Beyond the Big Day | LQ043

Welcome to our love space today, it has come to that time of year again where I love to get out there to some wedding shows, to really spread the word right, to destigmatize this idea of putting energy into our relationships means that there's something going wrong in them, right? That there's something that needs to be fixed, rather than like, hey, let's just be intentional. And, you know, put our love space vision together, right? Be in a great place. And know exactly the like, not exactly the journey we're going on, but kind of the journey we want to go towards, right? So I am just really excited about this time of year, and to be doing that, and to be really helping people think about that intentional love space they want for the love of their life, and thinking about that before even their big day. Like, imagine that there's so many of us, and I know that this is me that I wish you know if I could go back there's like the thing on Tiktok right now. Like, if I had coffee with my 20 year old self, what would I say? But it's probably unreal too. But what would I say? Well, I would, I would have wished that someone had told me that, hey, if you put energy into your relationship, if you actually, you know, put some time and some thought and to be intentional about it, and not just letting it float out there and seeing where it goes. You know, things would have been much different in my first relationship. And perhaps even if I knew about some of these things, I might have even realized that that first relationship was not the right step and that, you know, don't be afraid of letting go of that relationship and to find the person that is actually going to be your best match for getting married, right? And I mean, hindsight is always 2020 right. But if you can start to be intentional even before your big day, right? Or thinking about what you want beyond your big day, then you are setting yourself up for success and for love and to be sparked and for things to get easier and easier for you. So there was a great, I can't remember if it was a Tiktok or real but of this guy showing the science experiment where, I guess, I don't know if you call it science experiment, but an experiment where they had these two girls and two rows of cups lined up, and there's a bin, and they got one of the girls to start putting the cups away closest to the bin first. So as she got, you know, as the cups got farther away from the bin, she had to run further out into the room to go get the cups, and then further back, and then the other girl, the other little girl, they had doing it. She started from the last cup that was furthest away. And so she went at the beginning of the race, or whatever. She had to go the longest distance to get the cup into the bin. Okay, hopefully I've painted you a good picture. I'll see if I can link the little video clip in the show notes for you if you want to check it out. I'm not sure if I can do that, but we'll give it a try. So anyways, so the point of this, like, kind of visual experiment, was to sort of paint the picture of like, Wow. Who will they? Will these two girls finish putting their cups on time together, on time because they have the same number of cups, they're roughly going the same speed. Will the person who gets to put the cups in right away closest to the bin? Will they be more successful? Or will the person starting from further be more successful? Now, you would start to think, when you're watching the video just visually, you're like, Oh my gosh. The girl who got to start closest, she's going to win this race. Because the girl who's going farthest away like her, her cups seem to look like they're not her line of cups seem to look like they're not getting shorter. But what actually happens is, by the time the girl who started far away has the cups at closest to the bin right. She's like, got five or six cups left. She can pretty much just stand there and pop the cups in. She doesn't have to run anywhere, versus the girl who started with the clubs cups closest. She is now running back and forth, and it's taking her longer and longer, and she's running out of energy to go the same speed as the girl who can now just stand there and pop the cups into the bin. And they use this as kind of a metaphor for, like, your work life, right? So people or your financial life, so people who are putting in that more effort, right? So they're starting from further away. They're putting in their more effort, using their more energy at the beginning of their journey versus at the end of their journey, are going to be more successful, because that girl who was now closest to the bin at the end of the race, she's just kind of mailing it in. And not to say, mailing it in, but you know, her steps were short and easy and, like, easier to manage. So and I just thought, and you know that going into my first wedding show this coming weekend for Of The Year of 2025 I was just like, Wow, what an amazing metaphor. Like, I already like to go out there and be the only person at the wedding show who's like, hey, let's put some work into your relationship. But I just thought, what a fantastic visual to be like, Yes, this is what I'm talking about. Is you want to be the person who's putting in the foundation, who's being intentional now, because in 20 years, 30 years, I. Your family has grown, or whatever your journey is in your married life or in your committed couple life, whatever your journey is for that that you want it to be easier when you're older, right? When you're old and you don't have as much just internal personal energy, because that's just what happens to us as mammals as we age, right? You want the steps for your relationship to or the pieces for your relationship to already be there and be in place and be strong, and