Jeremy:
How often should you text your wife? This is the one of the questions that we got in the Facebook group. Actually what Neil asked is “How do you stay synced up with your wife throughout the day?” And one of the things that I think is important to realize if you have pretty separate lives, which most of us are living, there is a lot of great technology that we can use these days to try to stay synced up. And it’s really important you guys that we function like a team with our partner. And even though we might have activities, things we’re working on that are separate, there’s a little bit of divide and conquer going on, a certain amount of that’s okay.

I really think that, as fathers and husbands, if we really want to build a family team, we have to really up the bar in terms of the amount and I would really specifically call out the frequency of the connection that we are initiating with our wives. This is a big deal. I know that when I went back to work full-time after my wife and I worked together for a number of years, it took me a couple of years to figure this out. I would go to work, I would be completely consumed with whatever I’m doing. I’d come home eight hours, 10 hours later and I would try to catch up on things and you know it just-

Jeff:
Or you come home, I’ve heard with other guys like this and it’s the expectation of you think it’s going to be a great day, but then the house was burning down metaphorically with the kids.

Jeremy:
Yeah.

Jeff:
And it’s just that collision of whoa. Yeah.

Jeremy:
What’s going on with the team? And are we a team? And you can really start to have this experience of creeping separateness and how do you combat that? And a really simple thing that I started doing is just trying to text April once or twice during the day. Even if you have to schedule this at first to make this a pattern or a habit, I encourage you to do that. If it’s like every day around lunch time or take a break in the middle of your day and just say, every single time I take a break I’m going to text her. How you doing? This is something that’s going on. I love you, I miss you, I’m praying for you. This is what I’m thinking about. Whatever it is that makes a massive difference. It might take you like two or three minutes a day to check in and to create this sync up and increase that frequency, but man, that’s separateness can end this. Every relationship’s different.

Every couple needs to work this out. How frequent, but I would encourage you guys, I think the default is, especially if you work apart, is to assume that hey, that’s just me time. I can be 100% focused and I can go eight, 10 hours straight without having any connection, initiating any kind of contact with my wife and that’s a healthy normal thing. I’m not sure that’s healthy. I’m not sure that’s normal. I think we should go ahead and use our technology since the industrial revolution is pushing us to work apart anyway, let’s go ahead-

Jeff:
Yeah.

Jeremy:
And use that technology to try to have more frequent connection points. But yeah. What are you thoughts about that, Jeff?

Jeff:
Totally. And that’s what I was going to say too is it’s one of those things where there’s this vacuum created of you can almost lead two separate lives and then you don’t usually realize that until it really hits you emotionally, which is like two years too late. You know what I mean? It’s like, oh, you just wake up one day and you’re like, I haven’t really … I spend more time at work. And I think separate work is totally fine. And like we said, that’s totally … a lot of people actually, that’s probably the most common scenario. And it’s totally fine and okay. But I think one way to redeem it is just to make sure that you’re connected. I’ll give you guys if you’re listening to the cousin version of this as someone who works from home because you still have to stay connected and you still have to do like that.

But I know for me it’s never really been an issue of how’s the house or the team doing? Because I know a lot of my friends say that. Like when I was saying they come home and then it’s just the expectations are different and all that stuff. But I know for me how they’re doing because I can literally hear them every two seconds. I know five minutes before we started this recording there was our kids were crying so something happened, someone stole something and then five minutes later there was someone who’s laughing.

I can hear the whole thing, which is an interesting ordeal working from home. I know exactly how they’re doing. But what I’ll say, the cousin of this that we’ve learned is we’ve learned we can go a long time even being in the same home without having little talks or space set aside for the things that we’re really thinking about, like things that are really on our heart or how we’re doing emotionally or big decisions we need to make but we don’t want to wait two weeks till our next date night, all that stuff.

We realized that was starting to feel separate. There was a separateness there and so it was only this year or last year or whatever that we started doing this thing where we realized a really, really good rhythm. It’s kind of funny because you can have to test and experiment was essentially the really good thing that really unlocked this for us was something as simple as whenever Alyssa feels something or senses something or has a question or whatever, she emails me it. And for some reason that just puts that basketball in my court and then I’m able to look at it, read it on my own terms, think about it on my own terms, so I don’t feel bombarded. Because sometimes we had that tension of she would bring that to me, but then I was like, oh, I’m working, but I wasn’t communicating-

Jeremy:
Yeah.

Jeff:
That this was work time, all that stuff. It was just confusing. The email thing solved it for us. Now, all of a sudden, that just solved it. And then she knows and trusts that I’ll bring that back to her and with my feedback or my thoughts in a conversational way that day or later that day or the next day or that week, once I’ve processed it. I don’t know what it is, but it’s just … that’s helped. And that’s fixed it. That’d be the cousin version, I would say, of people who stay at home and make sure you’re still creating space to have more of the intentional conversations, not just how the home is feeling. And then like you said, for if it is separate than just checking in is literally and actually understanding what that’s like is huge.