Married With Benefits by FamilyLife

Shanti Feldhahn: She said the couple comes in, they're sitting there with their arms crossed. They don't like each other. They're shaking apart. She said, "Okay, here's what you have to do first. I will not take you on as a client—or a counselor here will take you on as a client—but here's what you have to do first. I will not see you, I will not talk to you, and I will not help you until you do this for two weeks."

Brian Goins: Welcome back to Married With Benefits. I'm your host, Brian Goins. I don't know about you, but have you ever suffered from calendar clutter? It feels like every space is being taken up on your calendar with kids' stuff and work stuff. Then you go to a marriage conference, you read a book, or you listen to a podcast like mine, and you hear something about a date night.

The idea that I could actually cram another thing onto that calendar puts immense pressure on you as a guy or you as a woman. You just think, "I don't even know if I can make time for that." Today in this episode, we're going to be joined again by Shanti Feldhahn and also by University of Virginia sociologist and renowned scholar, Brad Wilcox. There's a ton of diplomas that are going to be around this table, most of which aren't mine. We're going to discover with both of them that maybe we're putting a little too much pressure on ourselves. It could be that date nights aren't the silver bullet to every relationship woe.

Shanti, I've got an impossible choice. I want you to feel what they feel when you interview them. If you had to choose between what's more important in a marriage, but you can only pick one of these: either a weekly date night or running errands in the week for a couple, what's more important for that couple to do?

Shanti Feldhahn: Running errands multiple times together. Yes, it's running errands. I thought you'd say that, and that frustrates me. You forced me into a choice. It's obviously not that simple. But we picked that one because of this secret and because of what we found in the research.

This secret is that highly happy couples hang out. Why that word "hang out"? It feels so nebulous. When I saw the title of that, I immediately pictured me and Jen in a basement with a couch and a bag of chips watching football. That qualifies 100 percent. We've heard at marriage conferences that you need to schedule your next date night. There's this date night pressure. I've always felt this sense of pressure like I've got to plan a date night every week, I've got to get the restaurant, I think about money, and I think about babysitting. If we miss a week, I start feeling like a failure.

I love the idea of date nights. Date nights are a great thing. Sometimes in the middle of busy life, you have to say we have to schedule it. That's the only way we're going to get away from the kids is to get somebody to watch the kids and go have dinner somewhere and just talk. So I'm a fan of that. This really isn't a forced choice.

The issue that we found in this study is that first and foremost, the happiest couples tended to treat each other like best friends. That was even more than treating each other as their married partner or their co-parent. They treated each other mostly like best friends. Then you start looking at what the primary predictors of friendship are. What makes good friendship?

When you look at the primary predictor of friendship, people always guess similar interests or affinities. People always guess similar temperaments or complementary temperaments or similar values. All those things are really good, but those are a distant second, third, and fourth compared to the number one predictor of friendship, which is geographic proximity. You're just the best friends with the people you see the most often.

We all know that's true because we've all had really close friends where one of us moved away. You still love that person and you're still friends, but there's not that day-to-day closeness in the same way. It works the exact same way in marriage. You are the best friends with the people you see the most often. One of the factors that makes a really happy marriage is just hanging out together and just literally spending time together.

Brian Goins: That seems pretty natural, especially when it's early. You may not have a lot of money to go out, but you have time generally when you're first starting out. You prioritize it. You go on adventures and all that kind of stuff. But there's something that does happen in marriage. I've heard it said that the first thing to go in marriage is politeness. I wonder if the first thing to go in marriage is just proximity. Even though we're living under the same roof, we can find all kinds of things to fill up the space between us and just get busy. Kids and jobs all add in, and suddenly it feels like we're more like business partners than best friends.

Shanti Feldhahn: That is what so many couples are trying to solve. You love your spouse, you care about them, and you enjoy your marriage, but you want to go from good to great. You want to go from so-so and struggling to great. One of the keys to that is this. This was actually really interesting how this recognition of this came near the very end of our study.

