Tanya and I are married for 6 months now. Ours is a love marriage and we live with my parents in our family home. My family runs a successful business and my dad offered Tanya a place in the HR division to which she happily agreed since her own company was shutting operations in our city. I kept with the tradition of heading to the office with my dad and brother and Tanya would reach the office with my sister.
Since all of us are working in the same business our time together like breakfast and dinners is usually spent discussing business and our daily experiences. Also, we didn’t strictly keep to office hours hence, the lines of personal and work life are pretty blurry! I didn’t realize that in all this Tanya was feeling lost. New family, a new workplace, and no work-life balance was weighing down on her. I never realized this since it was all pretty normal for me. Tanya being in HR realized the importance of balancing professional and personal life. She tried discussing it with the family, but couldn’t really get the point home.
One day Tanya came up to me and said, “Don’t you think we need to spend some couple time together“. I was pretty confused, I said, “But we work in the same office, live in the same house, have our meals together, go out whenever we wish”. Tanya said, “Yes”, but she also said something that got me thinking.
She said, “We do spend our days and evenings together, but we rarely get to discuss anything personal”. I realized that she was absolutely right and asked her “So what do you suggest?”. Tanya suggested that we should start a ritual of heading out for a stroll after dinner. I found it a bit odd how can a simple thing like an after-dinner walk help? Honestly, I was expecting a more drastic suggestion!
So we started taking time to head out daily for an after-dinner walk. We would discuss fun things like a movie, a new and trending book, or just our friends. Everything except for work. We now look forward to our exclusive 30 minutes together and are happier than we have ever been.
Amazingly, these walks also helped us to clear our heads and we were more productive at work the next day. My dad and brother noticed this too! They asked me what was it that I was doing. “Night walks ritual” I said! They are still confused :)
