“Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another.” ~ Marquis de Condorcet

If you took the strengths of others, and compared them to your weaknesses, how do you think you’d size up? And do you think this would make you feel good?

The funny thing is, this is what most of us do at one time or another — and some of us do pretty often.

It’s a sure-fire recipe for a drop in self-confidence and for unhappiness.

It’s also not that useful.

Let’s say I take a look at someone who creates amazing artwork and really top-notch podcasts on their website … and I look at my art and skills, and realize that I don’t come close to measuring up. In fact, I look pretty pitiful (I’m a lousy drawer and I’m a beginner in the podcast world).

But wait a minute: it’s not a fair comparison. Just because I don’t measure up doesn’t mean I should shut down Simple Marriage, or that I should get depressed or jealous or resentful. Instead, if I looked at my strengths — writing practical and honest posts — I can see that I have a lot to offer, a lot to be happy about.

And that’s so important — being able to look at your own strengths, and see your true value. It’s actually one of the keys to success, because without this ability, you will be unmotivated, and won’t believe in yourself.

I bring this up because my wife and I have discussed this question a lot lately: Why is it so hard to live without comparing yourself to others?

It’s a great question. And a tough one.

While it’s natural to make comparisons, the problem is you end up unhappy, even when you have a good life, marriage, and family. The comparisons make you begin to question what you already have.

My quick advice: try to be aware of when you start comparing yourself to others … once you’ve developed this awareness, try this trick: stop yourself.

Tell yourself, “Stop!” And then start thinking about all the things you DO have, the things you love, the people you have, the blessings that life has given you. Make this a regular practice, and you’ll start to be happier with your life.

The Effects of Social Comparisons
But let’s take a look for a moment at what’s wrong with comparing yourself with others:

• Like I said, it’s usually an unfair comparison to start with. As a result, you’ll always come off bad if you look at someone’s strengths (including what they have, like houses and cars) and your weaknesses.
• Even if you compare strength to strength, there will always be those who are better, and those who are worse. Where you are on the ladder of accomplishments or purchases has nothing to do with what you want to do.
• Even if you do well in comparison with others, you may be artificially inflated from this comparison. It’s a short-lived boost of ego if you win the comparison — easily knocked down.
• You end up resenting others for doing well, without really knowing the true person. You can see this if you’ve ever resented someone upon first meeting them, and then later realized you got the wrong idea.
• You might end up talking about your own accomplishments more than is necessary. No one appreciates that.
• You might criticize someone in public, trying to knock them down, often unfairly.

These aren’t good things.

Let’s look at how to stop this phenomenon.

Breaking the Habit of Comparing Yourself With Others
So how do you break this cycle of comparing yourself with others? Here are some tips I’ve found useful:

1. Awareness. Most often we do these social comparisons without realizing we’re doing it. It’s a natural act, I suppose, and as a result it’s something that is done without consciousness. So the solution is to become conscious — bring these thoughts to the forefront of your consciousness by being on the lookout for them. If you focus on these thoughts for a few days, it gets much easier with practice, and soon it’ll be hard not to notice.
2. Stop yourself. Once you realize you’re doing these comparisons, give yourself a pause. Don’t berate yourself or feel bad — just acknowledge the thought, and gently change focus.
3. Count your blessings. A better focus is on what you do have, on what you are already blessed with. Count what you have, not what you don’t. Think about how lucky you are to have what you have, to have the people in your life who care about you, to be alive at all.
4. Focus on your strengths. Instead of looking at your weaknesses, ask yourself what your strengths are. Celebrate them! Be proud of them. Don’t brag, but feel good about them and work on using them to your best advantage.
5. Be OK with imperfection. No one is perfect — intellectually, we all know that, but emotionally we seem to feel bad when we don’t reach perfection. You aren’t perfect and you never will be. I certainly am not, and I’ve learned to be OK with that. Sure, keep trying to improve, but don’t think you’ll ever be the “perfect person”. If you look at it in a different way, that imperfection is what makes you who you are, you already are perfect.
6. Don’t knock others down. Sometimes we try to criticize others just to make ourselves look or feel better. Taking someone else down for your benefit is destructive. It forms an enemy when you could be forming a friend. In the end, that hurts you as well. Instead, try to support others in their success — that will lead to more success on your part.
7. Focus on the journey. Don’t focus on how you rank in comparison to others — life is not a competition. It’s a journey. We are all on a journey, to find something, to become something, to learn, to create. That journey has nothing to do with how well other people are doing, or what they have. It has everything to do with what we want to do, and where we want to go. That’s all you need to worry about.
8. Learn to love enough. If you always want what others have, you will never have enough. You will always want more. That’s an endless cycle, and it will never lead to happiness. No matter how many clothes you buy, no matter how many houses you own, no matter how many fancy cars you acquire … you’ll never have enough. Instead, learn to realize that what you have is already enough. If you have shelter over your head, food on the table, clothes on your back, and people who love you, you are blessed. You have enough. Anything you have over and above that — and let’s admit that all of us reading this blog have more than that — is more than enough. Be good with that, and you’ll find contentment.

