Want a surefire way to boost the connection, love, and harmony in your intimate relationship?
A weekly relationship ritual is sure to do the trick!
Whether you’re in a new relationship and want to get off on the right foot, or you and your spouse have been together for many years and the busyness of life has been getting in the way of your connection… a weekly relationship ritual is one of the most effective ways to inject more love into your union.
By incorporating a regular relationship ritual into your life, you improve communication, increase your felt sense of intimacy, and feel more resilient day to day with your significant other.
My wife Demetra and I have used this practice to great effect for years, a countless number of my clients have benefitted from this type of a regular practice, and you can too.
5 Tips For Your Weekly Relationship Ritual
1. Commit to a time that works for both of you
The first decision that you and your partner need to make is what day and time your relationship ritual will take place.
With timing, you want to strike a balance of it being a day and time that has a consistently high chance of being unbothered by outside obligations, but also where you’ll both have a high likelihood of having the mental and emotional bandwidth to be truly present for it.
Once the time of day/week is mutually agreed upon, it becomes both of your responsibility to consistently show up for it, and do whatever you individually need to do to ensure that you can show up to each relationship ritual meeting with as much presence and emotional availability as possible.
2. Agree on the length of your relationship ritual
The second thing to agree on is the duration of your relationship ritual.
Now, if you’re in the honeymoon stage of a new romance, this point might not matter to you as much. But for more long-term/established relationships, this point should not go overlooked.
The last thing you want is to have one or both partners begin to resent the relationship ritual because of how much time or energy it requires.
Your individual relationship toward the relationship ritual should be one of lightness, gratitude, and renewal. As such, generally leaning towards keeping it (relatively) short and sweet is better than long and arduous.
Only you and your partner know what you can realistically (and consistently) commit to showing up for, but generally something in the 30-60 minute range has a higher probability of being maintained than a weekly practice that spans 3-4 hours in length.
3. Agree on what you’re optimizing for in your relationship ritual
Every couple in every unique season will need to optimize for different things in their relationship ritual.
A newer couple might optimize for self-disclosure of personal preferences so that each partner can learn how to love the other best.
A couple that has been together for a couple of years that are about to get married and move in together might lean more heavily towards naming fears of what’s to come.
And a married couple who have been together for thirty years and are currently in a good place might lean more towards a gratitude practice where they share things that they appreciate about what has transpired over the previous week.
The practices that you both lean most heavily on will depend on what the shared energy of your relationship requires in that season.
So long as one or both of you have your finger on the pulse of what the relationship currently needs, you’ll always be in a position to calibrate the structure of your relationship ritual to its highest and best use.
4. Agree on your go-to practices for your relationship ritual
Structurally speaking, having a rhythm for your relationship ritual makes it easier to stay consistently committed to. Why? Because you don’t have to burn psychological energy feeling like you need to reinvent the wheel every week by starting from scratch.
If you have a lot of unresolved stuff that needs to be addressed, a clearing practice would likely be the best default practice.
If you’re in a season where you’re reprioritizing physical touch or sexual intimacy, then having spoiling sessions be your default practice would serve you best.
There are many options of practices you can incorporate into your weekly relationship ritual (I get into several more in the linked resources below). The most important thing is that you and your partner select the one that feeds the aspect of your relationship that currently requires the most nourishment.
5. Be flexible, but make it a priority
Over a long-enough time horizon, life will inevitably challenge your relationship rituals committed time slot.
Even if you and your partner are absolute rockstars at making it a priority, eventually one of you will get sick, an exciting event (concert, comedy show, etc.) will come to town, or a significant holiday will land on your designated time slot.
When these moments happen, my suggestion would be to simply move the relationship ritual a day or two to the side, and keep it up.
So if your relationship ritual usually lands on Sunday evening and you know that you want to go to a concert with your partner that day, simply engage with the practice the day before.
After a certain amount of time of making your relationship ritual a consistent habit, sleeping a week and having a two week gap will just feel strange. Better to move it to an adjacent day and make it a priority on a different day, than to drop it and pick it back up a week later.
Relationship Rituals Are Worth It
The positive impact of a weekly relationship ritual cannot be understated.
Does every couple need to have one? Of course not. But the depth of connection, joy, and nourishment that comes from having a committed practice like this can do wonders for your partnership.
If you want to dig into the best practices that I recommend for your weekly relationship ritual, the exercises that I recommend in my Effortless Connection Exercises program are exactly that.
I dig into seven of the most effective exercises that I recommend to my clients, and you even get to see my wife Demetra and I demonstrate many of the practices on camera.
You can find out more about that by going to this page.
Dedicated to your success,
Jordan
Ps. If you enjoyed this article, you’ll also love checking out:
– Clearing: The Single Greatest Connection Exercise For Couples
– The Spoiling Session: The Best Sexual Exercise For Couples
