How Remembering Improved My Marriage

Can you remember a great date that you and your spouse have been on?

Over at the Simple Marriage forum, a question about “great dates” was posed…which caused me to remember one of the best dates my wife and I had. We actually recreated our very first date…

One of my most memorable dates was re-living our ‘first date’. (I put that it quotes because it really wasn’t a date… she wanted tickets to a concert – since I worked in radio, I had an extra. So she said – ‘I’ll buy you dinner for the ticket’. We ended up talking so long at dinner we missed most of the concert *Dave Matthews*. What we did see, I don’t remember!!)

Back to re-living the date: We went to the same Mexican restaurant…then we went to the outdoor amphitheatre. I have to give my wife credit. There was NO concert on the night we went back to the theatre. She had to get permission from the security guards for us to have strawberries and chocolate and champagne on the hillside looking at the stage.

That was great.

A First Date Kiss

How Remembering Improved My Marriage

By remembering the past successful date – it made me want to relive the date – or experience something similar with my beautiful wife™ again. I also realized that there were so many loving feelings and actions that went into the date – it helped me realize again how much she loves me and the effort she puts into our relationship.

It’s so easy to look back and think about negatives and arguments, but what about recalling some of your best memories together?

Visualize Past Success

This post was inspired by reading Tim Sanders’ blog. He mentioned this concept in his post about a speaking engagement he had coming up.

He brought up a great book by Maxwell Maltz, called Psycho-Cybernetics (amazon link). Dr. Maltz talks about visualizing past successes. Instead of imagining a successful future event, he advocates taking the time to recall a previous positive event to encourage future positive performance.

Marriage Super Researcher John Gottman in his book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work(amazon) says that …”the best test of whether a couple still has a functioning fondness and admiration system is usually how they view their past….by focusing on your past, you can often detect embers of positive feelings.”

Great Dates?

So lets take a minute…What past great experience do you remember with your mate – Date or otherwise…that can help stir up positive rememberances…AND help inspire future connection?