Creating Sparks That Last & All Things Relationships

The remedy to hustle culture? We’ve all been there. Caught in the scroll. One minute looking at an aesthetically pleasing post with icons depicting going for a bath, getting out in nature, and meditation. The next are posts on getting less sleep, waking up earlier, and working while other people party.   Self-care or hustle. Happy or successful. Going by social media, it seems you can’t possibly have both. Interestingly self-care is often seen as the remedy to too much hustle and the inevitable burnout from working too hard, for too long, on too little sleep. Prompting the question: Are we practicing self-care for the right reasons? It’s a blurry line. Do we need self-care as a result of how hard we are working or do we need it simply to feel good within ourselves?  In an ideal world, it would be the latter, we’d practice self-care because it feels good and it’s what we want to do. However, this is not an ideal world and we do not always get the option to do what feels good when we hav

Goals to Make Your Relationship Zing! Image credit @unsplash by @jonathansborba When James and I completed our Date Year Experiment, we came away with solid ideas of what we wanted our relationship to look like. We set goals to ensure that we got the very best outcome. I'll outline some of them here, along with additional ideas from practicalintimacy.com https://pin.it/1N7Qi1l 🔥 Know your boundaries and limitations:          ❣   As well as knowing your own boundaries and letting your partner figure out theirs, you also   need to know your limitations: own your faults, your shortcomings and areas of   required improvement. Don't try to dictate your partners' limitations to them, this is about you taking ownership of your own stuff. 🔥 Validate your own feelings and emotions:         ❣   Maintaining the status quo to keep the peace is not an option. Name your feelings, name your emotions without having to defend them. They just are  because that is what you're experienci

NO SPARK STAYS ALIGHT WITHOUT EFFORT Our Date Event for the year proved to be thoroughly worthwhile. James and I had bonded over new experiences and quality time alone, but that by no means meant we could sit back and watch our marriage continue to flourish all on its own. Just as there is no perfect person out there, yes I’m talking to you, there is also no perfect relationship or marriage out there. If you consider for a moment, that essentially you are two strangers from different backgrounds with your own opinions, cultures and personality, so you are bound to disagree on some topics, which is to be expected. And if you’re not disagreeing some of the time, I would venture to say that one of you is sacrificing too much of your self or possibly even being unnecessarily passive.  We should be playing to each others’ strengths not highlighting weaknesses, but building them up as best we know how. Relationships require fine-tuning all the time Every day we are faced with situations tha