Welcome to Season 2 of The Family Dinner Project Podcast! In each of our episodes, Content Manager Bri DeRosa and Executive Director Dr. Anne Fishel will talk through tough topics related to family meals. Pull up a chair and grab a plate — we’re serving up real talk about family dinner! You can get caught up on older episodes here.
We tend to think of family dinners as being about the kids. But all families start with two people, and some families stay that way. What does the research tell us about the benefits of shared meals for adults? And how can couples use their dinners together as a way to strengthen their bond and connect with one another, no matter how many children are at the table, or what phase of life they’re in?
In this episode, Bri and Annie draw on Annie’s decades of experience in family therapy, as well as their work together on The Family Dinner Project and their own personal experiences, to share strategies for couples. They talk about how to negotiate getting started with a shared meal routine early in a relationship, why it matters, and how eating together regularly can strengthen a sense of teamwork and boost mental health. Moving through the years, Bri and Annie point out that keeping family meals on the calendar can promote marital satisfaction if kids are part of the equation. And as relationships progress, they share tips and ideas for keeping the spark alive no matter how mealtimes change in the face of life’s demands.
Key Takeaways:
- Go to 3:39 for Dr. Anne Fishel’s thoughts on “What makes family meals so important for couples, given that there are all these other ways they have to connect?”
- Go to 7:00 for a quick overview of the most relevant research into the benefits of family meals for adults, including better conflict resolution and improved mental health
- Go to 13:47 for a discussion of how new couples starting out together can navigate setting up shared meals in a way that benefits them both
- Go to 18:04 for thoughts on how adding babies and toddlers to the mix might change a couple’s mealtimes — and how to preserve your connection
- Go to 24:03 to hear about the “messy middle” of life and how to get out of a dinner rut, keep shared meals on the calendar despite competing priorities, and keep the “spark” alive
- Go to 29:04 for food, fun, and conversation ideas for couples, from ways to use food as a love language to smart in-depth conversation starters and ways to bond over a shared interest during your meals
Related Episodes and Links:
Episode Transcript:
Bri DeRosa: Welcome back to the Family Dinner Project podcast. I’m Bri DeRosa and as always joining me is Dr. Anne Fishel.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Hello, Bri. Great to be with you.
Bri DeRosa: Great to see you this morning, Annie. And I, I have been so looking forward to this conversation with you because for listeners who don’t recall or who are new to us, Annie is a family therapist.
And so I really value your perspective always on especially kind of couples stuff, relationship stuff, and we decided that today we were going to talk a little bit about couples and shared meals, and how eating together can actually strengthen your relationship and become an opportunity to grow closer to one another, no matter kind of what stage of life you’re in.
Dr. Anne Fishel: I was thinking that, just coincidentally, today or this week is sort of the fifth year anniversary of COVID lockdown. Yes. It really was either an opportunity or a challenge or something very dramatic for couples to experience because they were spending, they spent, we spent so much more time together than ever before.
I mean, it was like all of us became retired couples, spending 24 7 together, no matter what age you were and it, you know, it was a whole, whole other aspect, I think, of the pandemic.
Bri DeRosa: You know, that’s such a great point. You’re right. I hadn’t even kind of looked at the calendar and made that connection, but you’re absolutely right.
And I remember at the time you actually wrote a piece for our site, which I’ll have to put in the show notes for everyone, about how couples in lockdown could look to the example of retirees to make their relationships withstand the rigors of kind of being forced together all the time, right? If you weren’t anticipating that, and we know for some people, that was too much togetherness and sadly, you know, COVID could prove the end of some relationships for some people who realized, wow, we just can’t do this.
But it also was, I think. strengthening for some couples and for some families. And we, we bore that out in the research that I know we’ve talked about on the show before, but in the research that you did around how COVID changed everyone’s perceptions of family meals. So I think this is a great time then to get into this and talk a little bit about what makes that difference, right?
Some of the key ingredients that make the difference between we are together, and we are spending time together, and we are eating meals together, and this is a bonding, strengthening experience, and not. Right?
Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah. And there’s so many things that couples can do together besides eating meals that define their relationship as a couple.