We had heard the happy couples mention things like, "Oh yeah, we go hiking, we do this, we hang out and watch football." We just brushed it off. We did not see it as important as it was. Then relatively near the end, we had just hired the survey company to do the big national survey. We couldn't add anything to it both because it was already costing us $50,000 and we didn't have any more money. I said, "This is so important. I want to actually hire someone else to do a data run for me on this because we have to quantify whether this matters." Oh my gosh, it really, really matters.

Brian Goins: When you think about hanging out, it feels nebulous. There might be people feeling some anxiety about this. Is this something else I've got to add into my life? I could feel people like those who are in the military that have deployments, or entrepreneurs that are at a super busy time of life. They might feel like they have to be at the restaurant every hour if they want to make payroll. Give me some examples of what hanging out is.

Shanti Feldhahn: Literally, it could be almost anything that gives you a chance to interact with one another. Sometimes this can be hanging out over the phone because your spouse is in another state for business, or over Zoom because your spouse is deployed. These are literally for me and Jeff. One of the things we have is crazy schedules. We travel a lot. I'm often traveling without him. When our kids were young, this was something we would have to juggle.

It's a little bit easier now that our youngest has left for college. But for us, we realized the easiest thing to do was that we would get the kids off to school and we would sit for 20 minutes and have coffee together. Sometimes it was a little bit more than that, sometimes less. It just sort of was like we're having coffee, we're reading the news, and letting our brains relax for a minute since we got the craziness of the kids out the door.

It might literally be that we sit there side-by-side and never talk to one another because we're reading the news or I'm reading a book. But most of the time because we're sitting there, it's like, "Did you see that thing that happened?" It's almost like you're giving yourself the space for something to happen. Too often we don't even give ourselves the space for that, or we feel this pressure to create the space like the weekly date night where we feel pressured to have to perform a little bit or have the deep conversation.

Brian Goins: What I hear you saying is it may not be quality time like we would think of couple quality time as having great conversations. You're saying quantity is just as much important.

Shanti Feldhahn: The thing about quantity, even if it's just a little bit of time here and there in a lot of spaces like driving to the grocery store, gives you a chance to be able to say, "You know what? I forgot to tell you that thing that happened at the office the other day." It's not a huge momentous thing. It was just this little day-to-day thing, and my boss told me I really did a really good job at that report, and that made me so happy. You've caught one another up on things that are important about your life. That kind of stuff happens more naturally amongst best friends when best friends are just getting together and going out to dinner or getting together for coffee or going for a hike. It naturally happens that way.

Brian Goins: Let's talk about what the obstacles are that get in the way of hanging out. I think the first one really is just busyness. We just make ourselves busy. We fill up the space with everything else but each other.

Shanti Feldhahn: This is the modern disease. This is what our lives are like today. We have so many things that we're doing and so many choices that we tend to try to do all of them. Think about what a marriage would have been like 200 years ago. It's a long time ago, but think about it. You've got a small family farm, and as soon as the sun goes down, that's kind of it for the day because you don't have electricity, you don't have a light, and you don't have TV. You're not watching Netflix.

You're just making dinner by candlelight and you're sitting down and catching up on what happened on this particular field of the farm and what's going on with the kids. There would have been a much more relaxed scope of life because of one reason: you just didn't have any options to do anything other than that. Today we have every option imaginable and we haven't yet learned the discipline of saying, "Oh, that means I need to make choices." That means that with all these different options, I can't necessarily take on every single thing I want to do and still know who my spouse is and have time with my kids. You have to actually prioritize.

Brian Goins: I heard somebody talking about the word "decide." Decide means to kill. Suicide is killing of oneself. Infanticide, patricide. Decide is to kill the other options. That's in your next book. That's free. Deciding something is really deciding to kill the other options that are available to me. We don't do that as Americans because we have FOMO and we have to go here and go there. It's really easy to fill up everything.

