Reconnect in the empty nest with couple rituals

“I’m afraid of being an empty nester! I forget what my husband and I used to do or talk about!” Sound like you? Here’s how couple rituals can help you reconnect in the empty nest.

Show notes

In this episode of Midlife Spotlight, Kate and Sara delve into the significant topic of reconnecting as a couple during the empty nest phase of life and suggest that rituals can play a pivotal role in fostering closeness, purpose, and meaning.

We explore various types of rituals that couples can integrate into their lives.

These include couple time rituals, which are planned activities like date nights.

Next are celebration rituals, centered around commemorating special occasions such as anniversaries or achieving personal milestones.

Daily routines and tasks, like the simple act of going to bed at the same time or having shared coffee routines, also help in nurturing the bond between partners.

Expressions of intimacy rituals focus on showcasing affection, encompassing actions like greetings, goodbyes, or even casual touches throughout the day.

Lastly, communication rituals emphasize the unique communication styles couples develop, including their private jokes and secret signals.

See how you can use rituals to rekindle your connection with ideas like setting regular date nights, having daily check-ins via calls or texts, or establishing specific times of the day to catch up. 

The empty nest phase, contrary to many fears, can be a time of exciting rediscovery and deepening connection for couples. We hope you enjoy it!

Transcript

Kate: Welcome to the Midlife Spotlight podcast. I’m Kate Campion –

Sara: and I’m Sara Garska –

Kate: and we’re certified life coaches obsessed with helping you find joy in this next act of your life. Whether it’s reviving your midlife marriage, losing weight, or scratching that “what next” itch, we’re here to share our experience and expertise with you.

This podcast is a weekly dose of YOU time, where you get the tools and tricks to improve your health and happiness. Talking to you is so much fun, so thanks for tuning in. Let’s get started.

Kate: Hello and welcome to Midlife’s Spotlight, the show that helps you enjoy your next act. I’m Kate Campion.

Sara: and I’m Sara Garska –

Kate: and in today’s episode we’ll be talking about our couples can use rituals to reconnect in the empty nest.

Now one of the things that a lot of couples feel when they start getting to that stage where their kids are leaving home is a bit of like what do I even do with my husband anymore you know there’s been so many years where everything that has happened in the family has been happening because it’s been revolving around the children and the children’s needs. And this, you know, coming together without the children there can actually seem like a pretty frightening space.  

Now back in season one, episode seven, we talked a little bit about going from routines and bringing rituals into our lives and how rituals are really important because they helped us feel close and connected and gave us a sense of purpose and a sense of meaning.  And so what I’m going to suggest today is to how couples that are in the empty nest that have felt disconnected because like I said, their day-to-day life and everything like that has all revolved around the kids, how they can use these different types of rituals to actually build some really awesome and fun connections in their lives.

This is going to be pretty, pretty cool. And the funny thing about it as well is I’ve realized, oh, my husband and I need to do some work in this area.  

Sara: Well, I also want to, I was talking to a client today who does work. It’s not have children, and I was telling her about this podcast, and I said, but it’s going to be good for you too.  It’s good for people, even if you’ve never had children.

Kate: Yeah, certainly you don’t have to have kids as well for these to work. This can work whenever you’re feeling like you’re disconnected, and it’s also super useful around transition times. So what are relationship rituals and what do they involve, and I’m reading a definition that I’ll pop in the show notes. They’re typical everyday activities.  They help create shared experiences and they strengthen the feeling of us. To become a ritual activities or behaviors have to be deliberately repeated and meaningful to both partners.  Otherwise, it’s just another routine like commuting, brushing your teeth, those kinds of things. 