I mean, couples usually have sex with each other. They might take runs together. They might go to dinner parties with other couples. They take vacations together. They have little, you know, other kind of rituals about how they say hello at the beginning of the day and goodbye and and so on. So, you know, I was thinking what makes family meals so important for couples, given that there are all these other ways that they have to connect. And I was thinking there’s sort of two ideas for me that come together around family meals. One is the inevitability of having to eat to survive, which a lot of these other activities are more choices that you have to make, and maybe you have to be in the mood, and I’m thinking particularly about sex or even exercise.
A couple has to sort of coordinate. Do I really feel like that or let’s do it tomorrow, but food and eating has a kind of urgency to it. We, we all need to eat a few times a day to survive. So that’s kind of built in to helping each other and regulating each other’s lives and, you know, being sustainable, staying alive.
And then the other part of it is that there’s so many choices and opportunities to reinvent. eating with another person. What are we going to eat tonight? What are we going to talk about tonight? When are we going to eat? Who’s going to do the cooking? There’s so many opportunities to use mealtime as an opportunity to keep defining who we are as a couple.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I think that’s such a great point. And, you know, I, as you’re, as you’re talking, I’m thinking about I was recently chatting with my sister in law and she was saying how now that the kids are out of the house and she and my brother in law are both working from home they don’t actually tend to eat lunch together during the day.
They don’t always kind of deal with dinner, but that lately they’ve been making more of an effort to coordinate those mealtimes. And that is, she’s, she said it almost feels like a vacation, right? That they’re taking these moments to spend together and it. It has been good for them and it has broken up the work day and it has made things feel a little bit more fresher and more connected.
Right? So I think you’re, you’re on to something there, obviously, and I also just kind of want to point out we’re diving into this conversation and you and I know the benefits to adults sharing meals, but a lot of our listeners, we tend to think of family dinners as being about the kids, right? And a lot of our listeners might not know that there is a lot of research out there that suggests that no matter how old you are, whether there are kids in the picture or there aren’t, eating with other people conveys some very specific benefits.
It’s good for you. And one of the things, I’m going to let you dive in and tell us about this in a minute, but one of the things that always comes to mind for me is the study around firefighters, how they, when firefighters eat their meals together, and this is kind of legendary, right? Everybody knows the firehouse, you know, family meals.
When they are eating together–
Dr. Anne Fishel: –Cooking and eating together.
Bri DeRosa: Yes, great point. And so this, this thing where you’re eating together, you’re working together, and it actually boosts their performance. As a team later on when they go to fight fires, when they do the things that firefighters do, they do a better job as a team when they have cooked and eaten together first.
And that is, to me, really crucial to our understanding of the way that adults function when they eat together. If you’re eating together, if you’re cooking together, if you’re cleaning together, if you’re doing the thing, you’re a stronger unit, a better team, right?
Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah, and there’s related research, which is that when adults sit down with other adults and eat the same food, they solve conflict more easily.
Feels so incredibly important right now.
And there’s a whole body of research that suggests that when adults eat with other adults, they eat more healthily, they eat more fruits and vegetables than if they eat alone, and their mental health is improved. They’re less lonely, certainly, and have lower rates of depression and anxiety.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Family, of course, starts with two people and doesn’t have to involve kids.
Bri DeRosa: It doesn’t even have to involve family, right? Like, we include, when we think about family dinners, there are people out there who live alone, but who can have, you know, a weekly dinner with a, a very strong group of friends and that can be your family dinner, right?
But it needs to be routine. It needs to be ritualized. It needs to be something you can count on, right? There are lots of factors that go into that and certainly for couples I think one of the challenges is that routine and ritual thing because and we’ll talk about different points in the span of a relationship, right?
But there are, there are times where, for example, if you’re just starting out together and you haven’t gotten into a routine of eating with someone else and sharing a mealtime and everything that goes into that, planning and shopping and cooking, all of that and making those decisions together. It’s very easy to just kind of slide by in dinners, right?
You’re doing every, to your point, doing everything else together, but you know, oh, I’m not hungry yet. Well, I’m gonna eat. Okay, well, I’m gonna, you know, I’ll sit at the table and eat my ramen and scroll my phone and you’re gonna make yourself a salad later and scroll your phone and then we’ll, we’ll sit on the couch and you know, play a game or watch a show together.