“To love is to stop comparing.” ~ Bernard Grasset

(photo courtesy)
Adapted from Zen Habits

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No related posts.

If you venture into the world of marriage bigification and self-improvement, you’ll be inundated with all types of awesome speak.

It’s everywhere in the blogoshere.

Why does it have to be so hard?

What if two words could improve your marriage?

Two words can … and will.

1. Think big (look at the big picture of life and marriage, it’s not all about you)
2. Get over (forgive again and again)
3. Choose battles (not everything is worth the fight)
4. Just stop (get help if you need)
5. Shut up (there’s wisdom in knowing when to be quiet)
6. Move on (let go of the past and live in the moment)
7. Be smart (use your brain in every situation)
8. Common sense (uh, hello, befriending an ex-girlfriend on Facebook is just plain stupid)
9. Show up (there’s value to being together)
10. Be present (engage your spouse when your together, don’t be lost at work or elsewhere)
11. Grow up (this is what marriage is all about!)

Got two words to add?

Photo courtesy jennifer*clare

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3. What’s Wrong And How Do We Fix It?
4. In Defense of Pretty OK

I’ve brought this question up a couple of times thus far, but it’s always been buried in a post somewhere towards the bottom.

Today it’s front and center.

This weekend, spend some time examining your response.

Be open. Be realistic. But most importantly, be honest.

So what’s the best question you can ask?

Would you want to be married to you?

Photo courtesy *** Steph ***

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Related posts:

1. 8 Principles for a Zen Marriage
2. 15 Ideas To Improve Love And Marriage During Tough Economic Times
3. Simple Marriage Resolution for 2010

Editor’s Note: This post is written by Kathleen Quiring of Project M. Today we’re doing a post exchange based on a rant she went on a couple of weeks ago. This is her response to something I wrote. To read my response to what she wrote, go here – A Manifesto for Pretty Okay Sucks.

In my niche of the blogosphere, where we talk about life and relationships and marriage in particular, there’s a lot of attention devoted to “how to be more awesome.” A lot of blogs offer advice on how to get along better and resolve conflict and have better sex and take it to the next level.

On a daily basis, I’m being instructed on how to improve my marriage and myself: how to become bigger, better, more productive, more successful, et cetera. I’m being encouraged to strive for an awesome marriage, a fantastic marriage, a superb, splendid, excellent, wildly successful marriage.

I sometimes find myself a little paralyzed by all the awesomeness to be achieved.

I know what these folks are trying to do: they are trying to encourage us to pause and think seriously about our relationships, and to get out of any ruts we may have fallen into which may be impeding our ability to “live life to its fullest.”

But sometimes, for some of us, “life to its fullest” would mean a little less pressure to be so friggin’ awesome.

I sometimes wonder if, for every person out there who needs to be told they can and should strive for better, another person out there needs to be told to stop striving so hard. For every person out there who needs a swift kick in the butt to get them moving in the right direction, another person is kicking herself into exhaustion. She needs to be told to chillax.

This other person, I think, sometimes needs to be told that it’s OK to just be OK. That person needs to be told that she should take a vacation, or at the very least take a long, hot bath, take a nap, and then stop trying to hard, because she’s going to try herself into a coma.

For some of us, all this talk of “improving ourselves,” “achieving more,” and “getting more out of life” can be crippling. All we can think about is how inadequate we feel and how far from perfection we are.

See, some of us have trouble distinguishing “excellent” or “extraordinary” from “perfect.”  For some of us, when people say, “You can do better,” all we hear is, “You’re not good enough.” For some of us, when people say “A good marriage is the enemy of a great marriage,” all we hear is “You are falling short. You and your marriage are so far from great that you should consider throwing yourself into a lake of angry stingrays and ending this ridiculous sham of a life before you spread your infectious mediocrity to the rest of us who still have a chance.”

