The Marriage Conversation Most Couples Never Have

Links from this episode:

• Join us for The At-Home Marriage Retreat, Sat Dec 5 (early-bird $19 per couple through Nov 30): https://stan.store/masteryourmarriage/p/the-athome-marriage-retreat
• Help us out with a 30-minute listener interview (confidential, no sales): https://masteryourmarriage.us/research

Do the two of you only really talk about your marriage when something's going wrong?

We're Robert and Sharla, married for over three decades and coaching couples through the same struggles we've lived ourselves.

Most couples try to figure out their marriage while they're buried in the day-to-day of it. You sit down to talk about the two of you, and five minutes later you're talking about who's taking the dog to the vet. This week Robert tells the story of a plane ride home from a business conference that turned his whole company around, not because anything changed about his job, but because for a few hours he was finally out of the daily grind.

Then we share what we do every January: a marriage retreat, just the two of us, that's about 30% business and 70% play. And because Robert flies small planes, we walk you through three phases you can use to plan your own version, even if you can't leave the house.

In this episode:

• Why Robert's best business decision happened on a plane ride home, not in his office
• Where the real conversations happen in our house (hint: a comfy chair with an ottoman)
• "Does arguing about the budget count?" and why most couples only talk about the marriage in crisis mode
• Why you can't steer your marriage while you're putting out fires
• Inside our yearly retreat: snowed-in cabins, a hot springs crater, and a six-foot dry-erase calendar
• The family mission statement we never meant to write, and the line that carried Sharla through a hard year
• Three phases for your own retreat: takeoff, in-flight, and the before-landing checklist
• What to leave on the ground, and the questions worth asking once you're up there
• How we started with three or four hours and a calendar, long before it was a weekend away

A place to start this week: Put one block of time on the calendar this month, even just an afternoon, and decide together what you're leaving on the ground.

Want to do the whole process with us? The At-Home Marriage Retreat is a live online day on Saturday, December 5, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Mountain Time. Early-bird tickets are $19 for the two of you through November 30, and include the workbook and the 30-day replay: https://stan.store/masteryourmarriage/p/the-athome-marriage-retreat

Related episodes:

• Ep 100: How to Create a Family Vision Statement for 2025 https://sharla-and-robert-snow.captivate.fm/episode/how-to-create-a-family-vision-statement-for-2025

Find us: https://masteryourmarriage.us Instagram @masteryourmarriage masteryourmarriage@gmail.com