Last week Maya and I were on our honeymoon in Mexico.
Eight days, no baby. Just miles of the Caribbean Sea, sand, palm trees, and tequila.
February had been a doozie for both of us at work — her company going through an acquisition and my speaking and consulting business taking me all around the country.
We were looking forward to some time to rest, relax, and reset.
And more importantly, we were looking for some time to focus on our relationship and connection. For the past month, we’d felt like two ships passing in the night, so we welcomed some free time together.
But it wasn’t as easy as we hoped it would be.
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Neither of us had had this long of a break in a while, especially one without our daughter.
And both of us found ourselves starting to slip back into our routines of responding to Slack messages, composing emails, and burying our faces back in our businesses.
That can be a slippery slope, and a dangerous one, I’ve found.
When I feel that start to happen, I’m always reminded of a quote I read (It’s probably from Brené Brown, but I haven’t confirmed that).
It said, in reference to strengthening or maintaining our relationships, “we should approach each moment as an opportunity for disconnection or deeper connection.”
That doesn’t mean that we have to always work on our relationship — sometimes our alone time is vital. But what will happen over the long term will be a cumulative effect from all those little moments, either missed or maximized.
What that means is, if every time we have an opportunity to establish a deeper connection, we neglect it, it adds to the gap between us. We get a teeny bit further apart.
That gap will widen over time.
One of my favorite examples of how Maya and I do this — and it’s a perfectly small one — is by a little end-of-the-day tradition we have of exchanging photos.
While lying on the bed or couch and either winding down with a TV show or social media time, we like to recap our days through our pictures.
We both document our experiences through photos like most Millennials (and, well, everyone else these days). But because we have different perspectives, the photo journey is completely different depending on whose phone we see.
So we trade phones to scroll through each other’s camera rolls and view the day’s memories from the other person’s eyes.
This is typically to make sure one of us doesn’t miss a single super cute picture of our daughter, but on this trip, it was a wonderful way to see our experience from another angle.
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Often we ran across better pictures of something that we also loved (a certain palm tree, a food item, or an angle of the Mayan ruins we didn’t have). Sometimes we’d see candid photos of ourselves taken by the other person that we weren’t even aware of (In that environment, it was hard not to look good).
We’d select all the photos we wanted from the other person’s camera roll and then Airdrop them to each other.
Then, we’d wait anxiously to see how the other one painted the picture of our day when posting them on Instagram Stories.
We’d laugh at certain things each other highlighted and feel loved when we showed off each other in our Stories.
In those moments, and in a social media world where we can often get lost in our own lives, we found a way to deepen our connection.
It was small, and maybe even silly to some, but it’s those small wins that keep us connected over the long term. Each moment is a chance to deepen a connection.
We just need to take advantage of them.
Rain Bennett is a two-time Emmy-nominated filmmaker, writer, and competitive storyteller with over a decade of experience producing documentary films that focus on health and wellness. His mission is simple: to make the world happier and healthier by sharing stories of change.
You can read the rest of “Right as Rain” here, and check back every Wednesday on Chapelboro for a new column!
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