you can just be scanning and pop in those cups, right? You can just be standing there and enjoying the last part, right? So, and not that you're not enjoying the first part, but you get the gist of where I'm going with this. Okay, so, and I would just like to say if you if this is your first time listening, because you found me at the wedding show. This will be dropping just after I do my first wedding show. Welcome. It was so wonderful to meet you, and I love that you have popped in for a listen, because this episode is particularly just for you guys this week. Although, as we know all of this info is really just about social health and all of our relationships. So we can use it when we are, you know, in our dating phase, in our married phase, in our committed couple phase, for those of you who choose not to do the full legal piece of paper, that's okay, because you get to paint the details of your relationship, right, and even for our friendships and everything. So we know that all episodes here can apply to every walk of life and every kind of social relationship. But I've titled it beyond the big day, because this is for you guys who, particularly I got to meet at the wedding show. If you are from a future wedding show and you are now popping into this episode, Hello, future wedding show people. And I also am so happy that you are tuning in and joining me on this episode. So as we know, one of the things that often gets reported when we're thinking about getting married and we're thinking about our big day, is that the first year of marriage is the hardest. Now some of us, this pops us back to being like, Oh, well, that's if you haven't lived together, or that's if you, you know, haven't done this and haven't done that. It's actually still reported that the first year of marriage is still the most difficult, whether you've cohabitated, whether you've lived together beforehand, whether shared finances beforehand or not. So now, if you're a couple who hasn't your change from dating life to married life is going to be like, oh, 100 million things are changing if you have cohabitated together and whatnot, you know, maybe it is. It's there's still going to be a change. You're still going to maybe have some new roles. There's still going to be maybe some differences, maybe some differences for family commitments and things like that. You know, maybe you were waiting for the marriage step to make it a little bit more official. So to bring a family into the world. Some people need more of that, more officiality. Some people don't. So if that's one of your steps, then you're going to be going, no matter what your steps are, you are making a public, visual commitment to people. You are signing a piece of paper. And you know how I feel about putting things in writing, anything that you are making tangible and putting into writing, it gives it that one more step of realness and robustness, right? So even if you're like, nothing is going to change. You've put something into writing, and that's going to change your mindset. That's going to change your shift. So what is really happening when you get married? The basic no matter what your relationship is before the basic is that there is an identity shift. You are going from either a dating couple to a married couple, some of you who've been in it long term, 1015, whatever, years, and now you've decided to get married for whatever reason.

You know, to paint in that detail that you are having an identity shift in your relationship. So you are going from non married, right, committed couple to married couple, or dating couple to married couple, and now married couple is your new identity. And whenever you have a identity shift, you are really in a transition stage of life, and that's why the first year of marriage is probably the hardest, because your transition doesn't happen just overnight, right? You don't shift that identity. Just like, one day we're this, and one day we're that, even though it's labeled that. Just like, if you go through the opposite, if you have, if you're if you're out there and you've been through a divorce or really big breakup, just because you go from in a relationship one day to single the next day, or a divorce, a the next day, or whatever you want to call it, that transition has not finished, right? We all know that takes time. Just like if someone passes away, they've gone from life to death. I mean, for them, the transition, I guess, is instantaneous in that case, but for us who are on the grieving side, it is not, and that process takes time, right? It takes time to come into a certain amount of, I guess, out of grief and just into remembrance for that person, right? So that's why that first year, I think, can often for most people, for some people, could be longer than a year. For some people could be a bit shorter. We all know that we're all different and we're. All different combinations of people, but that's why we're not just snapping our fingers, right? So this is my thought, is if you are, if you are going through a transition period, if you have been intentional about choosing the person that you are marrying or that you are committing to, and you are, you are, you know, being intentional with all the money and all the time and all the energy that you're putting in to your big day, okay, whether it's a big, big day or a small, big day, or whatever kind of big day it is, then you kind of have two ish choices. You know, there's always some in between. But you can either sit back and cross your fingers and hold on tight and hope for dear life that we're going to come out the other end of this year, that we're going to come out the other side of this transition, and that things are going to be awesome, that we're going to be living in a fantastic love space, that we're