Welcome back to another episode of the road to life podcast with Meredith and Craig. Lately. We've been talking a lot about some bold truths. Yeah. We've got another one today. What is it? Your marriage is dead in the water without fun. Seems harsh, doesn't it? Seems aggressive. Yeah. But I mean, if we're not having fun with some, how likely are we to commit and do what we need to do in it?
With anything, business, anything. If we're not getting pay off. If there's, if there's, if it's, if it's not fun, you're not going to want to do it. So you're going to give up on it. So that's where we're coming from. Fun is more than just a nice to have. Yeah. It's a necessity. For sure. It's a necessity. You know, Fun is actually the foundation for trust, intimacy, connection, communication. The big, the big four in your marriage, in any relationship really. Think about that. When you're having fun with anyone, well let's talk about having fun with your spouse because that's, that's what we're all here for.
When you're actually having fun, does the communication feel Easier or harder. Yeah, easier for sure. Right? Yeah. Do you feel more connected when you're laughing and having fun together? Totally. Of course you do. Totally. Are you more willing to share and be intimate when you're having fun with each other?
Yeah, of course. Definitely. And then with all of those things taken together. You're building trust. You're building trust. And so it, it seems like an overstatement that fun is so critical to your marriage. But when you really break it down, all of the four pillars of a strong marriage, they all stack on top of fun.
So when the fun is gone, when you've lost that foundation and the other four are balancing on some sand instead of that strong fun foundation, it's going to get tough. It's like if your marriage was a garden, fun is the sunlight. Ooh, I like this. So it's like if your marriage was a garden and you're trying to grow flowers, you can't do it without sun. Well, fun is that energy that, that the sun would provide. Like it's, it's what would help grow the flowers in your marriage. The flowers being the trust, the communication, all the important pieces.
Yeah. It allows the trust, the intimacy, the communication, the connection to all flourish, to grow. So fun is the sun fun in the sun. That's easy to remember. Fun sun, just like that. Just like that, just like that.
We all enjoy having fun, right? Like what it's kind of the definition of it. Yeah.
Like fun is something we all like to do. It's something we've all, especially when our relationships were new, we probably were having a lot of fun. That's how we ended up at the marriage part down the road. So. What happens? Like where, where does the fun go? Cause it was there and maybe now it's not. So yeah.
Life I think is consciously get rid of it. No, I think life happens. You know, things get serious. You now have kids and a job and you know that the house to keep up. And there's so many things that it doesn't become front and center. You have to be intentional about fun, injecting fun into your day to day life.
A lot of people, us included, I wasn't having fun when I was in a different career and when I was in different relationships, like I was not having fun. Sometimes we let life and the things that happen in life get in the way and we think that they're not supposed to be fun, but you can have fun doing all those things too.
Right. Cause being a grownup can be hard sometimes, right? There's bills and there's expectations and there's commitments. And there's a lot of balls in the air at any given time in life. And I think it feels like, Of all the balls in the air, the one that you could probably drop and not notice is fun.
Yeah. It seems like a luxury. Yeah. It's not even a conscious choice. I don't think. I think it's a very unconscious choice that I've got only so many hours a week, about 168 hours a week. I don't have time for fun this week. But I think what we forget is that fun can be done alongside all those things.
It doesn't have to be either, or it doesn't have to take the place of doing the chores around the house or your career or whatever. You inject it into those activities. Yeah. Yeah. We've done, we did a podcast episode a couple of months ago ish on how we have fun in our marriage. And one of the ways we do that is making the boring day to day mundane stuff in life, injecting fun into those tasks so that we are intentional about making sure we have fun every day. Totally. So we'll, we'll link to that episode in the show notes so that people can go deeper on how we inject the fun specifically. And I think another barrier or misconception about fun is that, and we talked a little bit about it, it requires time, but it also requires money or elaborate plans.
If we just take a different mindset towards fun is that it doesn't require a lot of time. It does not require a lot of resources as far as like, it doesn't require an investment of money or these, a big elaborate plans. And again, we talk about that in that episode where we talk about little things that we do day to day that don't cost a lot of money.
They don't add time to our lives. They're just little things that we do while we're doing the laundry or while we're getting dinner together. It's just having that intentional fun injected into the everyday. Another thing we talked about in that episode is keeping the lens of fun and adventure so that you can find it.
You know, you, you only see what you're looking for in your life. And if you're looking for problems, if you're looking for, you know, all the things you have to do, that's what you're going to see. If you're looking for fun and adventure, you're going to find it. When you look for it. So keeping, the sunglasses on with the lenses that are fun and adventure so that I can see it when I, when I get the opportunity.
