Girl Boss Tips

Our Relationship Framework And Tips

Sharing today a glimpse into my marriage a bit….Whew…where do I even begin?!  With there being MANY topics with marriage I will make this a Series, and this is the first installment! Today I wanted to just share about us, you see us so much but really don’t know how we came to be! There is so many avenues I can go regarding our marriage and being business partners.  I will first lead with a quick background on us.  We met in college, Rick is 5 years older than me,  and we instantly hit it off.  Little did my naive self know what I was getting myself into.  Our relationship was rocky from jump.  Then to make matters even more interesting Cameron came along.  We attempted to play house, and God instantly shut that down, and told our butts to go to separate corners find yourself and figure out if that is where you needed to be.

Quick Lesson Learned: So often women get so wrapped in the how you want your life to look that you force situations to happen.  I did this during that time period. We had a child and I wanted a life together, but sometimes your fairytale is not how you think it should be.  Listen and hear the direction God is calling you to go, EVEN if that means making some painful decision.

We separated, grew, raised an awesome son, learned how to co-parent, and kept living our life.  Oh and we also went through counseling.  We knew that if we wanted to restore our relationship and have a healthy environment for Cameron it was much needed.  After taking some years apart we reconnected, and came back together. Shortly there after we were married.

While our story is nothing close to being a fairytale it is one that I always say displays forgiveness and restoration.

One of the biggest aspects we had to identify and be honest with ourselves is we had built our relationship on the wrong foundation, so no matter how much we tried to make it work early on we only could take our relationship so far.  With that, we had to rebuild from the ground up.  Starting first with allowing God to lay the framework for our relationship.

Fast forward to today…our marriage is stronger than ever, and our life in general is thriving.

Dating one another: We regularly go on dates.  I can’t stress this enough, that you MUST date your spouse! If you want your relationship to keep thriving you have to date each other.  Now that we work together so much in business this has been even more necessary.  It is easy to be working together as business partners then going in mommy/daddy mode.  Date night allows us to turn of the work and not talk about our children and just be Rick & Taryn that are best friends.

Quick Tip: Dating is important but traveling is just as important.  Rick and I didn’t really start traveling until 5-6 years ago, because we always thought it was too expensive.  Once we started we got the bug.  It is so important to getaway and experience new adventures together.

Safeguard our marriage: We learned this at a couples conference and it has been so valuable for our marriage.  We put up safeguards in our marriage.  Depending on areas of caution based on your particular marriage it will vary per couple.  An easy safeguard we have is, we know all of our passwords.  Heck half the time Rick is typing my passwords in for various things. It keeps an open line of communication and prevents any area of doubt.   There are certain words or phrases that we lock out of our marriage that could trigger escalation.  Financial safeguards of we don’t make a purchase over a certain amount without one another being on board.  Safeguards can apply to so many areas.   For us they protect our marriage from facing unnecessary turmoil.  Now this doesn’t mean we don’t face hard times, but it keeps it very few and far between.

Keep friends that will keep you in check: This is so real!  You need accountability partners from other people that have similar values as you, that you trust, and will not be a YES person. Marriage is tough and sometimes it will cause you to lose it a bit, and that’s when you need to bring your accountability person in to snap you back to reality.  Because we all know sometime our emotions will bring us far from reality. We each have a friend that we can call in these circumstances.

Couple’s bible study: When we joined the church we are members of we went to a Marriage bootcamp.  One of the things we learned from that was to do bible study together.  This for us is crucial, because nothing is more important to grow closer to Christ individually, and as a unit.  Let me tell you with what you face in marriage, if it wasn’t for God himself….man I do not know where we would be!

Put each other’s needs first:  Sounds easy right?! HA! It definitely is not! And well…we don’t get this right every time.  However, the moment we made this the goal, our actions started changing.  Arguments decrease.

Family business meetings:  I have shared about this a ton, so I apologize if you’ve heard this from me before.  However, I do always want to stress it.  Family business meetings are a meeting where we come together to discuss the operations of our life.  Finances, scheduling, etc.  Basically all the not so fun stuff about marriage. It allows to give each person the heads up that serious business is being talked about.  Also allows us not to have operations things fall through the cracks because we are avoiding talking about it.  This is probably the biggest game changer in our marriage. It decreased SO MANY arguments! And kept our marriage thriving and taking care of business.

Don’t Sweat the small stuff: Life is to short, my spouse isn’t perfect, and more importantly neither am I.  With that mindset we try to give grace whenever possible.  Not nag and nit pick. And allow each other to make mistakes.  We rarely argue, and lot of the reason for that is we don’t sweat the small stuff.  Of course we work each others nerves….but that will happen in marriage.

Those were just a few major things that give our marriage the framework it is has, along with things we follow that help us on this journey.  Our marriage is not perfect, there are areas that we need to improve upon.  However, we are committed and we fight daily for this marriage and daily we put in effort to keep our marriage growing.

Hope you enjoyed learning a bit more about us, and make sure to be on the look out for the next installment!

Side Note:  One of the biggest questions I get asked is about the details of our room.  Click any of the pictures below to view our mast bedroom details.