going to have a wonderful vibe, that all of that kind of stuff is going to be happening. So we can cross our fingers and do that, or we can have the same intentionality that we used when we were picking that person, right, when we were picking our love of life and growing our relationship with them, and when we were picking our big day and creating it, we can have that same intentionality, so the same intentionality using to get married. Why would that end after your big wedding day, right? That doesn't make any sense. That then, poof, it's over, if we're not intentional about a relationship anymore, right? And I think that is a key part. Why some relationships, even when you have long term dating relationships, and then you get married, why? Sometimes when you get married, it's like, oh, we dated for 10 years and then we got married, and we were like, Married for one or two I know that was my first story, and I think it's because we were just like, Oh, great. It's going to be same old same old, and it wasn't necessarily same old same old and and we weren't ready for that shift. We weren't ready for that transition. We had no intentionality with it. And then we had all of our hiccups that instead of being hiccups, like if you listened to last episode where you have hiccups and you work through them and you have a plan for them. We didn't have any of that, and we didn't have any advice. We probably had support that we refused, maybe right ish or that we did implement. But you know, we didn't have we didn't have any intentionality in creating our future love space now lucky you beyond the big day, people is that I actually just finished to start off this new year a whole series of vision creation, because that is the first thing that you are going to do if you want to Be intentional and get beyond your big day and have a first year of marriage that sets you up for love and curiosity and growth for the future. So the first piece is that you need to have a vision. And like I said, lucky you, I've done like, I think it's like a five episode series that just ended kind of the second week of February, I think just ended. It's episodes 37 to 41 and that's all about creating a vision for your love space. Your love space is like your little universe that you are now creating as a little collaborative teamwork couple moving forward in to life, which is so exciting to me. I'm, I'm excited for you guys, I just love, love. Okay, so that's great. That's covered. If you're like, how do I make a vision for my relationship? I do it in five parts. If you're not that patient, at least listen to episode 37 because that's going to give you the basic idea of what I'm talking about. For creating a vision and a love space, so that you have a direction, right? You don't want to be that little boat just bouncing on the waves and being like, I hope I'll reach land. You want to have some sort of idea of where you're navigating to, again, the island where we might begin to on our little boat might change over the course of time, right? Nothing is always 100% sure, but at least you know kind of where you want to go, and you're not just out there bouncing around, getting getting seasick, alright, so vision is the first thing that you need to have for your identity. Shift. You need to have a vision. Go back, check it out. Create your vision. Create your love space. The second piece that you need is mindset. Okay, so, and I actually did an episode on this. This is my first one for 2025 so I think it's episode two. Let's say 36 I think 36 it's called moving towards, I believe, something like that. You can check it out. It'll be just before the love Space series. And in that, I talk about really, that every day we're given choices that we can make that either move us toward the goals, the things that we want in our life or away from them, right? And then you can also take that piece of IDEA and add this idea on. It is that every time we are in a situation in life, we can either make a choice. Place where we decide to lean on each other as being a couple, because that's the benefit. You are no longer going at this alone, and if you are trying to go at life alone and you have just gotten married, then I don't know why you got married,

right? To put it bluntly, and not, you know, not to ruffle any feathers here, but, you know, unpopular opinion, maybe, but you have a collaborative teamwork partner that you've just committed to spend the rest of your life with. That is the person that you get to lean on, and they get to lean on you through your ups and downs. And if you are choosing to not lean on each other, if you're like, oh goodness, I could never ask that of them. Then why would did you get married? Right? You can ask them, that of them, that's what they are there for, and they're not there for to take your abuse, no, or to like, Ah, I can't yell at anyone at work, so I'll just come home and yell at this person. No, 100% not. But they are there to support you. You are there to support them. You're there to be a team. So again, are you making choices in your in your coupleness that are leaning where you're leaning away from each other, you're trying to go too solo, too independent, too like, No, I'm a big, big person. I can do this myself, kind of vibe. Or are you like, Hey, I'm so glad that we are collaborative team, and we are going to get through this together. We're going to celebrate our excitements together and our wins together. We're going to work through our hiccups together, right? We're going to work through any hard times, any things like that, together, right? And that's that in sickness and in health vow, I think that a lot of us are like, ah, blah. I think a lot of us get that confused, as in if this person or richer or poorer, all those things, like, if you know that