Habits for Your Happily Ever After: Relationship Communication Advice

Do you feel tired even when you’re not doing that much?

Last week I introduced you to the distinction between too-much-tired and too-little-tired. Today we’ll talk more about too-little-tired—the exhaustion that comes when you don’t have enough meaning, focus, or purpose in your life. You’ll learn:

1. That when you get clarity on your flavor of exhaustion, you can do a better job with the cure.
2. Why having more time and fewer responsibilities can sometimes leave you feeling even more exhausted.
3. Three things that can help you find your way out of the dark cave of too-little-tired.

Date Night Discussion

I’m inviting you to create space in your calendar to have the following discussion. If you don’t feel tired, ask your sweetheart if they feel tired. If neither you nor your sweetheart feels tired, maybe you would be willing to look around your world and find a person who is tired.

I remember the people who invited me to join them when I was too-little-tired and felt untethered. A movie night at our local community center. An invitation to take yoga. Those invitations, while difficult to accept, invited me back to myself and helped me emerge from my cave.

If, however, you are the one that feels too-little-tired, ask your sweetheart if they would just listen to you for a bit. If you sense that your sweetheart is too-little-tired as well, invite them into the discussion we have today. If you want to use one of my scripts, you'll find them on this blog page. Just scroll down.

Check out the whole 4-part series:

Part 1: Too-Much-Tired | Listen to the episode | Read it on my blog

Part 2: Too-Little-Tired | Listen to the episode | Read it on my blog

Part 3: How to Prioritize (available 10/29/26)

Part 4: How Pleasure Refills You (available 11/5/26)

Want more?

1. Discover why real self care is built on capacity and nourishment

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When you view all flavors of tired the same, it’s difficult to address your symptoms. So how do you distinguish too-much-tired from too-little-tired?

Today we’re discussing too-much-tired—what happens when life drains your reservoir faster than you can fill it. You’ll learn:

1. How to recognize too-much-tired and distinguish it from the emptiness of too-little-tired.
2. How to identify what’s draining your reservoir—and the downstream consequences of running too low.
3. How to find the “river” that can begin filling your reservoir again.

Although we’ll define both types of tired, today’s episode is more heavily focused on too-much tired. Next week we’ll talk more specifically about too-little-tired and in the coming weeks we’ll address ways to cope with both flavors of tired.

Date Night Discussion

I’m inviting you to create space in your calendar to have the following discussion. If you don’t feel tired, ask your partner if they feel tired. If neither you nor your partner feels tired, maybe you would be willing to look around your world and find a person who is tired.

I invite you to pay it forward. After you’ve identified that tired person, ask them if you can watch their kids while they have this discussion with their partner. Or take over dinner. Or a soft scented soap. Be grateful that you are getting the sleep you need and your reservoir is full.

If, however, you are the one that feels tired, ask your partner if they would just listen to you for a bit. If you sense that your partner is tired, ask them the questions included in this episode. You'll find them written down on this page of my blog.

Check out the whole 4-part series:

Part 1: Too-Much-Tired | Listen to the episode | Read it on my blog

Part 2: Too-Little-Tired (available 10/1/26)

Part 3: How to Prioritize (available 10/29/26)

Part 4: How Pleasure Refills You (available 11/5/26)

Want more?

• Next week, I’ll be back with another episode about too-little-tired. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it!
• Until then, try listening to this episode about 3 types of rest to relaunch you.

Connect to Improve Your Relationship Communication

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How does laughter impact your relationship communication?

It comes easily to my son, Logan. It’s his superpower. He was a guest on the 50th episode of this podcast, and today I’m bringing you his episode from the archives. You’ll hear:

1. Logan’s elopement story and the advantages and disadvantages that come with eloping
2. Why laughter is a great choice for your relationship conflict resolution
3. How our pets teach us about unconditional love

Want more?

• Hear more about how humor connects you to your partner in this interview with Chris Duffy
• Could a practical joke save your marriage? Find out in this episode.

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Do you ever use your resentment (or your doubt, or your fear) to write the history of your relationship?

Today, we’re exploring 5 cognitive distortions that feed your Kitchen Sink Voice all the resentment it needs to thrive.

1. I’ll offer you a definition of cognitive distortions and help you see how they’re poisoning your relationship
2. We’ll explore where and why these cognitive distortions arise, so you can head them off at the pass
3. And I’ll help you see how to access curiosity and compassion to turn your relationship around

Complaint > Criticism > Curiosity > Compassion > Connection

This is the path from alienation to happily ever after.

