Twenty minutes on a Sunday

A few people wrote to me after the post in June asking what we actually changed afterwards, which I thought was a generous way of asking whether any of it stuck.

Not much changed. This is the one thing.

On Sunday mornings we take our coffee out to the back step and sit there for twenty minutes before anything else is allowed to happen. No phones. That is the entire rule, and it is the only rule, and I want to be clear that we did not decide it in some big conversation. It happened once by accident in the middle of June and then Rob did it again the next week without being asked, and now it is a thing we do.

I had it in my head that we were going to have to do something enormous. Counselling maybe, or one of those weekend retreats where you hold hands with strangers. What has actually worked is twenty minutes on a concrete step with a dog who cannot understand why nobody is throwing anything.

I think the reason it works is that nothing is required of either of us. We are not sitting there to talk about the marriage. Most Sundays we barely talk at all. Last week we spent the whole twenty minutes on whether the neighbour is going to take that tree down before it comes through our fence. But there is something about being out there with nowhere else to be that means when one of us does have a real thing to say, there is a place to put it. Whereas if you try to say a real thing in a kitchen at seven in the morning it just gets run over.

Emma called last Sunday in the middle of it and I let it go to voicemail, which I want on the record, because in twenty-three years I have never once let that girl go to voicemail.

Anyway. If you are looking for a place to start and the big version feels like too much, this cost us nothing and took twenty minutes. It is also considerably easier in July than it is going to be in January and I am already aware of that.

Michelle