really does mean, like, not just if things get bad, right? If someone gets sick, if we we are in financial, you know, ruin things like that. It's not just I am there, toiling and sticking it out and, like, ah, clenching on for dear life. It's like, No, we are a team, and we're going to support each other, and we're going to work with each other, and we're going to problem solve with each other to try to get through this hard time in life, because life is not perfect and life is not easy. And I don't, you know, I think social media makes us think that life is perfect and easy, but it is not, and don't be fooled. And it is okay to ride through tough times together, right? And not like, Ah, this is my tough time. I'm going to do it by myself. No, that's that's why you have a collaborative teamwork partner, right? That's the best. Okay, so we need a vision. We need to have our mindset. We need to be making the choices where we're leaning in towards each other, where we're leaning on each other together, right? And we need to have the choices that move us toward the love space, toward that vision, and not away from it. The next piece, and this piece will dive into a bit more, is the strategy piece. So the word strategy means we want to have a well thought out plan. And now this is the part that can be complicated for lots of couples, because there's so much noise. What is the best way to have a relationship? And you really want to think about because there are, there's so many relationship models and theories out there, and we can't do, you know, like the gottmans have actually done a really great job of actually scientifically and experimentally testing and behaviorally watching couples to see what their actions are and what things happened that might indicate future success or future failure for that entire relationship, right? And so that is actually really great. So it's like, am I going to use some of their frameworks? Am I going to use, like, the 8080, marriage framework, which I think is also, you know, really great and positive. Am I going to use, you know, Crystal's spark forever cake framework, right? Where we think we're big picture thinkers, and we think about our communication, our affection, our kindfulness and our energy, and then we paint those pieces in how we want to kind of, you know, uncomplicate it a little bit. Are we going to do the five to one ratio, which we should do, no matter what relationship model we use? But that's what the gottmans came up with. Was one of the predictors of happy, successful marriages, versus, you know, what we might call an unsuccessful marriage, is that most happy, successful couples have five good social interactions, right? Five nice, kind interactions to everyone, prickly or MA or snappy reaction. And I think for a lot of couples, it's probably even more than that in a day, because think of how much you talk to your partner or chat with them, or, you know, cook a meal with them, organize in the morning, whatever you're doing, right? There's probably more positive interactions than that in your day, than that five to one ratio, but that's the minimum five to one, all right? So that is what you're going to think about. Is like, What strategy do you want to use? What is going to be your basic guidance that you can kind of go back and look and be like, Oh, okay, well, you know, how are we going to work through a communication? Right? Understanding that communication is just, you know, in the cake model, is just the sending and receiving of message. Is okay, and how do we make sure these messages have been received with the intention that we intended, right? And if there's a miscommunication, if my message has not been received in the way that was intended, then how are we going to work this out and understand each other better, right? And be more successful and be more collaborators with each other, right? How are we going to understand each other's affections, right? We might want to use the love languages we might want to, you know, think about the way we're going to create not just sexual intimacy and affection in our daily life, but also that intimate, non sexual touch and non sexual intimacy every day, right? And not just leave it for a once a month date night, which all although, which also, if you are just joining in with us, and this is your first episode, please go back to, like, one of my first episodes in 2024 and I think it's called, put more cake into your date night. Fantastic, because we want to reimagine date nights, not as a date night, because people have said they're played out, they're born, but we want to reimagine them as mega moments of love. And that's super exciting. Definitely have many mega moments of love beyond your big day, and be intentional with them. But you need to have a strategy. You need to have some sort of bit of a framework, some sort of, you know, bit of a system that you can refer to, because that's going to actually guide the next part, which are your actions, right? So, when you think about having, say, like a business plan, this is almost how a business plan would be made, right? Is that we have a vision for our business, then we have our mindset, or what we're going you know, the the kind of vibe that our business is going to have, and that's going to guide our strategy, our plan for how we're creating our business, and then our plan for how we're creating our business is going to now have a is now going to have actions that match up with it, right? And our actions are what is going to propel our forward movement, and is what's going to grow a relationship. So the action pieces are really taking our strategy part and implementing it, putting it into play. That's a very important piece. We can think all we want of like, oh, I need a five to one ratio of positive