Some of us wake up every morning pinned down to the bed with the weight of our own sense of inadequacy, and the last thing we need to hear is that we ought to be striving for better. We have a hard time focusing on the possibility of improvement because we’re unable to get past our sense of not being enough.

For those of you who are like this, I have this to say:

You are doing fine. Sometimes an OK marriage is good enough. You don’t have to be a marriage superstar. Today, you’re allowed to be just “pretty OK.”

There are no Awesomeness Police waiting for you at the end of the day to tackle you to the ground if you don’t achieve All-Around-Awesomeness in every department of your life. At the end of your earthly life, I highly doubt God is going to look over your Life Resume and criticize you for failing to be stupendous, extraordinary, super-fantastic in all you did.

You don’t have to be awesome all the time.

Some mornings, you’re going to have to be ready to settle for “just OK.” Otherwise you won’t be able to get out of bed and live your life. You’re not being lazy or good-for-nothing; you’re just being realistic. Sometimes, I think it’s OK if you just strive for satisfactory.

Then, after a certain number of mornings like this, maybe you’ll be able to start thinking about extraordinary. Eventually. But you don’t have to today.

I want you to know that sometimes in life, all you’re going to be able to achieve is “decent,” and that’s pretty darn OK.

Personally, I don’t want to have to be extraordinary. I want to know that the universe won’t implode if I end up with just a “pretty OK” marriage.

Maybe you feel like this too.

If so, I want to give you permission to just strive for satisfactory. Just be OK. I tried this a few weeks ago and I think I’m on my way to being all right!

Photo courtesy Adam Pniak

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3. What’s Wrong And How Do We Fix It?
4. How To Keep Arguments From Escalating

I love the mountains. I love their beauty, impressiveness, challenge, and strength.

Having grown up in the plains of the midwest, where the mountains were 8 or more hours away, I loved trips to the mountains.

I’d love to live in the mountains some day.

For the past several months my wife and I have had several conversations about what we want our family to be about. What kind of story we want our family to be part of. What story we want our marriage to be.

This conversation took a more intent path when we read Donald Miller’s newest book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (absolutely worth the read). Miller proposes that life is a story and many people quite frankly live in boring stories of their own writing.

For my wife and I, we began discussions about moving to the mountains as a way to write a better story. But it quickly became evident that moving may be a reaction to current life and if we did move, we’d only be changing the scenery, not the main story.

So in 2010 we are working on the main story, not the scenery (although the scenery in our home will be decluttered and simple as possible). In other words, we’re working on the main characters.

The scenery plays a minor role, the characters carry the story.

To that end, here are some questions we’ve been working through thus far.

1. Are you living for something more than yourself?

Much of life seems to be survival of the fittest and while self-care is essential for a life fully alive, and a marriage fully alive, it can cross the boundary to being only about ourselves easily. Being a part of something bigger than ourself is important to living a good story. Give of yourself to others, give your time to a worthy cause, help those around you.

2. If your life were a movie, would you want to go see it?

This same question works for marriage as well.

3. What do you want in life?

This is a question many people can’t answer, in fact most people wouldn’t know where to begin. To tell a great story, you must want something. So what do you want?

4. Do you find you avoid life’s conflict?

Life is filled with conflict, so is marriage. It’s unavoidable. Do you find that you spend a lot of time trying to avoid conflict in life and marriage? Is life at home like walking on egg-shells? If so, what does this say about the characters in your story? Move into the conflict. Face the fear of the unknown and speak up. As John Eldredge says in Wild at Heart – “Let the world feel the weight of you, and let them deal with it.”

In 2010, write a great story. Be a good character in it. And tell a great story.

_____

Join Mandi Ehman, of Organizing Your Way, all this month as she posts 31 ways of organizing for a better 2010.

Photo courtesy geoftheref

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1. Essential Rules for Traveling Light in Marriage
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3. If Your Marriage Were A Movie, Would You Want To Go See It?
4. What Do Men Know About Women?

The new year is right around the corner, so now is the time many people are working on their resolutions for 2010.

Perhaps this is the year to drop a few pounds, stop viewing porn, spend more time at home, read more, or watch less TV. Whatever you plan on doing for this new year, allow me to present this tion.

