After seven years together, my fiance and I finally had one of our toughest conversations yet. In the last seven years, we have been through a lot. Three years long distance, family trauma, physical and mental health trials and triumphs, etc. He works forty hours-a-week, and I work full time while also being a full-time student. In our hectic lives, we didn't realize that we were starting to lose "us." We come home after a long hard day and honestly just want to have some peace. We turn on a TV show and veg out for a while.
In the last few months, I had started to realize that something was missing, and honestly, I couldn't figure out what. One night while he was playing a video game and I was on my phone, it began to dawn on me. We no longer took time to concentrate on us. We no longer worked on strengthening our relationship.
As high school sweethearts, we have changed a lot together. I am definitely not the fourteen-year-old he first fell in love with, and I have watched him develop into the most amazing man I know. We had lost the part of our relationship that was full of life.
One night, we sat down and started discussing our relationship. It was hard. Really hard. We are a couple that no one wants to think has issues. One of our friends once told us that if we were to break up she would never believe in love again. The reality is -- no relationship is perfect. Relationships are hard. Relationships take constant work. If someone tells you it is easy, their relationship needs to have a reality check.
The question we came to was: "Where do we go from here? We love each other very deeply, but something needs to change. We need to focus on us, but where do we even start?"
The next night, we put the technology away. Phone, TV, computer... everything. We ended up playing board games by candlelight. Yes, I know this sounds ridiculously corny, but this was one of the best things that has happened to my relationship.
We are a society so caught up in technology that we forget to focus on what matters most. We forget to hug our loved ones. We forget to say "I love you." Our relationships with humans should be so much more important than our dependence on technology.
When you begin to lose the "us" in your relationship, you need to find the root of the issue. For us, it was our constant use of technology -- our lack of focus on each other, not the world around us. Even if you just take an hour out of your night to talk. Just talk. You would be amazed by what it can do for your relationship. Relationships take time, and every minute we spend concentrated on our phone or TV is time that we could be focusing on a loved one.
Remembering the importance of dedicating time to my relationship has already done leaps and bounds for my relationship and this is only the beginning.
