Reminiscing on Love | LQ008

Welcome to our lovespace. Today, I'm just feeling so absolutely socially filled up. We had a family weekend this past weekend, and we went to visit my sister in law for her a big milestone birthday. And we just got to spend so much family time together, it was fantastic. My partner and my bonus kids came up. And we even did like, you know, obviously, we ate some good food and drinks, because you know, that's my jam. But we also did an escape room together, which talk about collaboration and teamwork that has got it all. And, you know, doing it between a few different age groups and trying to give everyone a chance to figure things out. And stuff like that was just, you know, we really got me thinking on the drive home and actually, on the drive home as I was kind of, you know, thinking about what a wonderful weekend it was. And I kind of went down probably inspired by the escape room, because I kind of started to go down a little rabbit hole thinking about communication. And you know, how we chatted with or like how we talked to each other in the escape room. And, you know, that was like quite the opportunity to practice our mindfulness. And that no idea was a bad idea kind of vibe. And it really got me thinking about that communication piece. And I know lots of times we're like blah, blah, communication, What a boring, overused, yucky, yucky word, it was like yucky, yucky word. So you know, again, here, it really just means that we're thinking about sending and receiving messages. Okay, so that's really how we're taking it, not all the boring stuff, it's not inherently bad, or good or whatever. So Anywho. So what stood out to me, were kind of really two types of communication that I thought happened that made the weekend, you know, just really fantastic. And one of the first kind of type that popped into my head was the fact that we had some buildup, and we had some setting the scene for our fun, fantastic weekend. And then the second part was how, you know, when we sit around, we are, you know, even though we live, you know, a few hours away from each other. We do see each other a few times a year, and we do communicate a lot with each other, like we're texting, and you know, we see each other's Facebook posts, and, you know, my partner, he often calls his sister, you know, or, or whatnot, or will hear updates, you know, from my mother in law, those kind of things. So, you know, it's not like we don't, you know, know things about what's going on in each other's lives. So, you know, we all you know, as you do with people, you say, like, Hey, how's it going, what's new, blah, blah, blah. But we often, you know, once we've been hanging out for a few hours or a day or two, especially with the kiddos, what we often do is we often start to tell stories about you know, our past experiences and things that have happened in our life, and especially when my you know, I love hearing stories about my partner and his sister when they were growing up, and I love hearing stories about, you know, her partner growing up, right, and what his experiences were. And you know, and I love the kids, you know, they love to ask questions and share about their own experiences and make comparisons. And, you know, I think it's just, you know, that part really got me that we do a lot of reminiscing together. And sometimes it's reminiscing about like, remember that that trip, we all just went on or remember that weekend, we spent together the family dinner we had, which could have been last month, six months, two years ago, whatever. And that very long ago reminiscing. And so those are the two pieces, I was kind of I was gonna go down another route for this kind of last little episode in our series on Mega moments of love. And if you're you know, are new to this love space, those are the other the name we're using to rename, kind of rebrand reframe, revamp, date nights, okay, those are our mega moments of love. And that's how we're going to keep them sparked is really thinking about them as mega moments of love. So those are kind of the two, when you start to really think about it, I was like wow, I think this could actually be a great addition to our mega moments of love. So talking about communication first we're going to think about that build up part or the setting the scene part and then the second part we're going to think about is that reminiscing part and just wait okay, it's gonna be fantastic so we'll jump in with thinking about the buildup part or setting the scene part and you know, obviously when we're having Omega mon videos love some of them are short like little coffee date or meetup or workout with a smoothie or whatever. And some of them are longer like a whole night out or a weekend away or whatever cooking a big deal a big five course meal together. Oh, that I loved in that help I get to do that. This this love month but anyway, anyhow. So there's the obvious planning part of the what and the where and the when, and you know if it's coffee date, that goodness be like that for communication. If it's a bigger, a bigger mega moment of love, that's going to take a bit more planning and conversating the converse like chatting. So, yeah, so that planning piece can be part of the build up, right? The other kinds of buildup you can have that makes it really that adds more, I guess, more positivity and excitement to it, is sharing your thoughts about it. Now, I have a lot of couples that are resistant to this. So I worked with actually one couple in particular, and they were like, well, our mega moment of love, we like to keep it consistent. And we just like, what we worked on was for them to meet for like kind of a mid morning coffee, like at 1030 11am Coffee. On Wednesday, they went almost every Wednesday, every second if a work meeting or whatever came up, they would meet, you know, at the same coffee shop that's kind of equidistance between their two offices. And that's what they really enjoyed doing. So great. But I was like, Okay, well, let's tweak it let's, you know, add the next piece, okay, is that we're going to add some build up. And they're like, Well, we already know the plan. Okay, well, now we're going to share our thoughts about that plan leading up to it. And maybe it's every Wednesday, you know, maybe on Monday and Tuesday is when you're doing this kind of build up. So they were very resistant, because they're like, it's the same thing. We pretty much go the same plan. Boring, what am I gonna say about it? And I was, so I asked them about it. And they told me some details. And they said, Oh, well, you know, you just told me how much you enjoyed that wonderful cinnamon bun you had there last week? Fantastic. Why don't you send a text tomorrow? Or why don't you mention tonight? Like, ah, you know what, I hope tomorrow night they have those cinnamon buns? And because I'm really looking