There is a moment that happens in almost every busy family — and if you’ve lived it, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You and your husband finally sit down together at the end of the day. The boys are in bed, the kitchen is mostly cleaned up, and you look at each other across the couch. And then one of you falls asleep within four minutes. The other one quietly turns on a podcast and eats the last of the leftover cornbread standing at the counter alone.
That was us, more times than I can count.
My husband and I have been married for seventeen years. We have four boys — ages 6, 10, 12, and 15 — and we homeschool all of them here in Connecticut. Our life is full. It is genuinely, beautifully, sometimes overwhelmingly full. And somewhere in the middle of all that fullness, we had to get honest with ourselves about something important: our marriage was not going to stay strong on its own. It needed tending. Intentionally, regularly, and without waiting until we had more time — because more time was never coming.
If you are in a season where your kids are everything and your marriage feels like it’s running on fumes and good intentions, this post is for you. Not because I have it all figured out, but because I’ve learned a few things the hard way and I want to share them with you, one Connecticut mom to another.
Why Marriage Gets Pushed to the Back Burner (And Why That’s Dangerous)
When you are raising multiple children — especially when you’re also homeschooling and managing a household — your marriage becomes the relationship that feels the most resilient. Your kids need you urgently and loudly. Your husband is a grown adult who can pour his own coffee. So naturally, without even meaning to, the marriage gets deprioritized.
The tricky thing is that this happens gradually. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to stop investing in your relationship. You just keep saying yes to the next urgent thing, and your marriage keeps getting quietly shuffled to the bottom of the pile. And then one day you realize you’ve been roommates for six months — coordinating schedules, dividing tasks, parenting side by side — but you haven’t actually been together in a long time.
Research consistently shows that the quality of a couple’s relationship has a direct impact on the emotional health and stability of their children. The American Psychological Association notes that children who grow up with parents in a warm, secure relationship tend to develop stronger emotional regulation skills and healthier relationship patterns themselves. In other words, working on your marriage isn’t just good for you — it is one of the best things you can do for your boys.
My husband and I came to understand this not from reading an article but from watching our own kids. Our 15-year-old notices everything. When my husband and I were going through a stretch of disconnected, just-surviving-it months a few years ago, he got quieter. More withdrawn. He didn’t know what was wrong, and honestly, neither did we at first. It wasn’t until we started deliberately reconnecting as a couple that we watched him settle back into himself. Kids feel the temperature of a marriage even when they can’t name what they’re sensing.
Date Nights Are Great — But They’re Not Enough
Everyone tells you to schedule date nights. And yes, please do that. We try to get out once or twice a month — dinner in New Haven, a walk along the water in Mystic, grabbing coffee somewhere quiet in our town. Those nights matter. They give us something to look forward to and a space to remember who we are outside of being parents.
But here’s what I’ve learned: you cannot outsource all your connection to one night every couple of weeks. The marriage lives in the daily moments. It lives in whether you make eye contact when one of you walks into the room. Whether you ask a real question at dinner, not just “how was your day” but something that shows you’ve been thinking about your spouse as a person. Whether you choose to put the phone down when your husband is talking to you.
These are micro-moments of connection, and they are what actually hold a marriage together during busy seasons. A single date night cannot repair two weeks of emotional distance, but a hundred small moments of warmth and attentiveness can build something genuinely solid.
Practical Habits That Have Actually Helped Us
I want to share what has worked for us — not as a prescription, but as real things from a real family in a real Connecticut farmhouse with real chaos happening every single day.
- The 10-minute check-in: After the younger boys are in bed, my husband and I try to sit together for at least ten minutes before we both disappear into our own decompression routines. No phones. Just talking or even just sitting close together. It sounds small, but it has been enormous for us.
- Protecting Sunday afternoons: We take our Sabbath seriously, and part of that means Sunday afternoons are protected family time — which also means my husband and I are present in the same space, unhurried, without the pressure of a to-do list. Some of our best conversations happen on a Sunday afternoon walk. If you’re looking for a framework around building intentional rest into your week, I wrote about our approach in our guide to creating a family reset day at home, which has roots in that same Sabbath value.
- Praying together: This one changed things for us deeply. When we started ending the day with even a short prayer together — just a minute or two — something shifted in how connected we felt. There’s a vulnerability in praying with someone that you don’t get anywhere else. It keeps our hearts soft toward each other even when we’re tired and a little irritable.
- Talking about the kids together, not just at each other: There’s a difference between venting about your kids to your spouse and genuinely discussing them as parenting partners. We try to have a real conversation at least once a week about how each of our boys is doing — not just logistics, but how they’re growing, what they’re struggling with, what we’re noticing. It keeps us on the same team and reminds us we’re building something together.
- Saying the kind thing out loud: I cannot tell you how many times I have thought something appreciative about my husband and never said it. I thought it. That counts, right? It does not count. Say it out loud. “Thank you for fixing that shelf without being asked.” “You were really patient with our 10-year-old today and I noticed.” Those words cost nothing and they do real work.
When Homeschooling Together Gets Hard
I want to be honest about something that doesn’t get talked about enough in homeschooling circles: being together all day, every day, as a family is genuinely beautiful — and it can also put real pressure on a marriage.
My husband works from home and also participates in portions of our homeschooling. We are together a lot. That closeness is one of the great gifts of this lifestyle, but it also means there is no natural separation built in, no commute to decompress, no built-in buffer between work stress and family time. We have had to get intentional about creating some breathing room for each of us — and about not letting the stress of a hard school day bleed into how we treat each other at dinner.
I’ve found that when our days have good rhythms built in — something I’ve written about in our post on building a family morning routine that actually sticks — the whole household feels calmer, and that calm extends to our marriage. When mornings are chaotic and school feels like a battle, everyone is depleted by noon and my husband and I are running on patience fumes by evening. Structure genuinely serves our relationship.
What to Do When You’ve Drifted
Maybe you’re reading this and thinking, we’re past micro-moments and check-ins. We’ve really drifted. I want to speak gently and honestly to that.
Drifting is not failure. It is what happens to good people in busy seasons when no one taught them that marriages need active maintenance. The fact that you’re noticing it — that you care enough to notice — is actually a good sign.
Start small. Not with a big conversation about everything that’s gone wrong, but with one genuine act of reconnection. Reach for his hand. Ask him something you don’t already know the answer to. Make his favorite dinner without an occasion. These things feel small and they are — but they send a signal that says I see you. I’m still here. I choose this.
If you’ve drifted to a place where small moments don’t feel like enough, please consider talking to a marriage counselor. There is no shame in that. The American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy has a therapist locator that can help you find someone in Connecticut. Seeking help is one of the most courageous and loving things you can do for your family.
The Long Game
My oldest is 15. In three years, he will likely be moving toward college or whatever God has next for him. And then slowly, over the following decade, we will go from a house with four loud, wonderful boys to just the two of us again. I think about that a lot.
I want to still know my husband when that day comes. I want us to be genuine friends, not just people who survived the same season together. I want our boys to grow up and look back at their parents and see a marriage that showed them what it looks like to love someone on purpose, over time, through tired seasons and full ones.
That doesn’t happen automatically. It happens because two people keep choosing each other in the small moments, day after day, even when the couch is calling and the cornbread is almost gone.
Your marriage is worth the investment. Your kids will be better for it. And so will you.