What if you started 2010 by focusing the first 10 weeks on your marriage?

Here’s what I’m planning – for the first 10 weeks of 2010 my wife and I are going to work through A Simple Marriage together, one chapter per week (although one week will have 2 chapters). This will allow us to slowly work through each chapter alone and together.

What I’m asking is for you to join us.

Here’s how. I’ve set up a discussion board in the Simple Marriage Community where we can connect and work through this together with you. This part of the community will be members only – all that means is you’ll have to email me to let me know you’re interested in joining us so I can send you the password to access the discussion.

It’s free to join us, other than the cost of the book ($23).

If you plan on joining us, send an email to sm2010 [at] simplemarriage [dot] net. You’ll receive a reply with the password for the members only board.

Let’s start off 2010 by working to simplify and experience more in marriage. What do you say?

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Related posts:

1. 8 Principles for a Zen Marriage
2. Connecting In Order To Have The Best Marriage
3. 17 More Tips To Improve Marriage And Slow Down Life At The Same Time
4. Two Words for a Better Marriage

Editor’s Note: This post is from Tess Marshall of The Bold Life.

What would your marriage look like in 2011 if you focused on improving it for the next twelve months?

In a world filled with stress and fear the very thing we can find comfort in–our primary relationship, we tend to ignore or take for granted. Being in a loving relationship has a positive effect on every area of our lives.

Print this article, discuss it with your spouse, and then put it on the refrigerator.

Begin to take action today.

Your reward will be a happy family.

Cost: priceless!

50. Schedule date nights regularly.

49. Speak your truth in a respectful way.

48. Ask for what you want or need.

47. Share your feelings often.

46. Create magical moments.

45. Compliment your spouse daily.

44. Change yourself instead of trying to change your spouse.

43. Look your best, dress up and be well groomed.

42. Lower your expectations.

42. Learn to enjoy each others company.

41. Plan for good times.

40. Support each other’s individual goals.

39. Create goals together.

38. Do service work together.

37. Eat as many meals together as possible.

36. Talk to each other for 30 minutes a day.

35. Pray or meditate together.

36. Share in each others interests.

34. Touch your spouse several times a day.

33. Kiss every day for at least 12 seconds.

32. Apologize and state how your behavior will change.

31. Spend time away from each other.

30. Be trustworthy.

29. Remove the television from your bedroom.

28. Accept each other’s flaws.

27. Don’t take each other for granted.

26. Give each other space.

25. Offer to help with daily chores.

24. Say please and thank you no matter how big or small the act.

23. Always give away the extra cookie.

22. Serve yourself last.

21. Check in with each other while apart by talking or texting.

20. Clean the other’s car.

19. Watch some TV together.

18. Be the first person to pick up the dishes from the table.

17. Smile often.

16. Gaze into each other’s eyes.

15. Eat meals slowly and really listen when the other speaks.

14. Refuse to hold a grudge.

13. Cuddle often.

12. Be honest.

11. Forgive often.

10. Surprise each other.

9. Spend 3 weekends alone together each year.

8. Plan and stick to your budget together.

7. Always discuss major purchases before making them.

6. Laugh at each others mistakes.

5. Never threaten each other.

4. Make honesty your best policy.

3. Respect each other.

2. Remember together you’re a team.

1. Make love often.

Photo courtesy pedrosimoes7

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1. 8 Principles for a Zen Marriage
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3. What’s Wrong And How Do We Fix It?
4. How To Keep Arguments From Escalating

Editor’s Note: This post is by Simple Marriage contributor Mary Ann Crossno.

If a good working definition of expectations is planned disappointment, then the outcome of expectations will be unhappiness. When what we expect to happen does not happen, we are disappointed and we suffer pain at some level. The greater the expectation, the greater the pain we will suffer.

Surprisingly, we are likely to be unhappy even when our expectations ARE met! Let me explain.

We are most grateful for the good things that come our way that we did not expect to happen. If you expect your partner to help with the housework, you will be disappointed, mad, sad, or angry when your partner does not help you with the housework, but you won’t necessarily be grateful when your partner does help with the housework. Depending on your history together, you may be

• Pleased – “I’m glad we’re doing this together.”
• Surprised – “I can’t believe you actually mopped the floor!”
• Justified – “I do my share and you need to do your share.”
• Vindicated – “It’s about time you started pulling your weight!”