forward to that. Or oh, you know, last time I had a cinnamon bun was really great. But there were those danishes. And I've been thinking about this danishes? And I'm not sure. Now, then people have lots of thoughts about these kinds of things. Some people might have these thoughts and not even actually know they're having them these thoughts. And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to be like, hey, what could we say about this thing, it's going to take some practice at first, you may have to dig through be like, I never really talked about food or cinnamon buns or whatever. But I'm gonna mention it right. Or another thing that I took from, you know, when I was getting them to tell me about was a few times ago that they had gone, it was extremely busy. And I'm like, Oh, well, you could even mention that. Like, I hope it's not busy, like last week, because that was or the other week because it was such a pain in the butt. Now, they were a bit like I said, resistors they're like, I think this is silly. Now when they started doing it, right, and I was like, you can chat about this, you know, whenever you want, like you can text each other. When you're driving home together, you can or sorry, when you're commuting home, you know, I know sometimes you guys call and are like, hey, what's the dinner plan? Or what's the way that you can mention it? Then, you know, whenever you're gonna have these little tiny moments of communication when you're having breakfast, you know, over dinner, whatever you have. So when they started doing this, and verbalizing it, right, saying the words, they actually started to figure out that they did have thoughts about the Wednesday coming up, and the coffee coming up or whatever, you know, wherever they were going. They actually were having thoughts about it. And interestingly, she did try the cinnamon bun comments. And what happened was that they actually got on a tangent conversation about how he didn't know that she loved the Namibians, and that she actually really loved their cinnamon buns. And then they actually, I think they did like a little, you know, month or two worth of Saturday mornings, where they yelped best cinnamon buns near us, and made it a bit of a morning adventure to go find a cinnamon. But now that is an activity that they reported, they never would have thought about doing. They never would have said, Hey, let's spend two hours on a Saturday morning, finding a delicious cinnamon bun, chatting about them. But it was like a new adventure to try. So sometimes when we do this build up stuff, it's for us to just be thinking about it and looking forward to it. For some of the setting the scene step it can open new conversations, it can open up new ideas, it can open up new tendons, again, it's really that thing to show that we're thinking about each other, because we almost always are right, and we're wearing our new relationships, and we have that new relationship energy, we can see we know that we're thinking about each other. Now sometimes that thinking gets kind of put on, you know, the routine cycle in the back of our brain and it doesn't mean we're not thinking about each other. We just don't maybe have in our real relationship energy. We're maybe not carrying it as forward as we used to when we had our new relationship energy. And what we just need to do is to bring just a little bit of that forward, of course, you know, we we need to be outputting energy that we can maintain and that's right for us and that fits are a couple minutes. But

you know, a lot of that is actually just Being more with that mindful pace, right, the actually pausing and thinking about it. Okay. So that's one of the reasons or that's a few reasons why I think those little comments about saying the scene are great. Now one of the things that actually links us to our next piece is one of the tangents they went down one day when they were actually talking about how busy the place has been getting it made them reminisce and made them talk about a past memory of when they had been at I think it was like a restaurant on you know, some past date next, a pastor mega moment of, of love, but that was before they haven't makeup moments, they went on this tangent about like comparing the busyness and like, you know, reminiscing about that story and kind of retelling the story to each other and what their experience was. And what happened with that is that we got some reminiscing, we got not only build up and you know, setting the stage, and that positive chat about like, Yay, this, you know, our coffee time is coming up together. And it's actually interesting, exciting, and not boring and mundane and like, whatever. Besides that it actually started, they start to reminisce about different times that they'd spent together in the past. Okay, so this second part, the reminiscing part, now, I'm very excited about this part, because I think we all probably could have made a pretty good smart guess, about the fact that you know, chatting, and, you know, looking forward to something is going to set a more positive scene for us when we get there, of course, because we're already creating those positive feelings like, Hey, I'm looking forward to that cinnamon bun, you know, or like texting, you know, an hour before something crazy just had happened at work, I can't wait to fill you in. When I see you, or I got exciting news, can't wait to let you know about it. Right. So that's fantastic, right? Because when we show up, we're already, you know, kind of prepped and ready to hang out. So that buildup piece important for those reasons. But the reminiscing piece I never really thought about. And, you know, so I kind of thought about it, I'm like, Okay, well, it's obviously important to me, and, you know, not just thinking about this past weekend, but even when I hang out with friends, or like when I go out on my mobile moments of love, we often, you know, reminisce about previous times together and other date nights and things like that. So are other mega moments of love. So, you know, I know that it's been important to me. But I wanted to find out for you guys, if there's actually any, you know, more science or research behind, because that's always nice to have. But rather than just my opinion on things. So, craziness is what I found when I kind of like started to actually look into it. Is that this besides, I guess it giving us a conversation topic to chat about during our time together during our connection times, what I wanted to find out for you was is there any basis for reminiscing to be important to our social health to our social connectedness and interactions. And what I discovered is that they actually have something called I think it's called reminiscence therapy for elderly people. So they've been mostly studying this in, you know, seniors. And the reason is, because that's where a