Shanti Feldhahn: We get busy, and here's what happens with that. We're very busy with all these other things and we don't realize that by definition we have made, in many cases, our spouse the last priority. That means by default we've made our marriage the last priority. If you ask people what their most important human relationship is, almost everybody says their spouse if they're married. Yet I have made it my last priority. I can tell what you value by what you cheer for, what you pay for, and what you sign up for. We can say we value our spouse, but if we're not signing up to be with them, whether it's quantity or quality time, then we really don't value them. We really don't set them above everything else.

In a struggling marriage, busyness can be that anesthesia for a tough season. I can find all my other hope and joy in everything else, and I don't really want to come back to my spouse. Why would I want to spend time with somebody that I'm struggling with? We talked to a lot of people and heard a lot of different stories. This is an example of something where I heard this kind of story from so many different people.

There was this one young woman who she and her husband had three little kids. They were in an incredibly dark season of their marriage, almost splitting apart. She somehow got the kind of awareness that she needed to do this. She said, "Let me look at our schedule." They were incredibly busy. They never saw each other, with the kids going different directions. She looked at their weekly calendar and said, "How often do we spend time just the two of us hanging out?" It was 15 minutes a week. They almost had no time at all. It was basically like Friday mornings he left for work a little later than normal. It was really very small.

She said, "We have to change something and do it now." There was an urgency to this. She looked at their calendar and there wasn't a ton that they could change immediately. But she noticed that on Tuesdays and Thursdays, her husband took their seven-year-old son and drove across town to Little League. She said, "There is no reason in the world that I should have to load up a toddler and a baby and drive across town with him to Little League except for the fact that that is 20 minutes in the car on the way there and 20 minutes on the way back twice a week."

At the beginning, that is literally all that we changed. We had that 20 minutes and 20 minutes. For 40 minutes on those two days, it gave us just a little bit of margin, just a little bit of time to be able to catch up and find out what was going on. "Tell me what your sister said the other day. I never did find that out." Suddenly they started actually rebuilding a little bit of a friendship. She had said, "No wonder we're at odds. We don't even like each other anymore. We're not even friends." This started building back, "Oh, this is who I married. This is the person that I liked. I did say yes to this person at some point in time."

Now they're actually being able to just have that little tiny bit of margin. That is what built them back up and then they were able to do more. As she put it, "When you are friends, you can address anything. But once you're not friends anymore, it's really, really hard." That to me was such a good example of how that was so simple.

This is not going to solve the big issues. There are going to be some of these things that make friendship difficult. Somebody's feeling betrayed, for example, or somebody has an addiction and it's just causing all sorts of stuff. In those situations, we're not saying just hang out and it'll be fine. You're going to need some help. You're going to need to work through that. You're going to need probably some specialized help from somebody who knows how to help you work through that. However, actually finding ways to be friends again will actually make those issues easier to deal with. It'll make that process a lot easier because you can start liking each other.

Brian Goins: Let's assume for the sake of argument that you have your whole calendar packed out. Find the margin. Find the gaps. There are gaps. These little things are fairly easy to implement, but they're also easy to forget. I could imagine that woman was going, "Not tonight, I'm exhausted. I don't want to go on this ride." But she had to do it. She's acting her way into a new kind of feeling, and the byproduct is I get to be friends with my spouse.

Shanti Feldhahn: I was talking to this woman the other day who was saying she had always wanted to go back to school when her kids had left home. That had been out there to make it more professionally viable to get a better-paying job. She and her husband were both second marriage and both incredibly busy. Her kids grew up, they leave home, and she's like, "Yes, I get to go back and get my degree." It was taking a lot of time. Her husband's business was their main way of earning income.

She still wanted to be able to talk to each of the kids at three different colleges and be in their lives. She realized he was getting the short shrift. She said she realized she had to put school on pause. She did it for a year, recognized that this was taking all her margin. She said, "Either I have to do this, this, or this." She had a volunteer thing that was a big deal for her. She said, "One of these things I'm going to have to choose to drop to kill in order so that when I add school in, I'm not taking all that time away from my husband." He would have to make the same choices. It's not all on her. He would have to make the same choices, but it is something we just don't often think about.