The trick is: don’t believe everything your Kitchen Sink Voice tells you. We’ve all made up stories in our head about our partners.

He forgets the ice cream at the grocery store, and you tell yourself the lie, it’s because he thinks I’m fat.

It’s not that your brain is broken.

Far from it. We all want to fill in any incomplete information with certainty. Psychologists call these patterns cognitive distortions.

In this week’s episode, I walk you through five of the ones I see most often in relationships:

• Mindreading: I know exactly what you’re thinking.
• Catastrophizing: You create the worst-case-scenario.
• All-or-nothing thinking: You always… You never…
• Personalizing: It’s all my fault
• Disqualifying the positive: Nevermind all the clean counters. Look at the one crumb you left behind.

Habit for Your Happily Ever After

This week’s habit for your happily ever after is to notice when you experience the hiccough of a cognitive distortion. But it's not to catch yourself having a cognitive distortion and then beat yourself up.

Instead, the goal is to become curious.

• Am I mindreading and certain I know what my partner is thinking?
• When am I most likely to catastrophize?
• Am I turning “sometimes” into “always” or “never?”
• When am I likely to take responsibility for things that aren’t mine?
• Do I overlook the positive to see what’s still wrong?

When you get curious about your Kitchen Sink Voice, you take away its omniscient and omnipotent power. You expose the wizard behind the curtain.

Date Night Discussion

This week I invite you to find a moment to say to your partner, “The story I’m telling myself is…” This is a great way to introduce your Kitchen Sink Voice to your partner.

Want more?

• Discover another cognitive distortion: compare and despair

Links I Mention

• Explore The Work of Byron Katie
• How to stay in your own business in your relationship

Connect to Improve Your Relationship Communication

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When you got married, did you have a basic outline of what marriage was supposed to look like?

I did. And for a long time, that outline felt like a kind of safety net.

But eventually, a safety net can become a cage.

What if the goal isn’t to get marriage RIGHT, but rather to stay engaged with what your marriage is becoming? To keep discovering who you are becoming and who your sweetheart is becoming.

To notice when the old agreement no longer fits and get curious about what might fit now?

Ramona asks a question in her newest book: Where is the energy? What is alive here now?

That question can change everything.

Instead of: you were supposed to…

Try:

• What is exciting to each of us now?
• What’s most intriguing to me now?
• How can we make room for what’s true for both of us?

After decades of marriage, questions like these led me to see that every struggle, every change, every surprise, every ordinary Tuesday morning became part of our shared story.

Has your marriage become something you couldn’t possibly have outlined in the beginning? Maybe that’s the point.

Your happily ever after isn’t a destination. It’s your willingness to keep discovering the relationship you’re actually in.

This is one of the ideas I loved most when I got to talk with writer Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal, No One Is Here Except All of Us, and her newest book: Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading From the Blank Page to the Last Page.

Connect with my guest

Visit Ramona's website here.

Connect on social media here.

Want more?

• Listen to Ramona Ausubel’s interview on the Emerging Form Podcast. If you enjoy that, Christie Aschwanden and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer also interviewed me on the same show.

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Do you have a place where you rehearse how dreadful your partner is?

For me it was the kitchen sink. I stood at that sink and this was my litany while I washed dishes. “Here I am. Alone again. Cinderella. I’m the only one who cleans this kitchen.”

We all do it, right? Poor me. My life sucks. Everyone else has it better.

And we want to blame someone for our sucky life.

If you are like me and everyone else I know, the easiest person to blame is your partner.

Today we’ll focus on those moments you’re likely to be critical of your partner.

1. We’ll discuss how your Kitchen Sink Voice turns an ordinary complaint into a courtroom where your partner is always the defendant.
2. We’ll address how curiosity can interrupt the blame-shame cycle you might have when criticism shows up and how curiosity can allow you to discover what you’re actually feeling in your body which wakes up your compassion—for yourself and your partner.
3. These three C’s—criticism > curiosity > and compassion can become a practice for you to transform the way you think, and thus the way you connect to your partner.

Habit for Your Happily Ever After

This week’s habit for your happily ever after is to identify where your Kitchen Sink Voice lives. We all have one. When you can find your Kitchen Sink Voice, you’re able to begin to practice with the 3 C’s: criticism > curiosity > compassion.

Date Night Discussion

• Tell your partner about your Kitchen Sink Voice.
• Ask your partner if they have a Kitchen Sink Voice.
• If you were able to find your equivalent for my Brown Grass Voice, how would the story change?

Want more?

• The single most important habit for your marriage

Links I Mention

• The Lizard Brain

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What happens when you feel your feelings?