interactions to prickly interactions. But if I don't know what positive interactions I'm doing every day, or if I don't know how to show my partner affection and how they like to receive affection. And sometimes, when we are in more of that dating phase and more of the newer relationship phase, right? Like the first maybe five, five to seven ish years of our relationship, is that a lot of things can happen unintentionally and serendipitously, right, like it just magically works out that we've been doing this and we both feel good about this, and then sometimes, once we get married and maybe we start to create a family, we have more of the hustle and bustle and more of these everyday life demands are getting in the way. This is just what happens as we age and we grow our lives and grow our jobs, grow our family, grow all of those pieces that there's going to be more and more demands on our time and our responsibilities. And so we actually need to be intentional to know what those serendipitous things were, because if we don't know what those serendipitous things are that connected us in the beginning, that kept us sparked and excited to see each other every day. We're going to lose them. They're going to dry up, and then we're going to feel disconnected. And then we might tell ourselves the myth that this is just what happens when you've been in a relationship for a long time. And that is not true. That is a myth. That is a that's a lie, that's a lie, because for a long time, people were maybe more focused on survival, right? And we might be, you know, coming to a world that that's the case, but we are

now at, I think, a point a lot of us, where we can we're not just surviving, or maybe it feels like we're surviving, but if we were just a little bit more intentional, or if we just put a little bit more foundation in at the beginning of our relationships, then it won't feel like survival later on, or when we are in our survival mode because of other things going on in the world or in our lives, that this piece will be in place. It will be a support for us and an energy creator for us and a safe place for us, rather than just something else that's draining us. So our actions, if we're using the kick model, that means we are thinking about how our communication, our affection, our kindfulness and our energy, those are our four big picture things are working to support our relationship. And in this model, the fun, wonderful part of it is that you get to fill in the details of how you're going to do that. So not every couple communicates the same. There's probably some basic things, but again, the way you communicate is how you're going to fill that in, right? Same thing with your affection, how you're going to fill in the affect. In that is going to be your detail to fill in. There's no right or wrong answers, as long as there is affection, affection and that there is forms of physical touch, because we know that our little mammal bodies release certain hormones with certain social interactions and certain amounts of physical touch. So everyone again, is going to be, you know, that spectrum of how of how much physical touch each person needs to make their emotional cups full, right? Or to release their oxytocin and their serotonin and all of their great, you know, bonding hormones. But that's still a basic fact that we need some physical touch. Some people need lots. I love tons. There are some people that, you know, one hug a day. I think when I was growing up, there's like a song called, like, five hugs a day is the minimum. So some people might need only one hug a day. That would be really, really minimal, but that could just be for them. And some people need 25 hugs a day, and or the equivalent of physical touch, in hugs, and that's going to be different for everyone, and that's okay. Same thing with our kindfulness piece, how you show kindfulness to each other and how you are able to be vulnerable around each other, because that's a big part of kindfulness, going outside your comfort zone with each other and being supportive and being kindful. You're going to paint in the details of how that works in your relationship, right? But you need to have that big, that big building block of kindfulness, right? So you need to think about how you're going to be kindful, or what ways you show kindfulness to each other and how, how you support each other's vulnerability in order to for that block to be successful and supportive, and same thing with your energy, right? How are you going to create energy with each other and for each other, right? And how are you going to protect your coupleness, energy together? Those are the details you need to fill in, right? So I give you these big picture pieces you get to fill in the details yourself. You get to explore. And one of the parts of exploring, and you know, being in a mindset of doing actions that lead you towards your life space vision beyond your big day, right? So, because sometimes we get stuck in this vision, like we have this vision for our big day, our wedding is so exciting. There's so many little details we can do, especially if you're detailing too. You could have like, a million details on your big day, you get to carry that all forward into creating now your love space and your love space is a continuous constant. You know for you, you can change it, you can rejig it, you can remodel it. You can add to it. You can subtract to it. Your love space is there for eternity for you right? As you guys grow and love each other, and the years pass by, you have your love space, right? It's like being able to plan, you know, if you're in love with planning weddings, if you're not, don't take this piece of advice. But if you're into planning weddings, it's like you get to plan a wedding for the rest of your