Allow me to back up a little. Years ago my husband and I read a book called, Intimacy by Douglas Weiss (which is a great marriage book, by the way). In that book, the author suggested doing a daily exercise of practicing three important things. Gary and I decided to remember the three suggested things with the acrostic P.E.A.

P – Pray together

E – share an Emotion

A – Affirm one another

We jokingly would tell people that we need to “pea” on each other daily. Icky imagery, I know, but that’s the kind of sick humor that connects me and my man! ha! Oh, and yes, I know that I’m spelling it “pea” like the vegetable when we were saying it like the act of relieving ourselves! But either way, it gave us a good laugh and was a perfect reminder!

Unfortunately, we got away from that specific daily practice. However, just recently, if you’ve read my post from May on praying together, my husband and I began to pray together daily again. And I must report that we are still going strong on that one! Yay! But we want to incorporate more positive connection points in our marriage and I believe that affirming one another daily is another way to add that “spark” that we all long for in our marriages.

Gary and I typically pray together at the start of our day, but I think that a natural time to affirm one another is at the end of the day. And we don’t want to just limit ourselves to affirming positive tasks that we’ve accomplished or done well during that day. For example, I appreciate being affirmed for more personal aspects like how I’ve positively interacted with Gary or how I’ve handled a difficult relational challenge, rather than for fixing a nice dinner. Although that’s nice too!

It might seem that scheduling an affirmation is far from romantic. But I’ve found that married life, especially with kids and jobs, can get so crazy and the first thing to go is simply noticing the positive qualities in our mates. But if you consistently interject affirmations into your day, given time I can almost guarantee that you and your spouse will feel more of a romantic spark than you’ve felt in a very long time!