You don’t get stuck. You don’t get stuck in bitterness, resentment, shame, or a host of other negative places where I see people stall out or begin to push their partner away.

Today I talk to the mother of Nicholas Rizzo who died of an opioid overdose. I wanted you to hear from Katie Rizzo, Nicholas’s mother so you can have a deeper understanding of the family life of an addict.

• Katie reminds us that addiction is a family disease: The whole family suffers.
• I wanted you to hear how Katie is gentle with herself, her husband, and her two surviving sons, Max and Joey.
• Because you’ll never regret choosing love.

Connect with Katie Rizzo

Katie Rizzo has a new book coming in October: The Trimesters of Grief. You can preorder her book here.

Note: Today's episode is much longer than my typical episodes. But, for understandable reasons, the topic needed the extra time. I wanted to include you in the entire conversation I had with Katie.

Want more like this?

Have you heard this interview with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer? Her son died by suicide. Rosemerry and I know each other well. She offers another way to choose love in the midst of the most difficult circumstances.

Are you dealing with grief right now? Here is an episode that offers 2 practical tools I've used in my own life and I've offered to my clients.

Connect to Improve Your Relationship Communication

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Today I talk to Rick and Clancy Denton who are relatively new to the empty nest phase of life and have some great ideas to offer much younger couples to keep your relationship fresh and vital.

1. You’ll hear how your identity can change through the lifetime of your marriage, and how that will impact your relationship
2. You’ll hear why Rick believes that a happier couple makes for happier parenting
3. And we’ll offer you a habit to create your own relationship Olympics

Date Night Discussion

Inspired by watching the summer Olympics of 2024, my guests, Rick and Clancy Denton, decided to create their own events, participate, and judge themselves on a variety of events.

If you and your sweetheart were to create The Relationship Olympics for your relationship, what events would you want to have? What events would you and your sweetheart medal in?

Connect with Rick and Clancy Denton

With their two young adult kids out of the house, Rick and Clancy Denton are empty nesters and they’re embracing life as a couple again. They have a brand new book available: The Loud Quiet: Love, Laughter and Life in the Empty Nest. Rick and Clancy also host a podcast: The Loud Quiet.

Want more?

• Read or listen to How to Make a New Friend as an Adult

Connect to Improve Your Relationship Communication

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Ever notice how easy it is to put yourself at the bottom of your own list?

• You tell yourself you'll rest when the laundry is done.
• You'll pursue that hobby when the kids are older.
• You'll make your doctor's appointment after everyone else's needs are met.

Little by little, you disappear.

Not because anyone asked you to, but because somewhere along the way, your domestic productivity became tangled up with your worth. Your ability to feed everyone, keep things clean, and the trains running on time ran right over you. The YOU inside your days disappears in a mountain of to-do's.

Today my guest is Monica Packer, author of the soon-to-be-released book Sticky Habits: A Woman’s Guide to Reclaim Happiness, Ditch Perfectionism, and Create Habits that Last.

I'm so thrilled to bring you this conversation with Monica, because you're going to hear about how she tries to avoid martyrdom, feeling invisible, and overwhelmed in her home by focusing on progress rather than perfection.

Connect with my guest

Monica Packer is the mother of 5 children and the author of the soon-to-be-released book Sticky Habits: A Woman’s Guide to Reclaim Happiness, Ditch Perfectionism, and Create Habits that Last. She is also the host of the top-rated podcast About Progress.

Connect to Improve Your Relationship Communication

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How do you take a vacation that sparks tons of joy?

Today we’re talking about vacations and my 3-part framework: Partner, Lover, Friend.

• We’ll focus on The Lover in your relationship and how to increase connection by playing more and maximizing your fun
• We’ll talk about the unique quality of The Lover: Focus on yourself and what you want
• And I’ll give you 4 questions to discover the secret formula to play more while you’re on vacation.

Date Night Discussion

Here’s 4 questions to discuss as Lovers who vacation together:

• When am I likely to be resentful of your happiness and what do I need to do to stay in my own business and make myself happy?
• When am I likely to have no opinion of my own and rely on you to make me happy?
• When am I likely to get lost in my own happiness and leave all the responsibility for details in your lap? And how can I get ahead of that?
• When have I made the best of a bad situation in the past and how can I harvest that energy to do it again?

Want more?

• Do you remember my number one rule for your happily ever after? Stay in your own business.

Connect to Improve Your Relationship Communication

Visit the show notes.

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Please subscribe to my newsletter here. This unlocks personal invitations from me only available to my subscribers.

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Reach me at 970-210-4480