Rituals, Roles, and Goals: Creating Shared Meaning

Welcome to the top floor of your sound relationship house! This floor is a fun one and has the opportunity for big payoff.

Do you know those couples who seem to have their own language shorthand?

What about those that protect their time because Friday night is pizza and board games for their relationship?

Or those that just seem really in sync with one another?

Rituals, roles, goals, and symbols all create shared meaning and definitely contribute to all of the above.

Think of couples who decide early in their relationship that they have “their song”. So much meaning gets put into that song and the playing of that song can take you back to a place and time and helps to smooth over bumps in the road. It’s a reminder of your love and what you want from your relationship.

I often encourage couples to have a variety of rituals. Some of them maybe happen once a year (like the way that they celebrate their anniversary or birthdays), and some of them may happen daily and everywhere in between. It creates connection and is a predictable moment of coming back together.

In my house, since the pandemic started, my husband and I close out the work week on Fridays by closing out laptops, putting on our spotify duo playlist (thanks for joining our musical tastes spotify!), putting our phones to the side, making a fun cocktail, and playing a best of five series of backgammon. It lasts about an hour or two (depending on how ruthless our backgammon games are!) and is a time that we know we’re going to come back together no matter how bizarre the week was or how busy we ended up and we know that we’re going to have each others’ undivided attention and we’re going to have fun. Our playlist also supports our love maps as we’re both reasonably nostalgic music listeners so most of the songs have a pre-our relationship memory attached to them that we like to share; sometimes we both have them for the same song.  It has become an awesome weekly ritual that we both want to continue post-pandemic.

It’s also important that you have daily rituals of connection. These may be smaller. These may be a shared coffee in the morning and a quick conversation as your heads hit the pillow.

What’s important is that these serve to make connection a rooted habit and keep you both bound to the relationship and to one another.

If your relationship is newer, or you’re finding that you never developed these rituals, goals or symbols, Zach Brittle, LMHC suggests asking one another the following questions:

What does “home” mean?
What does “sex” mean?
What does “money” mean?
What does “play” mean?

These questions unlock broader thoughts, feelings, goals, and concepts. You may find that you already have aligned views and feelings about these concepts and can use that to develop larger goals and rituals.

Life is going to happen. You’re going to face storms in your marriage. Shared meaning, goals, rituals, and signposts can help you weather the storm. It can keep your team strong. They can buoy you and help you realize that together, you can handle anything.