Two unconventional marriage tips I wish I knew sooner
And a BIG announcement!
Happy Luke Height Day (5/7)!
Yeah, I’m a 5’ 7” short king. We all can’t be June bois. Besides, 5’ 7” is a prime height…literally.
The Five Seven Club is massive. We’ve got…
Messi
Beyoncé
And Sandra Bullock (Academy Award-winning actress for her role in The Blind Side)
To celebrate the big day, I’ve got a big announcement. No…I’m not starting to take HGH — I’m cool with my height.
This is Twosday’s 150th post! 3 years of sliding into your inbox
Thank you for skimming reading.
After 3 years of writing Twosday, I’m making a change that affects you:
Twosday will now be a bi-weekly newsletter.
The type of bi-weekly that means one post every other week. NOT two posts a week. Darn you, English.
Why the change?
Because I want to increase the quality of my writing. This takes time.
Time for better inputs and better editing. If a few hundred of you are going to keep opening these emails, then I want to make it worth your time, too.
Oh, and you can’t get more on-brand than two posts a month — amirite?
What does this mean for paid subscribers?
More inputs for me means more content for you.
I love reading, watching, and listening to great content. But writing weekly posts means I have less time for those loves. A bi-weekly newsletter frees me up to consume better work. I’ll continue sharing those with you.
For paid subs, I’ll also continue sharing random bonus content I create that makes me think or laugh.
Like this list of names Sarah called herself during our first year of marriage. I realized early on that she like to wake up, look in the mirror, and call herself something. So I kept a note without her knowing and told her about it last week.
One year of marriage isn’t much, but it’s enough to celebrate. And heck, in the LinkedIn world, it’s enough to label myself an expert and put it in my bio.
After one year of marriage, here are two unconventional tips I wish someone told us earlier.
Ask unusual questions
“Did anything funny happen today?”
That’s the first question Sarah and I usually ask each other once we get home from work. (It was a tip someone shared at a WinShape marriage retreat.)
This question leads to more life-giving conversations for us than How was your day? We eventually get to that standard question, but leading with a fun one sets an upbeat tone. It gets us laughing together rather than venting about frustrating parts of the day.
Living on auto-pilot is one of my biggest fears. I don’t want to cruise through life and later wonder how the heck did I end up here. I want to be like Tom Cruise and soar with fighter-pilot-intention. Unusual questions require two people to get off of auto-pilot. They make us work to uncover parts of ourselves that have been hiding for too long.
Some other unusual questions Sarah and I love are:
What was your high, low, and buffalo (aka a weird moment) from today?
What are you most excited about this week?
If you had to describe your current emotions with a Michael Scott scene, what scene would it be?
“Every person I meet is fascinating on some topic. If I approach you in this respectful way, I’ll know that you are not a puzzle that can be solved but a mystery that can never be gotten to the bottom of.”
— David Brooks, How to Know a Person
If you want more fun questions for the people in your life, I wrote a book full of them! Check it out here.
Catch the little foxes
Any relationship is like a co-op garden. Multiple people work together to create a shared space for flourishing.
That’s an image we get in Song of Solomon. In the 2nd chapter, the writer shares with their lover,
“Catch the foxes for us,
the little foxes
that spoil the vineyards,
for our vineyards are in blossom.”
Foxes are cute, but they’re also sly little thieves. Just watch Fantastic Mr. Fox.
In pre-marital, one of our pastors shared that small things will try to spoil the garden of our relationship if we don’t address them early. They’re unique to every relationship. They’re the pesky little things we let go because “they’re not a big deal.” Until they are.
The mind frame of catching little foxes is helpful because it gives us shared language when small things go awry. In some conversations, Sarah and I have said, “Pause, is this a small fox?” Naming the pesky creature spoiling our garden of love allows us to tame it.
Below is a coloring we came across in Colorado that shared the same concept.
✌️
— Luke
P.S. Here’s some of my favorite content from the past week…
A nod to Nic Cage
When four legends duke it out in a 100-mile foot race
Tips for writing a good transformational essay
How Ishiguro wrote an award-winning book in a month
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