Okay, so that’s what a relationship ritual is.  And like I said, I really encourage you to go back to episode seven where we talked about how you can take some of those everyday routines in your life and turn them into rituals because that was fun to talk about.  So the first couple, first ritual, relationship ritual is what we call a couple time ritual. So a couple time ritual is like a planned activity that allows you to get away from your everyday routines and pressures and spend more time together as a couple.  And the most obvious one of these is date night. Now, I have a website that’s actually on relationships and like probably a vast majority of the articles in that website are about date night ideas, so you know how couples can carve out that meaningful time together where they say this is the time we focus on our relationship.  

However, it doesn’t even have to be something as locked in as date night. It could even be something like we will go and do the grocery shopping together.  So, like every second weekend, we will go to the farmer’s market and do some shopping together and that will be our deliberate time.  So couple of time rituals is one. 

And like I was saying, I have to say that’s one. was like, oh, actually I don’t know that we’re very good with couple of time rituals, ironically for someone that writes about date nights. We can be a bit slack on the date night. Yeah, I need to think about that.  Okay, and the second one is celebration rituals. And this is another one where I thought in my own relationship audit, I came up a little bit short.  So, a relationship ritual is the unique ways that you and your partner choose to celebrate special occasions as a couple. Interestingly, in our previous episode, were talking about how families, how when they expand, have to actually readjust and find new traditions so that this can be quite challenging. 

You can look at these celebration rituals with you and your partner is actually something that maybe doesn’t need to change, maybe like a touchstone in your relationship together that you sort of keep as something special and unique.  And these celebration rituals, they tend to happen just a few times every year and they’re they’re the big things.  So they might be like your wedding anniversary. They’re meant. It might be like a birthday, holidays are just alluded to, that can be something that needs to be a bit more flexible and adjust to others in the family.  They can also be rituals around things like good news and bad news as well. you know, I got a promotion or I just achieved this particular milestone or I did this goal.

Sara: And I know that you were actually pretty good with the celebration rituals, weren’t you? Well, I don’t know. We had one that I did love.  And so while I was married on my birthday, my husband would take the day, if it was during a week day, he would take the day off from work.  We would arrange for someone to pick up the kids and babysit them. And if we called it, do whatever Sara wants to do day.  And we did all my favorite activities. I would take him to antique stores, thrift shops. would go to lunch or dinner wherever I wanted.  And it was just fun. To have that day just devoted to I think he was happy to do it too because it was out of the routine and it was just something that we created and had meaning for us.  It was just one of those rituals that I loved and just made me feel special. It didn’t cost a lot and it wasn’t, know, stuff maybe everyone else would want to do, but it was so tailored to me that it felt so special.  And so many years later, I still remember how those days felt.

Kate:  I love that. It’s really nice. Yeah. And you can have things like that and you can have special foods or stuff like that that, you know, they don’t have to be things that are super expensive.  They can just be actually about like, what’s going to make us feel good that’s an activity that we really enjoy doing together that marks that sort of sense of celebration.  

The third one, this is the one where my husband and I shine. I was like, okay. Yeah. If I’m going to.  I’m going to be talking about this. I’m glad that I’ve got one area where I think we’ve just like absolutely nailed it.  And that’s around our rituals of daily routines and tasks. So that’s the everyday activities that couples choose to do together to improve their closeness and spend time together.  Some classic examples might be cooking together. We don’t do that. Walking the dog, even a little bit like I said before about going to the grocery store.  But if you’re doing it in more of a couple of times, ritual, might make it a bit more special.  So for us, a key one is definitely going to bed at the same time. Now, I know a lot of couples don’t do that.  But that is something that’s absolutely fundamental to us. We’ve gone this whole ritual around the bedtime. The dogs have to go to the toilet.  We go upstairs. put a shakti mat down. We read, we do all these things. I love going to bed. Like,  I actually love it when we get into that part of the evening and it’s just so nice, it’s nice going to bed together, We go to sleep, so that’s a really crucial thing. 

