Dear Dr. Loveland,

First time writing in, and I hope you can help. I’ve been married 11 years to a good man and we have 2 young children. My husband works a full time day job Monday through Friday and I work evenings and some weekends. When we are at home together, there is always something to cook, clean, or do. It feels impossible to connect with each other emotionally and physically. We are exhausted at night and often times one of our kids ends up sleeping in bed with us, which means the time we have alone together is limited. Any advice on how to bring a spark back to our tired marriage? I just want to feel more of a connection with him.

Thanks,
Exhausted Wife

Dear Exhausted Wife,
Bless you and your hardworking family. Balancing everything you are listing is a tall, tall order so first I just want to commend you for writing in at all. Doing so means you think your marriage is important enough to write in about. So often moms get so entrenched in motherhood that wifehood takes an extreme backseat. I think it is beautiful that you care enough to want a connection with your husband. As you know moms can get tapped out, touched out, and have little left for their poor, lonely husbands. Often fathers don’t get those same needs met that women do with all the feels and loves we get from our babes so they still very much long for connection from their wives. The first thing that comes to mind when I read your situation is, we ALWAYS make time for what is most important to us. If we HAVE to have a cheeseburger today, bygone we are going to get ourself to a drive thru and get ourselves a cheeseburger! It sounds like perhaps your young children are getting a tad less younger and it might be time to adjust the priorities a bit on how you spend your time. For instance, maybe there are certain hours of the night where there are no children in your bed. Schedule time to be together then. As lovely as it is that you both get to parent your children with different work schedules accommodating the children, that work schedule does not accommodate your marriage so perhaps the money you are saving on sitting from him covering the kids some evenings and weekends, and you covering them during the day should be spent on some scheduled on-going dates and time together. If there are local sitters or family that you trust to leave the kids there, then go spend time in your home together alone. Make your time together sacred. As sacred as work time. As sacred as kid time. We walk a dangerous line in our marriages if we don’t make our marriage a priority. And personally I happen to believe that one of the best gifts you can give your children is to be in a very happy marriage. Let them see you kiss. Let them see you love one another. It will only do good things for them in molding their values towards relationships as they grow up. Another way to look at it is, small children have a lot of needs but they don’t stay that way. This is just a season of your life where it takes a little extra creative planning to get time together to connect but it won’t always be this way. So in order to keep that marriage going so that it will still be there strong and connected after the young-child years or after the kids move out someday then we MUST make the marriage a high priority. Just like we need to make time for ourselves a priority to refuel and jump back in (Mom: Me time. Huh, what’s that?! :P). Sounds like you are both very capable of balancing a lot, so sit down together and get real creative with coming up with a plan for time together. Not necessarily fancy dates or vacations. Just time to be together and be friends and be connected and have sex. Yes, schedule sex. There is nothing at all wrong with this. You don’t skip breakfast for the kids because you are too busy or tired or something came up, so don’t skip sex either. No matter how tired you are, you will feel better afterwards knowing you made the effort to connect. So I am finishing where I started. You are making your marriage a priority just by writing in, so that means you are one step closer to getting that spark back. It will be a new spark. A now-mother and father spark, a little bit older-now spark, a let’s “schedule” time to snuggle and watch Netflix spark, but it will be a spark if you both can meet each other in the middle of all the madness and say together, “we matter, our marriage matters.” Now go get yourself a cheeseburger, stat!