Yeah, totally. So we do talk about that in depth in another episode, but maybe a couple, the high level, three things that you could do today. Just while we're in this episode is. One, just schedule a little bit of time together to do something fun together. And, and I know we just talked about it doesn't require a big investment of time, money, all that stuff.
When you're doing the day to day stuff, that is absolutely true. But we still would say that it's important to set some time aside just for your relationship while you go and have fun, like a date night or some sort of, you know, Connection time. But even that doesn't have to be a terribly long time. It's more about quality than quantity.
Totally. Put your phone away. If you're scheduling an hour or two a week out of the 168 hours, that is not a significant. Totally. Proportion of your, of your time and it makes each of you feel like you're important to the other when you do that.
Yeah. And, and one of those things that you can do with that time is go explore and find things, find new things that you can do together. Try new things. I, it's not just fun, it's exploration, it's adventure. It's all of these components together that. You need to have for your marriage to thrive. So go explore and try new things.
Take a class together, go for a drive and go explore a new area. Like it's, it's all about adventure. Cause life is a giant adventure, but we just don't always see it that way. Our marriage is a big adventure. We just don't see it that way. It's a big journey. Go take the journey, have fun with it. That's what this is life is for.
You get one life. Enjoy it. Inject as much fun, exploration and adventure as you possibly can into it. I think a lot of times we get, and I, I've been guilty of this, is that you, you, you get caught up in the day to day of life and the mundane, what's the word? The mundaneness of it that you're just going through the motions. Like you go to work, you come home, sit in front of the TV, eat something, go to bed, wake up, do it all again. And you're living for the weekends. And even on the weekends you're not doing that much because you're tired and exhausted recovering from the week. And it's just, it goes on and on.
It's a constant cycle. Be very intentional about injecting fun and spontaneity and exploration and adventure. Always have it as one of my, because we set goals every year, and one of my goals is to laugh and have fun with you every day. We've talked about the fun, probably ad nauseum, but just the finding an opportunity to laugh, like actually laugh together. I just find you funny most of the time, so I can Why I'm hilarious.
I know. So I, I, I get the benefit of getting to laugh with you most days just as it happens, but you can also watch funny things or go seek out funny things in your life so that you two are laughing at the same time. There's something about the hormones, the chemicals, the endorphins, I don't, I don't know what the science of it is, but The two of you laughing together at the same stuff builds connection.
I can't count how many times you and I have had a laugh to the point where we both had tears. Like yesterday. Yeah. What was it about? I don't even remember. It was something so dumb. But it doesn't even matter because we laughed, we howled, we cried. We went through all the emotions and it was fun. And built connection.
Totally. It built connection in our marriage. So yeah, that's a great point. Just find something to laugh at together.
I don't know that we want to beat this to death, but it's really just fun is the foundation. If your marriage does not have fun, it will not survive.
Inevitably. Like it may not be today. It may not be tomorrow. Eventually, eventually. And when we say that doesn't mean that it's going to end in divorce. What that means is, is that it's not going to be all that you had hoped it would be. You're not going to be happy in your marriage.
You're going to just go through the motions. When you make a divorce, you may separate, it will not be the relationship that you ultimately want it to be. When fun dies, we begin to just go through the motions. And the beauty of fun though, is you can bring it back to life. Just because it's gone doesn't mean it's gone forever.
It just takes some intention to bring it back. And, and because it's so foundational to your marriage, if you notice that it's gone, just start reintroducing it. And when you do, you'll be amazed at how quickly other aspects start to come back as well. Yeah. Like the gel. Yeah. Or the sunlight. The sunlight of your marriage garden.
Fun is the sun of your marriage garden. I think I'm going to laugh till I cry about this later. You can put that as the title of this episode. Fun is the sun of your marriage garden. I will keep that in mind. You do you. Well, I enjoyed this episode and I know you all enjoyed this episode and we want to get the word out of how important fun is for your successful, healthy, healthy, thriving marriage.
So share this episode with your friends. Share it with your spouse, share it with your family, share it with everybody because everyone needs more fun in their marriage. So we're gonna go off and have some fun and we will talk to you next week. Bye for now.
Life partners, business partners, and best friends. We left the corporate grind to become fulltime entrepreneurs... with no idea what we were doing.
That made for some interesting, amazing, stressful, awesome, painful, scary, awful, awesome, insightful, unbelievable decisions, moments, experiences, relationships, and quite honestly, we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Our marriage is the foundation for everything else we build in our lives. It is a cheat code for life, and we believe that having that part dialed in levels up every other part of life.
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