Another daily routine that’s become more of a ritual would be our office day coffee.  We work in the city three days a week, we alternate working from home and working in the city. When we work in the city, there’s like two coffee shops that are either close to where I go or where if we take a ferry to work, there’s one there.  We always go in and we have like a little coffee together. We then go our separate ways, but then we usually text each other about the coffee. Coffee was so delicious or whatever it was. That’s another example. For couples who are looking to reconnect, you can look to see what are those daily routines and tasks that you do that you could actually like make more of a ritual and so on.

Sara: I was reminded of one that you had told me and I don’t know if I have quite right.  Well, it might be two. So I’m going to… Is you had told me about a morning cleaning one, maybe on the weekends, that you and Ben have a cleaning ritual?  I think that you get up and get knocked stuff out. don’t know. Maybe I’m making it up. 

Kate: We do have a couple of morning ones. I think I’ve talked about one before, which is the dogs.

Sara: Biscuits.

Kate: The cookies. Cookies. So like, that’s basically like, yeah, I should have talked about that one actually because that’s influences every morning.  We both wake up. One person goes downstairs. They make the cup of coffee for the other person while the jug is boiling. They bring up the dog cookies, as we call them, and the person that’s still in bed feeds the dogs, then we bring the coffee up, have the coffee together, and then the morning takes whatever shape it does depending on whether or not it’s a weekend or whatever it is.  So yeah, that is another sort of thing that really helps create that feeling of closeness and togetherness. Yeah, it’s a lot of fun.

Sara:  And that always makes me smile. So that’s why I have you repeat it. It’s like, aww, I want that. 

Kate:It’s the dogs and the cookies too, isn’t it? Though you really want to be head feeding your little dogs.  Wouldn’t do it any other way now.

Sara:  I bet they love the ritual too.

Kate:  Yeah. And you had one that you mentioned that you did with another couple.

Sara:  Oh, yeah. So, even though I’m divorced, I did have a period of life where the kids were out of the house and we were empty nesters.  And we actually enjoyed it. I look on that as a really good time of our marriage, at least for a while, even though it didn’t ultimately keep us together, we did have several good years. But one of our rituals was, and we did it with another couples, and it was a really good – just wonderful people and we’re still friends with them. But what we did was we lived in a small town with limited eating out options. And what we discovered, we thought about was that we’re going out, we’re spending all this money – because it was still expensive – but what we decided to do, we set aside every Saturday night to get together and one weekend it would be at our house and the other weekend it would be at theirs, and we would plan these amazing menus. That was my – I don’t cook a lot now, but back then I was making artisan bread, I was making so many good things, homemade pasta, my friend taught me how to make pasta, so we would do amazing meals and it was great, we would eat, we would talk all evening, and it made us feel closer. Being around this couple that was so loving and wholesome with each other.  It just made us, I think, be rise up and be better people and be more loving to each other. So for us, it was a great way of bridging that time when the kids were gone. I just, I love it. I still look back to that as one of my favorite times of our marriage. Sorry kids. You were my favorite times of our marriage. Anyway, that was a ritual we had and we did it for years and it was, oh, it was wonderful.

Kate: Yeah, that’s awesome.  I mean, I can still see now it brings you a lot of joy like you were saying.

Sara: It does, it does.

 Kate Yeah. And I think one of those things like you said is when you do something with another couple as well, it really does give you, I don’t know, it helps to create a sense of us as a couple when you’re doing something as another couple because you’re kind of like, I don’t know, engaging with each other like as a shared unit.

Sara: it’s so true, yeah.

Kate: I’m just thinking about, yeah, when we lived in our previous city, we used to do something a little bit similar with friends of ours and they had little kids, and we used to play games.So we’d like him have games night and go over there and play games and that was always like fun.

So, so much fun, so much fun just that intentional time doing something on the regular with each other, however that looked.  

So we’ve covered so far three different types of rituals. We’ve got the couple time rituals of which I think that example you talked about also fits in quite nicely to that celebration rituals, the daily routines and tasks and the other one is the expressions of intimacy rituals. 

