Happy happy 🐦 day, Mom! 🥰🎂🍰🧁🥰 Looking forward to your three-quarter-century celebration this weekend.🥂

Our last couples’ retreat of 2025 was something rare. This Austrian group brought focus, grace, vulnerability and a sincere commitment to investing in their relationships. Every so often, couples show up to “check the box” and tell themselves they tried, but these folks weren’t there for the one-pager. They showed up to do the real work, to slow down, to reflect, and to practice. Here are a few relationship insights I took from our group and one-on-one conversations:

1. Swap one task to expose invisible labour; it’s not about helping out or making things “fair”, but providing a new lens. Doing your partner’s task gives you a feel for the mental and emotional load behind it. If you have to ask a bunch of questions, you’re uncovering the tiny decisions that drain them more than the task itself.
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2. Get to know your repair formulas when things are calm as opposed to during the conflict. If you wait until you’re flooded to communicate what you need in order to make things better, it can be harder to understand. Talk about what repair means to you just as you talk about other needs in your relationship. Do you usually need space, closeness, reassurance, affection, clarity or something else?

3. Put your relationship on the calendar before the kids, work and other commitments. If you schedule connection last, it won’t happen. If you schedule it first, everything else rearranges around it. I’ve never encountered a group of couples more committed to date nights, nightly rituals and getaways sans kids. This group gave me so much hope!
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4. Touch without an agenda. Non-sexual touch helps regulate your nervous system and reinforces safety. If touch only happens when sex is on the table, it can feel loaded. Simple, everyday affection keeps the pathway to intimacy open.
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5. Schedule moments that may lead to desire even if you don’t want to schedule the sex itself. Oftentimes the struggle for desire is actually about the conditions that support it. You may not be able to schedule arousal, but you can schedule the rituals that make arousal possible (at present or in the future).