Brian Goins: So that's the first one, busyness. All of us can relate to that on some level. The second one happens in my family as well, which is one spouse is unavoidably gone for whatever reason. You think about military families, you think about businessmen and entrepreneurs.

Shanti Feldhahn: You would be amazed at how easy it is to assume that's just unavoidable, so we're just going to have this distance between us. What we found with the highly happy couples is that they went, "No, we're not going to have this distance." It's not like in the highly happy category of couples you just had people that were always at home. These are people that could be on any strata: entrepreneurs, doctors, long-distance truck drivers, military deployed, all of the above.

One of the things that we saw is that these highly happy couples made a choice to prioritize their marriage. For example, I heard over and over again from road warrior spouses, whether it was the husband or the wife gone Monday through Friday on a consulting gig in different states all the time, that they would sacrifice their sleep in order to take the red-eye back or in order to get up super, super early and get back home in order to be able to see their kids off to school the next morning. They would say, "Yeah, it's going to exhaust me and I'm already tired from a long week away, but that's the choice that I made. I need to make sure this job doesn't hurt that part of our marriage."

I had a lot of military spouses say video conferences and video calls are a beautiful thing. Thank you for technology. That wouldn't have happened 200 years ago. Can you imagine? This is such a blessing to be able to just do a free Zoom call. That was really common. The other thing that was interesting is that sometimes, and often it was the wife that prompted this if the wife was at home and the military husband is deployed, the wife would start a question conversation. Here's the question for the day. It gave them something to be able to engage about. They could still talk about other things, but it gave them something.

If you think about it, if let's just pretend that you're not deployed and that you're sitting on the couch on a Saturday afternoon watching college football. I love that kind of thing with Jeff. He turned me into a Michigan fan. What comes up in the commercial breaks is, "Hey, whatever happened with—you were telling me about that you were thinking about doing this new thing in your business? Or what happened with that difficult client? I never did find out about that." That kind of stuff comes up naturally if you're sitting together. If you're deployed or you're on the other side of the country for business or you're working in the restaurant all hours because that's what you have to do, you don't think about those things. A question conversation is a little trick.

Brian Goins: That's a good idea. I'm on the road a lot more than Jen is. Honestly, I get done with the day and I just want to veg out. I just want to watch TV, I just want to relax. I don't want to make the call home. I hate to say that. I will and I do, but that's not the first thing in my mind. Or I'm compartmentalized because when you're on the road you tend to overwork yourself because I'm out anyway, I might as well work late. For me, learning how to schedule those times in the better part of my day, whether that's first thing in the morning before I get going or to intentionally put on my calendar 30 minutes to talk to Jen, helps me get in that framework.

Shanti Feldhahn: I'm like you, I'm on the road a lot. It's something as simple as I'm getting in the car and I'm driving to the church where I'm going to speak and I've got 15 minutes, so I call Jeff. It just gives me a touch. That's all.

Brian Goins: Okay, so busyness, one spouse is unavoidably gone from the other. The third one is competition for others for attention, which feels like busyness. Give me some difference on that.

Shanti Feldhahn: It is obviously overlaid with busyness, but this is one of those things that we have to be so careful about. The two biggest ones stereotypically for women and for men is the kids taking the wife's attention away from the marriage and work taking the husband's attention away from the marriage. Please don't write in angry emails. I know that's a stereotype. There's a ton of women working. Look at me, I'm the one on the road.

I get that there's plenty of exceptions. However, these two archetypes are things we need to be really careful of. One of the things that starts happening to a lot of women when we have kids is we start all of our attention and our mental focus and our emotional effort and our energy is just naturally put towards that. Similar with a husband who wants to provide for his family. He knows he needs to keep everybody at work happy. He knows he needs to take that call at 10:00 at night instead of being with his wife. Or hobbies and leisure have become the next thing I'm finding my value and identity in.

All of that is happening. Church stuff is a big thing. These are all good things. Church can take over your life. That's not the way God intended. This is something to equip and empower and send the saints out, not to take over our marriages. All those things that compete are not the same as busyness because it is emotional competition. It is energy competition as well as actually physical competition.

