Healthy Relationships...

What do you do to keep your relationship healthy during the stress of pre-med, med school, residency, fellowship and beyond?

Thomas and I have done a few things over the years that have helped us:



We never go to bed angry. This is really helpful. Disagreements don't drag on for days, and we are able to work things out as they happen.



We tell each other how proud we are of the other....I am truly proud of my husband and his accomplishments. Sometimes it is easy for us to get side-tracked by the stress, and so it is nice to just "out of the blue" tell each other how "great" we think the other person is !



Yesterday, my husband called me just to tell me that he had looked through my copy of my thesis that was on the table and that he was so proud of me that I had managed to do this....it literally brought tears to my eyes...it really is nice to be on the receiving end sometimes too



Well, I thought maybe I'd get the ball rolling. I would love to hear some of the things that you all do that help you cope and feel good in your marriage!



Kris

2 things primarily come to mind:



1)We set aside time to talk. Sometimes it is at home, sometimes out to a restaurant, sometimes we go out for a long drive. We try to do this each night, with more sucess some nights than others. We eat dinner together most every night, which is a good "talk time" for us.



2) We take vacations. We kind of screwed up on this one & underestimated it's importance. From the time he started medical school until the 3rd quarter of his second year, the only trips we took involved going home to see family. As wonderful as seeing family is, it gave us no time to ourselves. We finally took a trip to Orlando in March over his spring break. We went pretty inexpensively, but had a wonderful time lounging, talking, seeing the sights- whatever struck our fancy at that moment. We have now promised ourselves that we will not wait that long again unless it is completely unavoidable.



Wendy