When you are dog tired at the end of the day, and you walk in to find your partner cleaning the kitchen, or putting the kids to bed when you expected her to be home late – that’s when you feel truly grateful – because you were not expecting the help! When we are truly grateful for something, we cannot help but feel happiness.

Dennis Prager says it best:

Gratitude is the key to happiness and anything that undermines gratitude must undermine happiness. And nothing undermines gratitude as much as expectations. The more expectations you have, the less gratitude you will have.

Expectations and gratitude are opposite sides of the same coin. Where do our expectations come from?

Our expectations are the confused result of our reactions, our thoughts, and our emotional heritage. We confuse wants with needs, anticipation with expectation, loneliness with emptiness, touch with sex, talk with communication, ideals with reality, and self with relationships.

We confuse what we can get only from within ourselves with what we can get only from a relationship.

This confusion drives us to continually

• try to get from someone else what we can get only from ourselves,
• or try to get from ourselves what we can get only from a relationship.

No matter how hard or long we try, we will never be complete in this life. We cannot be complete as an individual, and we cannot be complete by marrying or having children. We cannot be completely secure emotionally nor can we know everything about any one thing. When we are fixated on finding completeness in this life, we become so anxious that we either aim for absolute safety or we stay paralyzed for fear of not getting it [completeness].

The expectation that we can be complete and the desperate search for it leads people to attempt the impossible. The fantasy world is full of the illusion of completeness – which leads people to drugs, sex, alcohol, money, conflict, helplessness, power – all of the world’s ills. We’re all a little lonely, we all feel some sense of inadequacy, some fear of failure – in other words, we all feel some emptiness.

This is a natural state of being, and in my Christian worldview, designed by God to draw us to Him.

Growing up – becoming emotionally mature – is all about how we handle the uncertainty – the incompleteness – of life. When we are able to accept and understand that this emptiness is a natural part of being human, we are on the path to a better life.

The less aware we are of our own emptiness, the more unrealistically we raise our level of expectations on others. High expectations become hypersensitive and emotionally reactive. So much focus is placed on what others are or are not doing that there is little time left for self-focus. The more successfully we can lower our expectations of others, the more time we have to develop our personal sense of responsibility – and the more effort we put into living up to our personal responsibilities, the more we experience responsibility as joy and fulfillment.

Unhappiness is trading what we want most for what we want now. We want whatever makes us uncomfortable – our anxieties, our insecurities, our challenges – we want that discomfort to go away RIGHT NOW. But deep down, what we want most is to be more – more loving, more forgiving, more compassionate, and more grateful.

Make gratitude a habit.

• Write down three things everyday that you are grateful for –– and see how many days you can come up three things to be grateful for – without repeating yourself!
• Get a copy of The Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude by Sarah Ban Breathnach and write in it everyday for a year.
• Write your gratitudes on post-it notes and stick them around the house, in the car, in your spouse/kids’ lunch bags . . . surround yourself with reminders of what you have to be grateful for.
• For your Christmas cards, send a note to everyone that helped you in some way this year – and start with those closest to you – your spouse, your kids, your parents, and your siblings.

Whatever you focus on, grows.

Grow your happiness by lowering your expectations and growing your gratefulness.

Prager, D. 1998. Happiness is a serious problem.

Fogarty, T.F. 1978. On emptiness and closeness. In The Family, Compendium I.

Photo courtesy suvodeb

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2. What To Do When She Makes More Than Him
3. 8 Principles for a Zen Marriage
4. What’s Wrong And How Do We Fix It?

Editor’s Note: This post is by Simple Marriage contributor Mary Ann Crossno.

You’ve made it through Thanksgiving.

How did your day of thanks stack up to your expectations [definition: planned disappointment]?

Now you have 24 days until Christmas and 31 days until the New Year. What are you expecting to happen during this time?

Where do our expectations about this time of year come from?

The beginnings of our holidays are grounded in significance:

• Thanksgiving began as a time to thank God for the harvest and express gratitude to others for our many blessings.
• Chanukah, the Festival of Lights, celebrates the victory of the Maccabees, the rededication of the Jerusalem Temple, and the miracle of the oil that burned for 8 days.
• Christmas commemorates the birth of Jesus, whose coming marked God’s gift to all of a new relationship with Him.