Hanging out helps with that because if all of your emotional energy is being put towards the kids, for example, and you're not even thinking about your spouse, they're not even on your radar. We know a couple for whom it was the reverse. The husband was emotionally incredibly invested in his son's athletic career all the way from little bitty he was very athletic all the way up through college. As soon as the son graduated from college and stopped playing college sports, suddenly the husband realized, "I don't know my wife. I haven't had any emotional engagement with my wife in all these years because I've been so focused." He had no idea what to do with himself. That's an ongoing situation.

Brian Goins: Busyness, a spouse is unavoidably gone, competition for others for these attention. It occurs to me that all of those are actually choices we make. We say yes to the things on the calendar, we say yes to the road teams, and we sign up for all this stuff. We can only blame ourselves in some sense. You have to take an honest audit and look and say what needs to come off so that we can have margin to hang out. What needs to change? What trip do we need to take more often? Do I need to start going with you to Target? Whatever it might be, how do I prioritize? How do I bring the marriage back up into my radar so that I'm hanging out? This last obstacle is one that we can't always pick. It's the season of marital difficulty.

Shanti Feldhahn: The difficulties in life have become a marital difficulty. That's when that becomes a challenge to hanging out because you are trying to avoid the conflict. "I love or I used to love this spouse of mine. Now I'm not even sure I like them, but I don't want to be fighting with them all the time. When we do hang out, it's miserable. We're always at each other's throats, so I'm just going to be over here in my corner working or I'm going to be over here distracting myself with whatever."

We actually go further and further and further away from hanging out and we are getting further and further and further away from the very thing that creates the glue to keep us together. I was fascinated in this research. I talked to a woman named Joanna Berry a number of years ago. She was the director of this counseling center, a very, very large counseling center in Texas. She told me something that was such an "aha" moment.

This counseling center had this incredible reputation. If you are about to get divorced, go there because everybody who goes there doesn't get divorced. I don't know what the actual statistics are, but that was basically the general ethos. It was true. I asked her to tell me her secret. She said, "Every one of my counselors is trained with this method." She said the couple comes in, they're sitting there with their arms crossed. They don't like each other. They're shaking apart.

She does the usual intake and then she said, "Okay, I will take you on as a client—or a counselor here will take you on as a client—but here's what you have to do first. I will not see you, I will not talk to you, and I will not help you until you do this for two weeks. Every night, or some time every day, you need to spend 30 minutes together as friends with no negativity." Every day you have to spend time together just talking as friends. You can set your watch if you want, but you're not allowed to fight for that 30 minutes. At the end of that 30 minutes, if you want to start fighting again, fine. But for 30 minutes every day, you have to spend time together just talking as friends.

You're not comparing kids' schedules, you're not figuring out technical things about why the kitchen sink is broken. You're just catching up as friends. She said by the time that couple comes in for regular counseling, everything else there was just normal marriage counseling. By the time they come in two weeks later, they have become friends again and they can work on what needs to be worked on. They believe the best more of one another, which is another thing that tends to go away when you're in that difficulty. They're much more able then to actually buckle down and work on what needs to happen.

Brian Goins: It gets back to that proximity principle. You have to build it up, make the space, create the time. All four of those obstacles in any marriage are going to be a reality. Busyness, one spouse is gone, competing attentions—everything's screaming at us. It reminded me of when my daughter, Brantley, when she was really young. I would come home from work and I would come in and give Jen a big hug. She would take her little hands and she would go right in between us and she would just pull us apart and go, "Don't forget about me! Don't forget about me!" When she got older, the same thing happened. She's just a lot stronger. Teenagers, it's amazing how they can pull parents apart in all kinds of things whether it's because of sports or emotional drama. There is something always asking and yelling at us, "Don't forget about me." All the while internally our spouse is going, "Have you forgotten about me?"

