Here’s a question that stopped me in my tracks.
How many more summers do you think you’ll have together?
Not years. Summers. The long evenings and the swims. The fish and chips on the beach. The pōhutukawa flowering red along the coast.
Let’s do the maths
Say you’re both 55, and you’re lucky enough to have around twenty good, active summers ahead. Healthy enough to walk the coastal track, swim at the bach, travel, dance in the kitchen.
That’s a guess, not a statistic. Pick your own number.
Twenty summers. That’s about a thousand weekends.
Now take out the weekends that go to work, family obligations, house jobs, catching up on sleep, other people’s weddings and birthdays, and the ones that just disappear in a blur of errands.
How many are left for the two of you? Truly for the two of you?
For most couples I talk to, it’s a sobering number.
Not because life is short, exactly. Because we’re so good at spending our time on everything except each other.
Try this: each of you guess, without talking, how many weekends in the last year were just for the two of you. Then compare.
The “someday” trap
Most couples have a someday list.
- Someday we’ll go to Italy.
- Someday we’ll walk the Abel Tasman.
- Someday we’ll take dancing lessons.
- Someday we’ll have more time for each other.
Someday, when the kids are older, when work calms down, when the mortgage is paid, when we retire.
Can you picture it?
The trouble with someday is that it has a way of never arriving.
Or arriving later than we hoped, when our knees, our health or our circumstances have changed.
And it’s not just trips. It’s the relationship itself.
Someday we’ll sort out how we argue. Someday we’ll talk about our sex life. Someday we’ll feel close again.
Time is the thing we can’t get back
Money, we can earn again. Houses, we can renovate.
But the summers we spend as polite flatmates, too busy or too stuck to enjoy each other, don’t come back.
That’s not meant to scare you. It’s meant to give you permission to stop waiting.
What do you want to do with yours?
Here’s a lovely conversation to have together, maybe over a wine on the deck. If we’ve got twenty summers left, what do we want to do with them?
- Where do we want to go?
- What do we want to learn?
- What do we want our days to feel like?
- What do we want our relationship to feel like?
- What would we regret not doing?
Some couples write a list, some draw a map and some just talk. All of it helps.
Try this: each of you write down five things you’d love to do together before you’re 75. Swap lists. Circle the ones that overlap. Book one.
It’s not only about adventures
Big trips are wonderful.
But most of our life together happens in ordinary weekends and ordinary evenings.
So it’s worth asking: how do we want our ordinary days to feel?
- Do we want more laughter?
- More touch?
- More long dinners where we talk about something other than logistics?
- More time in nature?
- More desire?
Those things don’t need a plane ticket. They need intention.
What gets in the way
If you’re not already spending your time the way you’d like, it’s worth being curious about why.
Sometimes it’s busyness or money, but often it’s the relationship itself.
When couples are stuck in an old pattern, feeling a bit disconnected, or carrying unspoken hurt, time together doesn’t feel as appealing.
It’s easier to fill the weekend with jobs.
You know what I mean, right?
If that’s you, the most valuable thing you could do with one of your remaining weekends might be to work on the relationship itself.
So the rest of them feel better.
Start now
You don’t need to wait for retirement. You don’t need to wait for the perfect moment.
You can start this weekend.
It could be a swim, a walk, a long lunch, a night away, or the conversation you’ve been putting off.
Want to understand what’s happening between the two of you? Come to Reignite Your Love, a 3 hour workshop in Auckland about the emotional and sexual cycle and how to step out of it. Or start with a free discovery call.
