Personal Life Slacking

Mr W and I have this phrase personal life slacking. It very much means exactly what it says. We are slacking on our personal lives.

Now I don't mean slacking on our relationship, although our goal of bi-monthly dates sometimes looks like devouring a season of How I Met Your Mother on Netflix [in preparation for the final season starting this Sept!] while I make homemade pizza. I mean we are slacking on the [gestures hands] general area of social life outside of work life.

In risk of sounding melodramatic, if we're not at work, we seem to be recovering from work.  I realize I must be very careful to talk about this because both Josh and I think we have been blessed with slightly greater than average awesome jobs. I wont go into specifics other than a sampling of evidence..

As you can see there are plenty of reasons to spend extra time at work. And if Mr W and I were both single instead of married, it'd probably be a huge perk to us. However, we are awesomely married to each other and don't appreciate repetitive evenings spent at home, alone without our companion when we work at companies located in our neighborhood.  Thank The Lord for short commutes!

California Silicon Valley is so weird in a way in that work appears so awesome that we feel ready to give it all of ourselves. I'm not being melodramatic here, neither of us can recall a big-person job we honestly looked forward to almost every day. If we said so previously, it was because we had yet to be enlightened. 

Our jobs can tempt us pretty hard to spend just a little extra time at work instead of home.  There is a huge problem with this though, we give our best selves to our coworkers instead of to each other. Some days [trying to make this less often but I still totally fail] I am completely spent from having used up all of my social-ness on people at the gym.  On those days I can't listen to Mr W. tell me about his work, successes and anxieties. That is when my patience is drier than the Mojave desert and I'm totally not giving him the fresh-and-able-to-listen-and-respond-wife that I am called to be. Now this doesn't mean Mr W. is a saint; he has his days too but I am not about airing his dirty laundry.  However, mine is fair game.

So I've cut back on my hours at the gym, though I do love what working there does for my inner-child extrovert self. Mr W. has made our [mini] vacations a priority on his calendar. Some morning coffees he spends with me instead of pouring over his inbox. We set two alarms for church on Sundays because we STRUGGLE to get going on the weekends. No plans get made for Sunday afternoon so we can freely chat over lunch. I have made more friends with wifes of Mr W's co-worker's. Mr W and I make time each week for each other that is non-negotiable. However, on the occasion that a once in a lifetime opportunity comes up [funny these come up way more often since we moved out of the Midwest] I totally encourage Mr W to prioritize for it. Usually it means way more hours away from me and our home but I know this is temporary.  Notice I said prioritize, which means we try to ascribe to the whole emotional bank account. Meaning deposit before you over withdraw. Took us a lot of IOU's to figure out we didn't yet truly understand that system.

Living in California has completely strengthened our marriage because it's thrown so many 'nice things' at it that sometimes it feels too easy to be distracted by something new and shiny. But --we've also got a loooooot of work ahead of us!

slack no more

-Mrs W