And then later on in life, particularly, if say you’ve got an empty nest, there’s a real temptation after all of those years of getting it together for the kids, that you might just wine and cheese on the couch again? Like, I feel like doing a whole dinner thing. And so let’s, can we talk a little bit about, like, why is that not, why should we not just be sitting on the couch with wine and cheese and letting ourselves go?
Dr. Anne Fishel: I mean, sometimes that feels great. And there’s a certain freedom that comes from that, that can be, can be, really lovely, particularly if you’ve been so dutiful and regular and predictable about creating all those thousands and thousands of meals for, for children. I mean, I know when my kids first left for college, my husband and I were practically giddy not having to, you know, have dinner at a particular time and balanced meal and all of that.
And we’d have dinner at 10 o’clock at night, sometimes, sometimes we just have cheese and crackers, sometimes we’d sit in front of the TV, you know, if one of us felt like taking a walk at 6 o’clock, I’m taking a walk, you know, dinner is going to be postponed, if, you know, if you get hungry. eat before I get back.
So, I mean, there was kind of an embracing of the the break in our many year pattern. But over time, we sort of returned to more regularity I think because it had been such an enjoyable part of family life. So we wanted to, you know, bring it back, I think because we remembered how connected we felt when our kids were there.
And it was a, you know, predictable time of the day for us to check in with each other, talk about the news of the day, talk about our work, wonder what our kids were up to, problem solve, you know, all the things that Mealtime is good for, time to relax. So, without kids around, there are more opportunities to hang out with each other, but not in this sort of predictable way, with food as a bit of a relaxant and with the kind of built in routine and ritual of it.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I, I love that distinction, right, between like, hanging out, and ritualizing your hanging out. I think that’s, that’s a very important nuance that kind of tends to get lost. And it’s one of the things that I always point to. I just personally feel like whether it’s the two of you or the whole family or whatever, the idea of carving out the time and the space to make a meal.
To sit down, to say, hey, we’re going to stop everything else, and we’re going to take care of ourselves and each other, right? Physically, emotionally, we’re going to intentionally come together to do this, I think just sends a different message than many of the other things that we do together. And so, you know, especially I think if it’s just the two of you, that kind of caregiving, caretaking, nurturing ourselves and each other, Ritual can be very foundational and, and you almost don’t know until you miss it, right?
So how do we, if, let’s say you’re a young couple starting out or a new couple starting out at any age. What, What are some of the things that we need to be thinking about or doing as we’re trying to set up a routine together as we’re trying to get into this like let’s plan our meals intentionally around each other What is that?
Dr. Anne Fishel: So I think for for new couples newly cohabitating newly married couples the major kind of developmental task of that stage is, is making decisions as a couple that formerly were made individually or by the families that they grew up in. And there are dozens of those issues. You know, what are we going to eat?
And are we going to eat those meals together? And how are we going to divide the labor and so on? So I think food and mealtime is one of those really important decisions or That a couple comes to with their own histories and agendas that then have to be combined or worked out together. And when I work with couples at this stage, I’ll say to them, tell me what your childhood family dinners were like.
Tell me what you want to carry forward from those experiences into this new relationship or this new family that you’re starting to create. And through those experiences, very, very different, so there’ll need to be some negotiation where they’re quite similar and they’ll kind of fold in very seamlessly to one another.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I think that’s such a good point, the idea that we don’t all come from the same kind of conditioning around family meals, right? And there may even be someone in a couple who comes from negative conditioning around mealtime, right? So how do you negotiate that?
Dr. Anne Fishel: Well, sometimes when somebody has come from a really negative experience, you know, maybe a parent was intoxicated at most family meals, or there was even abuse at the table, sometimes they feel like, let’s just stay away from.
Mealtime, or let’s, you know, be in our, on our gadgets and just not engage with each other. But sometimes if the other partner had a really positive experience, that partner might say, let me, let me introduce you to this very rich and interesting and positive way to connect each day. And let’s just try it.
Or a therapist might say that to the couple might say, I know you’ve had a really hard time, Jacob, with your family dinners, but Sally over here had such a different experience. This might be an opportunity for you, Jacob, to go along for the ride and see what, what family meals or couples meals might offer you that you didn’t have. This is like a second chance to experience something different.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah, almost to kind of re parent yourself, right? You get, get the opportunity to have a little bit of a do over.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Right. Yeah.
