Your Marriage Needs More AWE: Affection, Warmth, and Encouragement 💖

If you want a good foundation in your marriage for those problem-solving, conflict-solving, tension-resolving conversations, you need to build rapport and connection first with AWE:

Affection

Warmth 

Encouragement

This concept is developed in Jim Burns' book Creating and Intimate Marriage: Rekindle Romance through Affection, Warmth, and Encouragement.

In this episode, you'll learn examples for how to pour in more AWE in your marriage with affirmation and gratitude, non-sexual touch, and rooting for each other.

If you want to learn more little things you can do with great love to build up your marriage, check out the Little Way of Marriage, the free online Catholic workshop Sarah and Nathan Bartel created for their CanaFeast ministry. 

Find it at www.littlewayofmarriage.com. 🌹

🌸 free online Catholic marriage workshop: the Little Way of Marriage 

Learn how to do little marriage-building skills with great love, inspired by St. Thérèse, the Little Flower, and her holy parents, Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin!

Transcript

0:48

how can you bring more warmth into your marriage? I'm going to share an idea in this short episode about how to bring more positivity into your marriage so that you have a firmer foundation for just getting through daily life without it feeling quite so burdensome. In your marriage and your your life together. And then how to strengthen your emotional connection in a more positive way so that you have a good foundation for having conflict, resolving problem solving, tension solving conversations, because you can have the exact same problem solving, tension solving, conflict conversation. Without a foundation of warmth and positivity in your marriage, and it is not gonna be as effective as if you have that exact same conversation, but from a backdrop. Of already feeling good connected, like you're on the same team. So you wanna put this good stuff in first. These are the deposits into the emotional bank account of your marriage that you want to be putting in. This will help you, like I said, with your resolving problems, being able to figure out how to solve conflicts, but also for, great love making, you know, it's going to be better if you have more positive emotional connection. And then this is going to make your household feel warmer. So any kids in your home are gonna feel that and be blessed by it. And they will be more at peace and able to thrive better if there's not those crackles of tension that just inevitably set in when we forget to put in the good stuff. So what is the good stuff? It's awe. That is an acronym for affection. Warmth and encouragement, and I am taking that from Jim Burns book, creating An Intimate Marriage, which I highly recommend. He is a, evangelical Protestant author. He is a speaker, and this book comes from a while ago, but it has a lot of good advice in it. So if you want a book. To help you flesh out more examples, I highly recommend it creating an intimate Marriage, rekindle romance through affection, warmth, and Encouragement by Jim Burns and Steven Arter Burn published in 2007. So let's look at these letters. Ah, affection, warmth, and encouragement. Let's talk about affection first. How can you put in more affection into your marriage? This looks like. Gratitude and affirmation. Something my husband, Nathan and I like to teach couples to lean into to create more warmth and positivity. Can also look like good non-sexual, physical touch. And it can also be remembering what it is you love about each other. Feeling dear to each other. Little gestures of thoughtfulness. Those all increase affection. So affirmation and gratitude. Wow, honey, you are so great at that. I really love how you handled that., You're looking handsome today. That shirt looks good on you. Thanks for taking out the trash. Thank you for working so hard for us. Thank you for going to church with us and, you know, being an example of faith to our kids, the things that you take for granted. Say them. Speak them out loud. Speak about what you're thankful for. I encourage you ladies who are married, look for five to 10 things a day that you are grateful for, that your husband does, or that you appreciate about him. And at least speak some of them, even if you don't speak all of them, just creating this list in your mind is going to help you feel more affectionate towards your husband, and that's going to shape your thoughts and your words and your actions. So can you do that? Can you list 10 things a day that you really appreciate about your husband? I mean, hopefully you appreciate a lot about him. You chose him to marry, right? So there must be things about him that you think are good. What are they? So. Leaning into the affirmation and gratitude helps build affection. And I also mentioned non-sexual touch. What does this look like? I think this is really important in marriage and it often gets overlooked. Sometimes wives will say, I'm just afraid to touch him at all, because then I think he's expecting something. I don't wanna give him the wrong idea. Or I don't wanna feel like, I've touched him. So now he thinks that we're gonna have sex tonight. If that is a thought in your mind, then you need to have a conversation with your husband about how can you make it safe for you to feel like it's okay to touch him, You know, a kiss is not a contract. You're not bound to have sex that day because you need to have room in this in your marriage. Even if touch is not your top love language, even if you don't really love touch, there have got to be some ways that you can find that you can have some good non-sexual touch in relationship. What are some examples? Walking by him and you, you pat his back as you're walking by. You just lay your hand on his should. As you're walking by, lay hand on his forearm. You, can give a hug, maybe not a front to front hug if you feel like or he communicates to you that that's too arousing for him to manage and, that might put him in mind of making love and that was not your intention. But I hope that you can also, find other ways to touch holding hands sitting next to each other on the couch. Your arms are touching, maybe leaning your head on his shoulder. maybe a shoulder rub, a neck rub, a foot rub. Maybe ask him to touch you. Maybe you don't really love touch in general, but you could ask him for a foot rub or a back rub if you have some tension knots there. So just look for ways to increase touch that can be part of increasing affection. These little things can make a difference. Just reaching out for holding hands, for example, that can really make a difference with feeling more affection. Okay. How about warmth? What are we talking about when we talk about intentionally increasing warmth in your marriage? This is kindness. This is eye contact. This is smiles. Eye contact is an endangered species now that we've got our smartphones and devices in front of our eyeballs so much of the time. But can you put down your phone when he comes into the room and look up at him and smile? Can you really make sure to look at him when you're talking with each other and then add a smile in so it doesn't feel so like, like a glare. You don't want your eye contact to be a glare or a threat,? But some warmth into it with kind with a smile and you know, a kind expression. So more warmth and then encouragement. What does encouragement look like? It looks like saying, I see your efforts. You really tackled that. I know you'll get there if you keep at it. I know that's hard, but I see you doing that, and you're doing great. You know, and you can add some gratitude in there too. Thank you so much for handling that for us, but encouragement, really it's like fertilizer for our relationship. When you can encourage each other, you can ask for encouragement also. And don't expect, he will read your mind and automatically give it to you. You can ask with words. You can say, I am feeling pretty down about organizing the school auction. Can you please encourage me? And you know, he can rise to the challenge and be like, oh honey, you've got this. I see how you're organizing and delegating and you've run the auction before. And it was great. And. I know it's hard, but you are the woman for the job.. You got a lot of strength to bring to this. So encouragement. As you can see, these do cross over into each other a bit. Let's not stress about keeping everything tling in its own category, but really thinking about how can you encourage your husband? How can you invite him to encourage you? And that will really help bring more awe into your marriage. More affection, warmth, and encouragement If you would like some more. Tips on how you can do little things to bring more positivity into your marriage, more connection. I encourage you to check out the little way of marriage workshop that my husband Nathan and I have created and put available out there for you for free. We lean into st. There's. Idea of the little way by showing you how you can do little things with great love in your marriage. And we also look at examples from her holy saintly parents, saints, Louis and Zalie Marta,, to inspire you for how to add more, more warmth, more joy, more connection into your marriage. I hope that's helpful for you. Hope you can look for ways to live the joy of love today. See you in the next episode.