So that’s the way in which a couple expresses affection, fondness, attraction to each other. You know when I was trying to think of tangible examples to this, I was thinking well often it could be quite useful to look at greetings and goodbyes. Like how you say hello to someone, jump up and give them a big hug and a kiss. Or what do you do? How do you build in those sort of physical things? Because what I always think in my work on relationships is that ultimately a lot of what we have in a romantic relationship we can have with other people like the ability to be ourselves, the ability to communicate, the ability to enjoy ourselves.  And all those things, but it’s the physical stuff that’s the key difference, right? You won’t be doing with anybody else what you’re doing with your partner.  Or if you are something’s wrong. So like actually, intentionally focusing on those expressions of intimacy and the rituals that you have around those can be a way of reconnecting too. And you had some with them, um, you also had a coffee and bed story.

Sara: Yes. So  One of my favorite rituals, and one of the things I didn’t know this was going to be so endearing because I’d never had it.  My ex-husband wasn’t a coffee drinker, so it’s not like he wouldn’t have done it, I don’t think. It just wouldn’t have occurred to him because coffee wasn’t his thing. But when I was in the relationship and someone started to bring me coffee.  I’m just like, that is one of the ways to my heart. It just was so special to have somebody go down, fix it, make it the best coffee ever, and bring it up.  Yes. It was wonderful.

Kate: And you used to have some snuggles where you’re watching TV as well, I believe. 

Sara: I barely gave you a lot of notes.  Yes. So anyway, watching TV. That was another thing.

Just that TV watching can be boring, but when you’re sitting there with somebody, just having that touch of your hand, your holding hands, or maybe you’re just leaning up against them and kind of snuggling, it just makes everything better.  And before you ask, I’m going to give you the third one. And that’s like when you’re cooking. And when I cook, I play music.  And so another one of those everyday things was if I was cooking, I loved when my partner would come up behind me or come and paint me in their arms and we’d dance for a little bit. I call it dancing in the kitchen. That’s one of my favorite things. anyone else that’s looking for someone that likes to cook and dance  in the kitchen, I’m available.

Kate: Well, that’s actually hilarious because, you know, my husband touches me and I’m cooking, I’m like, go away. I’m concentrating on cooking.  So I would be the opposite of a kitchen dancer, but I definitely do the tv snuggling. I was just thinking, yeah, true, like every night when we sit down and this is before we go up to bed. you know, I often like lie down on the couch with my legs and his lap, he gives me leg rubs every night.  So you know, those like little things are showing affection too. And the last couple of sort of connection ritual is around communication because there are special and unique ways couples communicate with each other, private jokes, secret signals.  

This is another area where Ben and I shine. We have so many inside it, know, we’ve been together for 12, coming up 12 years.  We’ve got a lot of inside jokes, a lot of like little hand signals that we give each other about things.  And in fact, one year in the early years when I did not have a lot of money for a birthday present,  I remember that I actually went through all our phone messages. I created our own dictionary of all the little phrases that we had and what they meant. I gave that to him as a present. We can say words that only have meaning for us and that’s definitely another way around keeping feeling close and connected as that little secret language that you’ve got that no one else has.

Sara:  I like that. I don’t have examples for that, but I will be on the watch out for that someday.

Kate: Well, I think between the two of us, we pretty much make the perfect whole. Because like I said, I’m pretty useless on some of the more formal things.  Okay, but what’s the point of doing this? So the point of identifying these different types of rituals is to just suggest that what you can do in your relationship is do a little bit of a ritual audit.  And I’ve actually created a little document, which if you go to our show notes, you’ll be able to download.  That you can do this for yourself. And essentially what it does is it talks about what the ritual is and what it is that you’re doing that’s working and what it is that might need attention.  Now, for example, one of the couple time rituals that my husband and I did have was that we started to watch all the James Bond movies.  And that was a lot of fun. But I have a sports loving husband and there’s always sports on a Friday and a Saturday night.  So the James Bond night was a Sunday and after a little bit of time, that started to stress me out because I’m an unusual person.  I love Mondays. But Sundays for me is about prep,you  know, and it’s about like getting ready for the week ahead, tidying up any loose ends, doing that kind of stuff.  And what I found was I was going to this movie, well, not going to it because it was in our own home, but I was going to watch this movie.  I was feeling so just stressed because I had not been able to put to bed the other things that I’d wanted to get done before we watched the movie, so I wasn’t able to give it my full attention.  