Bri DeRosa: And that, that might not work for everyone, right? And we should say, you know, proceed with caution. Right. People, this is, this is not the kind of thing that you just drag your traumatized partner along for the ride, you know, you have to be sensitive and careful about it and to your point Maybe with the help of a therapist, right? but it can be really really an opportunity to break a pattern and rebuild a new one, especially if you do think that at some point you might expand your family, you want to kind of get that done before, that re patterning done and that negotiation done before you bring anyone else into the picture, right?
Dr. Anne Fishel: Shall we do a little romp across the life cycle, just like take a little snapshot of what all the different adult relationships look like at different stages of the life cycle?
Bri DeRosa: That’s, you are reading my mind.
That is exactly where I was heading next.
Dr. Anne Fishel: So, I’m thinking, if an adult, if they’re two adults, and let’s say they have a baby.
Bri DeRosa: Mm hmm.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Those early dinners often look like, let’s feed the baby, put the baby to sleep, and have some time to exhale and connect to each other and not try to eat dinner with the baby.
And then I think it may switch or can switch when that baby becomes a toddler or a preschooler. There’s research that suggests that when couples prioritize or start to have family dinners with a toddler and Think that that’s an important part of family life. It also improves their marriages. So that may be a time that family dinners really start almost on behalf of the adults in that family.
Helps them bond. It helps them have a predictable time of the day to connect with one another. And maybe it’s maybe they have part of the dinner with the toddler and then they put the toddler to bed and they have the rest of the dinner, just the two of them.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah. It’s, it’s so interesting, right? There, there are numerous ways that families manage this transition, but it is a significant transition, right? We’ve just talked about how do you get to a place where you guys feel great about your connection and your ritual and your routine, and you get to this thing that works for you. Right? Then you start adding small people.
And what you’re now doing is having to start to consciously shift things in a direction that will expand and work with the needs of these small people as well as your needs as a couple. And this is where things get lost, I think, right? The research, as you’ve said, bears out that if you can manage this transition well, you probably are going to feel better about your relationship than not.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes.
Bri DeRosa: But, you’re, you’re suddenly in a place where like for the next X number of years, you’re not quietly eating together and sharing details of your day, you’re trying to figure out who put spaghetti on the dog. You’re, you’re wiping up spills, you’re cutting people’s meat. You’re chasing people who are running away from the table with sticky hands.
You’re doing that whole thing and how? There’s so much potential for frustration there. Yes. How do you preserve your connection and your sense of eating together is good for us in the midst of what feels like, you know, endless years of chaos, right? Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Anne Fishel: What do we do? I don’t think that’s an easy, I don’t think there’s an easy solution to that.
I think there can be a both and, you know, we’ll spend some time some part of, or some of the meals will be all of us. And we’ll try to embrace the chaos and laugh through it, and delight in a child’s willingness to try a new food, and we’ll play the cat cow game, and we’ll know that these dinners are boosting our toddler’s vocabulary ten times more than reading books to them, and so we’ll feel some pride in that.
And then maybe they’ll, there’s some meals we just sit down with the toddler. We keep her company, but then once she goes to bed, we take an opportunity to have an adult dinner. Or we do some, some mixture of the two.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I think that’s really important, right? Cause I, there is a temptation and I see it a lot where people say, well, we’re just, you know, we’re just going to have the kids eat dinner.
And then there’ll be an adult dinner later, and when the kids are old enough and ready enough to join us at the table, we’ll all start eating together. And there’s, I think, a really good intention around that, but it, it kind of slightly misses the mark. Right? Because the point of eating dinner together, when they’re little, is that that’s what gets them ready to be good dining companions to you when they’re a little bit older, right? They don’t magically at the age of eight or nine suddenly become able to have a great family dinner with you. It’s about the training all the way along, right?
Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes, and we don’t, I don’t want to lose sight of the couple’s connection because those dinners are not that satisfying for the couple to, you know, talk about politics or talk about a fight they had with their boss.