lot of the social health money and research is going just because of social isolation. And you know, we have a large aging population, and the who, and some other organizations have made recommendations that, you know, loneliness and social isolation is very detrimental to senior health, and well being. And so that's where kind of the money is flowing right now for the research. But we can still take things out of that research, because old people are humans and mammals like us, and we're humans and mammals. So it's like, same as these MCs. It's just we happen to be not as old. But write us seems to make sense that we can still pull some things and some important pieces out of this research. So that's fantastic. So one of the things they found out is, besides, I think you can all make the guests like, oh, yeah, getting old people to and I don't, you know, people, getting elderly people getting seniors to talk about, you know, stories from their past from their childhood, you know, like, oh, you know, talk about, you know, there has been that's passed away, or their wife has passed away or like, you know, what was it like, where you lived before, what kind of job you have blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, obviously, getting them to talk through those stories that keeps up their language skills and abilities that keeps up their word recall that keeps up their memory recall. And, you know, obviously, that those cognitive function pieces cool. We don't really need that because we're not in that category. But they also found that getting people to reminisce and talk about their past experiences. Wait for it. This is awesome. Also, redo was negative emotions like boredom, and feelings of loneliness or social isolation or disconnectedness and even for some people, symptoms of depression. Crazy, okay? It also decreased physical signs of stress. So physical signs of stress would be things which physical signs of stress would be things like headaches, or this is the things they tracked anyways headaches, back pain, irritability, poor concentration slash poor focus, those kinds of things improved, okay. It also created a good sense of self and self worth, or increased people's sense of self and self worth. Now, if we do this as a couple, like if we reminisce about our stories together as a couple, that's going to increase our sense of calmness together, our sense of connectedness, in our relationship, our sense of togetherness, and when we're creating our sense of togetherness, we can start to see see our time together as a connected, cohesive story. And when you start to see your relationship as a cohesive story, you start to see like, Oh, this is my origin story. And like, this is how we got to this part and whatnot. And that then you can start to see your path up and downs or even your present, you know, challenges, disagreements, you know, life struggles, because we've, you know, things come up in life, like, no one has a wonderful, perfect life, right? We all have our ups and downs, we all have our work, things we all have, or whatever. When we start to reminisce together and create that couple story of us together, we start to see those ups and downs, as just part of the process, part of the growth, part of the wonderfulness, even those downs, part of the wonderfulness that got us to this point. Oh my gosh, how exciting is that though it kind of reframes without you even knowing it. It reframes your narrative or your story about your relationship. Crazy, amazing. Okay, so that got me very excited. And it's and it's very exciting. Because if you can think about that, if you can think about your story of togetherness of being a couple, as that journey, you know that you guys are the only ones in the entire world, in the entire world. In the entire universe, even that have your story, right? That knows what's happened to you. Right? Or that's experienced was happens to you, you are so individual, you're so unique. And that's why we have to do our big picture thinking, right? That's why we have to, you have to color the things in how you want, right? Like, you know, I gave you some ideas for communication for setting the setting the scene. And you know, the build up for your Mega moments of love. But you're going to do those how you want, right? I'm just saying you need to have some sort of sending and receiving messages, right communication, or sending and receiving messages about the mega moment that's coming up. Because that's going to set the scene for it, that's going to make it you're having positivity before you even get there. Amazing. That's what we need. And same thing with this reminiscing. I don't know what you're gonna reminisce about, I don't know what stories you're going to have. I don't know, if you're going to flip through pictures together. I don't know if you know, you like to both tell stories together. I'm not sure what you're going to do. But I know that that big picture idea of we can add in some reminiscing that you can do, and you can do it however you want. You don't even have to wait for you know, a mega moment of love to do some reminiscing. I also, you know, you can do it whenever you want. Whenever stories pop into your head, please do that's actually super way more important than saving it for maximum of love. But actually, I wanted to tie it more so into our mega moment of love, because you should reminisce you should chat about fondly. Or even you know, like even sometimes if you have like a bad mega moment of love, like, you know, hopefully you've processed those feelings, but I know that that you know not all of them are going to be perfect. Sometimes something comes up. Sometimes an argument comes up out of nowhere, like wow.

So when that comes up, it's hopefully you can reminisce about that. Hopefully, once it's been processed, and you've chatted about it, and a little bit of time has passed then you can be like oh my gosh, do you remember when we like spend all that money for the fancy dinner and then we were still kind of stuck on this thing and we Totally argued, and this happened and that happened and I spilled wine on my dress and like was the best. Hopefully you can look back on that as part of your journey. So being able to chat and reminisce about our mega moments of love, also so important, okay, very important. So that's the other piece I want to tie in there. Not just that it can, you know, lead some conversation, but also that we should be reminiscing about our times together on those mega moments. This, this is what's going to create that kind full lens for your future. Mega moments, right? That setting the scene that reminiscing about the past ones, right? Those are all going to set the scene for your coming mega moments of love. And in that positive light creating that positive momentum in between your Mega moments of love to keep you sparked