Let me break in here just a minute. One of the best things that Jen and I do as a couple is that we try to get away at least once a year just as a couple just to work intentionally on our marriage. Like we say, great marriages don't just happen. It takes some intentionality to experience oneness. In a culture where we're moving so fast where we miss each other all the time, the Weekend to Remember is a three-day event where you get to pull the emergency brake up on life and have the conversations that you most need to have but probably aren't having. If you like this, if you like Married With Benefits, let me just say you're going to love Weekend to Remember. It's a great opportunity just to get back on the same page with each other. All right, let's get back into the conversation.

One of my favorite quotes in Shanti's book is from Joanna Berry. She reinforced this idea. She said, "The studies on this have all found the same thing I've seen in my practice. I have never seen a couple who is having problems who is also having quality time. Instead, they are having problems, so they spend less time together in order to avoid the conflict. Then what they think is a solution—avoiding each other—becomes the problem." That is why it's so important that we start prioritizing hanging out, whether that's quantity or quality time, whether it's date nights or if it's just the date coffee. Jen and I have a saying that you've got to calendar your companionship. If it's on the calendar, generally it happens.

It's important just to find your thing. For Jen and I, it's 1 in 7, 1 in 30, 1 in 365. Once a week we try to have a check-in coffee. Now that our kids have gotten older, it's a little bit easier to have that. When you have ankle biters, it's hard to do that and so you've got to find that lunch or find that 20 minutes wherever it might be. That's all it is, 20 minutes maybe where we create the space where Jen just starts unloading things that I didn't hear yesterday or she needed to talk about. 1 in 30 is that fun date night. Then 1 in 365 is once a year we try to do something with just the two of us. That's us. Where do you find your hangout?

Shanti Feldhahn: We do two things. We do the morning coffee and we take advantage of the fact that we are traveling sometimes together to be able to say, "Okay, this is a work trip, but we're going to tack on a day. We're going to a new place, let's tack on a day." This was hard when we had the young, young kids. To be honest, we didn't actually do that because I was already gone from them for two days and I didn't want to be gone from them for three days.

But you can tack on. I came across somebody who was near the ball fields near where we live. There's a Dairy Queen right near the ball fields and there was a soccer practice going on. There's a couple sitting in the Dairy Queen clearly just catching up and they had soccer paraphernalia. I could tell that this was a couple who dropped their 10-year-old off at soccer and since they were paying for that soccer team, they had 45 minutes during the practice and they were going to use it. Tack on.

Brian Goins: Look for the places where you can tack on. What ends up happening is we fill it with other things. We tack on other things and we usually fill it with stuff that is not about our marriage. We're just challenging you: find the space where you can fill it up with something that has to do with your marriage. It goes back to that principle of cleaving. When God said that in Genesis chapter 2, "cleave" is in the present tense. It is an ongoing expectation to continually leave and forsake dependence upon those things that keep you from oneness. Whether it's old parents, whether it's your single way of life, whether it's hobbies, leave those things. It doesn't mean you ignore them. You don't ignore your parents. But you forsake dependence upon them and you cleave. Stick like glue. Sit together at Dairy Queen. That might be sticking together at Dairy Queen. It may be that you do a hobby together. It all comes back to your marriage verse.

Shanti Feldhahn: When we got married, we had all of our marriage invitations printed up with Song of Songs 5:16, which says, "This is my beloved and this is my friend." That's really why we got married. It wasn't to have a spouse, it was to have a lifelong friend. Friendship takes proximity. It takes hanging out.

Brian Goins: Thanks for joining us for this episode. If you enjoy this podcast, please hit like or subscribe. Please leave a review or a comment. It just helps get the word out to more couples so that they can find hope for their own marriage. If you haven't picked up Shanti's book that we're talking about all this season long, *The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages*, you're going to want to get that and maybe grab one to give away. That's really what we're about here at FamilyLife. We want to help you experience oneness so that you can impact your corner of the world. We've got a lot more help and hope for your marriage and family at familylife.com. You can find other articles, podcasts, shows, and small group resources. You'll want to check that out at familylife.com.