Creating Sparks That Last & All Things Relationships

Date Night Arguments and How to Prevent Them It’s Date Night. Finally! The stars have aligned with your schedules, the sitter, the kids’ activities.  You can finally spend some quality time with your spouse away from the house. https://unsplash.com/@claybanks It’s been ages since you spent any "alone time" together.  You've missed your partner.  In fact, you have longed for uninterrupted time when you can connect and feel close.  Time when there is time and space to feel like you did at the beginning of the relationship. Time together is what inspired the other parts of your joint life.  You know that you need relaxed and enjoyable time together or you will lose the spark.  You already feel too much like ships passing in the night.  You need to break free from feeling like roommates. You’ve been imagining the date all week.  You’ve pictured having fun, connecting, and being affectionate.  You are looking forward to being able to relax and foc...

And Speak Yourself Up https://unsplash.com/@fuuj September is a big month in the year for most of us. And for many different reasons. Some of us are heading into Spring, others into Autumn. Some of our children are starting their school year and still others are planning their end-of-school-year strategies. So, a BIG month all round. And here’s the most productive way I have found to cope with it all: Speak yourself up To be clear, I’m not talking look in the mirror tell yourself how drop dead gorgeous you are (because you are anyway), no, I’m talking about that voice in your head that talks yourself down!  You know the one: Ugh this is the pits; I can’t do this; WTF - ENOUGH! Time to flip the script: I CAN DO HARD THINGS; ONE MINUTE AT A TIME - LIKE LITERALLY - JUST ONE MINUTE AT A TIME; I’VE GOT THIS; MY LIFE ROCKS! Doesn’t that feel so empowering!? Okay, now it’s time to just show up, for yourself. Now is the time you get to look in the mirror and pep talk yourself with your bes...

  What Is Love? 'Writer seeks 'wife' for a year on a tropical island.' The other day I asked for you, the reader, to define love in one word. I got some thoughtful answers which I'll list below. But before I do that, I want you to ask yourself what love means to you, firstly as an individual and secondly in a partnership. Years ago, when my marriage was still young, I read an autobiography by Lucy Irvine called Castaway (NOT the Tom Hanks movie). This was an intentional project to live on Tuin Island, an uninhabited island off the northernmost coast of Australia, for a year. It began with a male writer advertising for a female to live with him and test their mettle of survival on Tuin Island.   The catch, by Australian Officials standards, was that they had to be married in order to stay on the island. This did not please Lucy as G (as she calls him) expected more than just survival tactics from her. This caused deep introspection on both their parts, making for a d...

Your Personal Growth Does Not Threaten Your Relationship  You've changed.  You are not the same person who your husband or wife married years ago. They are not the same person, either.  You committed to your partner without knowing who they would become. Especially if you were young.  It's part of the marriage package.  People change over the years. You are not the same person at 40 that you were at 20. Thankfully. Because that 20-year-old hadn't experienced enough life to know what was what. At 20, our brains haven't even fully developed.  You committed to your partner knowing that both of you would change. At least, you knew it in your head. If you think too hard about it, these agreements seem scary.  We calm these fears by telling ourselves a myth: Couples in Close and Connected Relationships Grow Together. Their Marriage Lasts Because They Feel In-Sync and are on the Same Page.  This simply isn't true.  You are busy. You have ...

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 wh...

Micro Tourism: Is there value to be found in it? https://unsplash.com/@kylejglenn This will be my last blogpost for a while, and for very good reason. I am celebrating two huge milestone birthdays with loved ones over the next couple of months. Both my mom and father-in-law will be visiting us for 3 months from overseas. This is our first post-covid-lockdown gathering, so we are all tremendously excited. Fear not, I am leaving you in capable hands as I have lined up some incredible articles for you from guest bloggers I am well acquainted with. You will hear from Confidence Coach and Business Wing Woman, Rebecca Laidlaw who talks us through self-care and balancing the social media scroll. Appropriately named as 'soulhappysuccess' you will find her wise advice at the link:  soulhappysuccess Look out for her article next Friday, 29 July 2022. In May this year, I interviewed Couples' Relationship Coach, Cheri Timko on Instagram. You can find our chat here:  Relationship Habits...

 The Humility of the Cover Art Overlooking the hills of Tuscany at sunset from the courtyard of San Gimignano Photograph by yours truly, Elora Canne To continue our exploration of seeing EN ROUTE through the eyes of the author, I'm going to give you sneak peek into the humility that surrounds the cover of my memoir. • What scene resonated with you most on a personal level? (Why? How did it make you feel?) Let me start by saying, ouch, the fact that this photograph ended up being the cover of my memoir is beyond ironic! I had read a memoir about the Montepulciano region in Italy and really wanted to visit the area, alas we couldn't get there and visited San Gimignano instead. So to begin with, we weren't even meant to be there and that ended up being my book cover. Secondly!!! Secondly, my husband and I both took a sunset photo through the same arch at the same time and I wholeheartedly bragged that my photo was better. (It was, despite being off-centre!) Nevertheless, once ...