I don’t think I can say enough good things about complimenting your spouse.  At the end of Companionship.  Inventory each week, my wife and I make sure we tell each other at least 4 - 5 things that we appreciate about each other that week.  We do this without fail, every week, whether we’ve been fighting or not.

In previous posts, we’ve discussed:

• Perform a weekly planning routine.
• Discuss important family business.
• Taking time to share testimony.

It’s a pretty simple concept, but praise and positive reinforcement do a lot for a relationship, especially if one partner is feeling underappreciated.  I should say that no matter what, you must be absolutely sincere.  If you and your wife can’t find anything to compliment each other on, then you need to seek professional help.

Compliment time is my wife’s favorite time of the week.  What is the best compliment that you ever received from your spouse?

These posts on Lifestyle Design & Marriage have been detailing ways to have an easy four step relationship review each week.  In previous posts we’ve learned how to:

• Perform a weekly planning routine.
• Discuss important family business.

Now, after you’ve spent roughly 30 minutes on the previous two topics, you can move on to Testimony Time.  Here’s the quote from the original relationship review post.

“Companionship Inventory is a left over from when I was a full time missionary in Vancouver, Canada. As such, testimony time is a time to share with each other our feelings about what really matters - our spirituality. Some people may not feel comfortable with this, but for the two of us, it’s an intrinsic part of our lives and our marriage. Your testimony time could just include your thoughts on what’s really important to you or what you’ve been thinking about during that week. It’s often the most fulfilling part of our Companionship Inventory.”

Whether you and your spouse share the same religion or not, it’s important to talk about what you believe.  Do you still believe the same things?  How has your belief grown or changed this week?  Usually this is brief.  We each share a short story or anecdote that impacted our faith that week, and what that event meant to us.

If you are not religious, or if you are not comfortable talking about religion with each other, then you could discuss other important things.  I suggest you discuss what you’re grateful for that week, or what good thing happened to you.  No matter how bad things are, something good had to happen that week.  Life is full of those tender little mercies.

My question for you: Do you discuss your religion or spirituality with your spouse on a regular basis?  Why or why not?

Sometimes another person has an idea so good that you just have to evangelize it a little bit.  Corey from the Simple Marriage Project wrote two great posts (links at the bottom of this post) recently about where Lifestyle Design and Marriage intersect.

For those of you unfamiliar with the buzzword Lifestyle Design, it’s a term popularized by Tim Ferriss’ best selling book, The Four Hour Work Week.  The term denotes taking control of your life and living deliberately.  Not in some vague, new age, hippy, indefinable way, but instead taking concrete steps (little ones) each day to work towards a definable, measurable goal.

Much has been written on goals, and I am a goal setter myself, but what amuses me is hearing so many young men (and women) talking about wanting to hit certain goals before they get married.  A person might want to pay off their student loans, travel the world, have adventures, live a little…all before they get married.

This attitude is lacking one fundamental concept: the real adventures in life begin after you get married.  How many people have you heard talk about how much they grew, how much they changed, how much of a better person their spouse made them?  The real adventures in life are the adventures of the soul, the travels and travails of parenthood, and making that journey with the one you are formally devoted to.  There’s something about that formal commitment that joins two people together in a way that is unable to be imitated, and no other form of cooperation can compare to a focused married couple acting as one.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating everyone go out and get married as early as possible.  I was married at 21 and that was a little bit tough.  You know what, though?  It was worth every moment of it.  I would do it again.

It took us a couple of years, but my wife and I discovered a way to help make sure that we were always on the same page.  I’ve talked about it here before, and I’m going to take you all on the journey again, starting with my next post.  What is it?  I’ll give you a hint: it has to do with Lifestyle Design.

In the meantime, check out Corey’s posts LifeStyle Design for Married People and Passionate Life to A More Passionate Marriage