Anniversary: Annual Marriage Performance Review

Hi, everybody! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel, and in today’s video I’ll share our new anniversary ritual – the annual state of the marriage OR our annual marriage performance review.

My husband and I just celebrated our 20th year anniversary.  We are not big gift givers.  Nor are we people who have extensive rituals for anniversaries. March is a great getaway month, so we used to travel for anniversaries, but the arrival of children 16 years ago put an end to that.

This year we tried something a little different than usual. But one that I think will become a part of our anniversary every year. We did a state of our union evaluation.  OK — I know this sounds a little clinical and therapeutic. But why is it that marriage is the one part of our lives where we don’t devote energy to regular review and fine-tuning?  After all, we take our cars into the shop for regular maintenance, we have annual performance reviews for our job performance, and we take our kids and our pets to the doctor once a year to make sure everything is working properly. Why don’t we do this with our marriages?

Anyone who has been married as long as we have knows that marriages take effort to maintain. We are at a stage of our lives with teenagers where evenings and weekends are hectic with activities. Like many couples at this stage, much of our interaction concerns logistics.  Who is taking which kid where and how are we getting everyone fed? That is like 80% of our conversations.  This is a fact of life, but we both understand that it is important to make time for connection and, I would contend, to regularly pop open the hood to make sure the marriage is running properly.

Because this was our 20th, we planned a night away, but you could easily do this over a nice celebration meal. I went looking for a questionnaire that would fit my needs, so I didn’t have to create one myself. I figured if I created it, it would be skewed towards the things that I find important, and therefore unfairly biased. Luckily, I found lots of options online. We chose to use a questionnaire posted on the Wall Street Journal, but I will provide links to a couple of others if that one isn’t your cup of tea.

One quick note - it’s important to check your motivations before doing something like this. If you are going into this trying to change your spouse, it’s not going to go well.  My intentions were more about maintaining my own positive feelings, reminding us of our fortune, and determining what I could do better as a spouse and marital partner. 

Here’s how we conducted this: before dinner, we both got a glass of wine and filled out the performance review on our own.  It took maybe 20 minutes. Then we reconvened, and shared our answers. My husband, who good naturedly, but skeptically goes along with most of my half-baked ideas, actually enjoyed this assessment. Enough that he independently told a couple friends about it. Here’s what we liked:

• Short - It’s only six questions.  This is very important to my husband, who thinks that every movie is about 40 minutes too long.
• Positive - the questions start with something positive and end with something positive. As I said, the point of this is not beat your spouse up about all the stuff that annoys you. You want to have a positive interaction. Half the reason that I went looking for this, was interest in viewing our relationship less from a scarcity standpoint and more from a perspective of gratitude.
• Strengths - just like with an employment performance review, this evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of your marriage.  I think it does a pretty good job of covering the most important areas. For strengths you have: friendship, commitment, communication, fun, and partnership. For weaknesses there are: quality time, communication, sex, money, and work stress. 
• Measurable Objectives - this is perhaps my favorite part. Each partner has to come up with one thing that you can improve as a couple.  And it has to be measurable.  To me, that means something tangible. So for example, you can’t just say we need to talk more. Instead, a tangible goal would be we need to have a date night in order to talk more once every two weeks.  Or if that is too a ambitious, just scheduling 2 hours of together time every 2 weeks.  I’ll tell you the two extremely specific goals that my husband and I came up with. Mine is that we watch two hours of movies or TV per week together – my husband has a tendency to fall asleep really early.  His was for me to make one meal of comfort food per week — I have a tendency to make lots of controversial food that promotes conflict around the dinner table. These are obviously very measurable ways to improve things of concern to each of us. And finally,
• Review Date - Just as in a performance review, you set a date to review whether or not you are achieving your objectives. We are going to meet again to discuss quarterly. It will be a short discussion, but will help us to renew our commitment towards meeting our marital objectives.

We already have pretty solid marriage — but show me one marriage that couldn’t stand some improvement.  It occurred to me that if your marriage is shakier, this could end badly. So, perhaps let it end badly!  If you are interested in improving your marriage, feedback from your spouse is extremely important.  That might be an indication that it is time to think about seeing a marriage counselor.  This is arguably the most important relationship in your life — doing whatever you can to improve it is a smart investment in your mental health and that of your family’s.

Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!

• WSJ Rate Your Marriage: http://www.wsj.com/media/2015-marriage-review2.pdf
• Take the Marriage Assessment: https://www.focusonthefamily.com/marriage/promos/focus-on-marriage-assessment
• Power of 2 (scroll down to bottom for free quiz): https://www.poweroftwomarriage.com/