relationship, because that's what your love space vision is, right? It's this vision, not just for your big day, but for all of the days after your big day, and with that comes our last thing to think about. So we've thought about our vision right for beyond our big day, that's our love space. We've thought about the mindset, right, the leaning on and towards each other and the actions that move us towards our love space. Fantastic. We've thought about the idea that we need a strategy. We need some sort of framework, like cake, you know, to kind of give us some ideas of the actions that we can take in order to create our love space. Then we need those actions we actually need to implement in practice and do these things right? If I'm going to say, oh, you know, like, I want to lose weight, but I'm not doing any of the actions that move me towards that, then that dream is not going to happen. If I have this vision for my love space, and I'm not doing any of the actions that are going to move me towards that, then that's not going to happen. And so lastly, once we get to all through all of those things, is we're going to have successes and failures. We're gonna have things that worked and things that did not work, and that is perfect. Having a failure in your relationship as in, ah, we tried to solve we tried to work through problem solving like this, and it didn't work for us, and our arguments got bigger. Great. Well, that's fantastic to know, because now we can try a different way for collaborative problem solving or even just wording things a different way, right? Like lots of people like to lots of counselors and marriage coaches and things like that, couples coaches like to really support the I statements. And it is true that there's some good research that supports using I statements as being a great way to chat to each other and problem solve with each other and get through conflicts with each other, but I can picture that they don't 100% work for everyone, and for some people, they just feel too stilted to whatever they can't just incorporate it in the moment. And that's okay. That's great to know, because then we can figure out what works for you, or we can figure out what tweaks we need to do to make. Conflict Resolution, not easy peasy, but you know, not something that's creating more stress and more disconnect in your relationship. We want conflict resolution, or whatever you know, problem solving, collaborative problem solving, to actually strengthen your relationship and your connection with each other, and not to make it feel less more disconnected. So having failures or oopses is just going to give us good information on how we can tweak things, how we can change things, to move forward, or to try something different or try something new, to think outside the box a little bit. So don't get stuck that. You know, we've tried some of these things and they're just not working, or they don't feel like us. If they don't feel like you, let's find the thing that does feel like you as a couple. Let's find that piece, right? And that's why sometimes friend advice, sometimes friend advice is great, because it's like, oh, well, what works for you? You know, as a as a couple, and they can tell you, and you can be like, cool. Do you know, I've never thought about that. I could actually try that. Then sometimes you're like, Ew, that sounds horrible, and maybe you even did try it, even though it sounded horrible and it did not work. Well, that doesn't mean it's it's broken or nothing will work along those lines. That means that that thing just didn't work for you. We can find other things, right? We can be creative. We can find the details that work for you in your relationship, right? No one is perfect and right and just, you know, finding ways to come back to your relationship and to grow it more, to not be scared that if something didn't work, then nothing's going to work. Or this means we don't really love each other, right? Sometimes we can get so stuck in our heads, I know I can with, like, oh my gosh, if we have a fight about this, then that means maybe we're like, don't have a good connection. No, 100% boop, nope. Okay, our relationships are a place for us to grow. So like in the book The passionate marriage, they talk about marriage as being like a human growth machine, right? And there's a few other books that talk about it as marriage being a really a place for you to grow and develop yourself as an individual, and then yourself as a couple. And really that your new identity as a married couple, right, is to create kind of like a collaborative, continuous space where you get to grow as you get to grow the team members. Right of your collaboration, you each get to hone and grow your skills, and that's going to create right as each team member, right as me and my love of life, of as we both get better with our skills and our communication and our you know, more clear on the ways we can be kindful and show affection to each other, on the ways we can energize ourselves and create more energy for each other and for living life together, right? The way we can all do that, and we develop that, that piece individually, then that feeds in to all those pieces as our teamwork, collaboration as a couple, and then as a couple, our coupleness growth and develops, right? So constantly our, you know, individual growth feeds in to our team collaboration growth and our couple growth, and it just keeps going and going and growing and growing, which is the fantastic piece, if you can get into that positive cycle, right? You've spent time and money and energy and emotions to get to your big day. Why wouldn't you invest the same amount in creating intentionality after your big day, right beyond your big day, creating that intentionality that is going to keep you sparked.