So, if this was Ben and I doing this couples audit and we had, you know, couple time James Bond movie, that would be the opportunity to say, actually, while I’m really enjoying watching the movie, doing it on that day of the week is not working for me.  We need to either change the day of the week or we need to do something else. So, like I said, you can go through like each one of those different categories of rituals, look at what you’re doing, look to see if there’s any massive gaps that you like, actually, I need to come up with some ideas and then make it a kind of a challenge. 

So, what I was thinking as well is that sometimes people are like, well, I don’t actually know what I could put in for these rituals. I don’t know what a good one might be. So, first of all, I’ve got some suggestions as thinking about going on holidays, like having just, you know, hopefully in the empty nest you’ve got a little bit more time, a little bit of resources that you’ll dispose of, so like actually creating a ritual around maybe holidays, maybe you decide around Christmas that you’re going to go away and do this or something like that, you can develop secret expressions of affection.  Again, that might feel really weird if that’s not something that you’re used to. 

So it could even just be like, a special, I love code words, know, this is another example of, when my husband and I went to get our second dog, we were going to someone’s house to get the dog and so we decided that before we went in there, that if we didn’t want the dog, we would say, one of us would say, what a rascal.  And if we did want the dog, we would say they’re adorable. And so that was like what we did in that situation. Luckily Winston was adorable and got to come home with us. But now you know that’s become like, we make a joke. He’s not a rascal, he’s adorable. You know, and so it’s become like a little thing that we say. 

You can consider like calling or texting just to check in during the day with each other.  You can build in some regular date nights, head to My Sweet Home Life to get lots of ideas. And all you could like set up a specific time of day to talk and catch up.  And the thing I was thinking about as well was, you know, once you’ve come up with these ideas of things that you’d like to try, sometimes it’s really good as well to think about what you may have lost and what you could replace it with. Because you know, people, okay, let’s say that you used to have, for example, a ritual around Friday night dinners. Friday night dinners at home might have been a really simple, easy takeaway meal because everyone in the house was super tired and that just became the easy thing. Now suddenly you’ve empty nest and you might be like, actually, why don’t we go out for dinner every Friday night. So look to replace the things you’ve lost with things that you can do instead that kind of puts a little twist on it and makes it more about you.

And the third thing is to make it fun and make it easy. So when you’re looking to bring these new rituals into your life, think about what would be the most fun thing to do and focus on doing that first and then what would be the easiest thing to do and then look at that as well because you want to create as least friction with it as possible.  

So my thinking about that is that couples can be really nervous about the empty nest, but both you and I can attest to actually there’s a lot to be, a lot to love about the period when it gets to be just you and your partner again.  If you’re worried about connecting rituals are a great way to connect it. Head over to the show notes, download the copy, do a ritual audit, and then think about how you can build those new rituals into your life.

Sara: I love that. It’s made you want to have some rituals again.

Kate: And maybe a partner?

Sara: Well, yes, yes. That’s what I meant. Like, oh, okay. Maybe two and a half years single is enough. It’s time to start thinking a little more broad.

Kate:  I love that. 

Sara: That was great.

Kate: Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode. If you loved what you heard, you can leave a review on iTunes so we know to keep more of it coming. You can also visit our website at midlifespotlight.com and learn a little bit more about us. We love connecting with you and can’t wait to see you next week.