Today society’s holiday messages represent a cultural push and pull toward “idealized togetherness.” We’re saturated with Norman Rockwell scenes of family gatherings, Currier and Ives scenes of a winter wonderland, and Fifth Avenue’s illusions of all the happiness money can buy.

It’s a time of year that inflames emotions with a definite positive tilt – we’re supposed to be at our best. We’re expected to look our best, wear our best, serve our best, and display our best.

It’s the time of year when relationships seem to be under a microscope. “We-ness” expectations run rampant. “We” should want, feel, think, the same, or at least very similar, things about the holidays – how we celebrate them, what they mean to us, what we think about them.

How do the expectations of the holiday season impact your marriage?

Take some time to think back on the patterns of your relationship around the holidays. Does one take on the role of Santa while the other plays Scrooge? Does one rack up debt that the other works all year to pay off? Does one get giddy and while the other fights the blues? How do your holiday differences reflect unresolved differences that simmer the rest of the year?

Patterns are the hallmark of human behavior – we are what we repeatedly do. The only way to be different begins with identifying our patterns. We can’t change what we won’t acknowledge.

I married when I was 22 and became the instant Mom to a 9 year old daughter and 7 year old son, who had been abandoned by their biological mom. I wanted to make Christmas magical for them. Many of my own childhood Christmases were filled with more sadness than happiness – and that happiness always centered on great food – cooking, eating, and sharing it. For many years I worked to create an idealized version of Christmas for my family – the two kids I inherited, the one I gave to birth to, my husband, and most of all – to me. Each Christmas seemed to outdo the one before.

My husband loved our ability to take in his small extended family to our Christmas, and he loved our Christmas angel tradition [taking in an unexpected guest – someone alone for Christmas that came our way]. He didn’t love the excess spending. As a self-employed man running a business, he was caught each December with end of the year deadlines on projects in direct conflict with celebrating that started the weekend before Thanksgiving and lasted until after New Year’s Day.

When our children no longer lived at home, I was eager to continue many of the traditions I had established in our marriage. We settled into a pattern of him dreading the holidays and me feeling unappreciated for my efforts to “make” the holidays special. It took more than one holiday season for me to recognize my contribution to the funk. I had to give up the expectation that we were going to move through the holidays as one joyous organism.

I did it by asking myself this question [given to me by my therapist!]:

• How could I extend myself for the well-being of my partner?

Here’s how I answered that question around our holiday differences: I asked him what he would like [walks and movies] and would not like [six weeks of focus]. I told him what I needed and wanted to make me feel festive [cooking a great meal and a tree]. Anything and everything else that comes up on the holiday radar is optional and negotiable. It worked. It’s still working.

As a gift to yourself and to your relationship this holiday season, how will you answer the question:

• How can you extend yourself for the well-being of your partner?

Photo courtesy laffy4k

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Related posts:

1. The Lazy Marriage’s Budget
2. How To Spot And Defeat The Four Marriage Killers
3. 17 More Tips To Improve Marriage And Slow Down Life At The Same Time
4. What Do Men Know About Women?

In March 2009 I conducted a brief research survey looking to discover what basic elements are necessary for a marriage or committed relationship to thrive.

After surveying 1028 participants, here’s what the research discovered.

Top 10 basic elements

1. Communication
2. Trust
3. Love
4. Respect
5. Commitment
6. Honesty
7. Humor/Laughter
8. Sex
9. Friendship
10. Compatibility

A few demographic details about the respondents -

Male – 404 respondents – or 40%

Female – 617 respondents – or 60%

81% or the respondents were currently married with 7% cohabitating. Average length of current relationship was 10.8 years and 64% of the respondents had children.

In case you’re wondering – the actual research question was:

What are the basic elements necessary for a marriage/committed relationship to thrive? (list up to 6)

What’s your thought?

CURRENT SPONSORS:

• Romantic Marriages – Join the Loving Wives Club and romance your man.
• A Simple Marriage – Corey’s book written to assist you in amping up your marriage.
• Potty Training Power – Ditch the diapers today!
• Todoodlist – Technology is great. Pencils are better.

Want more?

Check out the Simple Marriage Community.

Get the Steps to a Simple Marriage EBook here.

Related posts:

1. 8 Principles for a Zen Marriage
2. How To Spot And Defeat The Four Marriage Killers
3. 17 More Tips To Improve Marriage And Slow Down Life At The Same Time
4. What Do Men Know About Women?