There, I think, needs to be a balance and maybe, you know, for some couples with young kids, they try to go out once a, once a week for dinner or they have a dinner at, eight o’clock that’s takeout and that’s their, their time to really have an adult dinner.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah, and I think that’s so important, that concept of a date night, even if it’s an in home date night, you know, that you, every Friday night we’re doing pizza for the kids, and then, you know, later on we’re gonna cook something that we really like, or, you know, Saturday mornings we can get child care, we’re gonna go out to breakfast together.
Whatever the thing is, it is really important to do both, but not to just consistently separate the factions of the family.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Right.
Bri DeRosa: And that’s, I think, where that, that tricky dynamic lies, right? It’s not an either or, it is a both and.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes, yeah, well put.
Bri DeRosa: So then, okay, well, let’s say we’ve gotten through all of that tricky moment where you’ve got the younger kids and you’re trying to figure this out and everybody’s exhausted all the time and we’re, we’re trying to set things up.
Then, you know, I think there’s, there’s this other thing that we haven’t really talked about where I sort of call it the messy middle. You, maybe you have kids, maybe you don’t. But there comes a place where you’ve gotten your routines down, everything’s been sailing along, and you know, you get stuck in a rut, or, you know, your life kind of shifts, maybe there’s a career move, maybe there’s, you know, new hobbies, maybe there’s new schedules, and all of a sudden, it’s just not feeling as important anymore, or as satisfying anymore. It just feels like life is demanding your time and attention and you start to kind of move it off the calendar more often. You know? And you start to kind of fall back into old patterns that are not eating together as regularly or not paying as much attention to your connection when you do. What can people do to kind of keep the spark alive at that point? Do you know what I mean? How do you make it exciting to, to keep eating together after multiple years?
Dr. Anne Fishel: So, the messy middle, that’s a, it’s a long period of time, I mean, if we take the, the long view of dinners over the life cycle if a couple has children, the meals with children are going to make up a small, smallish proportion of the overall meals over the life cycle.
I mean, in other words, there’ll be way more meals that are just with the adults. If that couple stays together and they have a nice long life. And you ask sort of an existential, I mean it’s a question that’s not just about meals, it’s like what keeps a long relationship lively and interesting and what do we do with Rituals, or routines, or this would apply to sex, and vacations, and food, and all kinds of things, that couples can feel like they’ve settled into something, but now that there are years ahead.
What are we going to do about it? What brings novelty? What brings change to a couple differs from one to another? And I think that can be a really important ongoing conversation that a, that a couple has. What, what do we find gives us a sense of comfort and safety and stability? And what is starting to feel a little boring or too predictable?
And, you know, what are some ideas we have to liven things up? So it might be inviting people over for dinner, going out, eating in different rooms, trying new foods to, you know, trying a new cuisine that we’ve never cooked in, taking cooking classes together having a, a weekly ritual as I know you’ve started to do with extended family.
Inviting people from work over for dinner, for a potluck inviting neighbors over, you know, things maybe we didn’t have time to do when we were busier with careers or busier with our children.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I think that, that notion of taking an opportunity to expand your family dinner beyond the two of you, I think is sort of a nice way to negotiate that, right?
And, and to your point, there are lots of ways you don’t have to expand. Yeah, you can take a cooking class, you can learn to make, hey, we’re gonna get a pasta machine, right? And we’re gonna learn to make homemade pasta, and that’s gonna be like our Sunday thing that we do, or, you know, any number of things.
But the idea of expanding mealtimes once a week or regularly to include some other people that you care about and that you can reach out to and fold into your routine, I think is a nice way of keeping a community alive for the two of you as well, right? And that, you know, community is sort of, it’s like my buzzword for 2025, but, you know, it’s sort of really, really important, and it’s one of the things, going back to the, the top of this discussion, where you mentioned COVID five years ago, woo. That was one of the things that we all missed, right?
And being able to eat with others was really something that we, we prized when we didn’t have it. So it’s a great thing to remember now if you’re feeling kind of ugh. Reach out, right? Go beyond the two of you and that will strengthen the two of you.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah.
Bri DeRosa: We could probably talk about this in depth for a long time, but I think It would be great to maybe talk about food fun conversation now, our, our little way that we end all of our podcasts.
So I’m gonna maybe start off, I want to talk about the food thing, and one of the things that I always think of when it comes to eating together as a couple and, and bonding over food is the ways that you can use food as a love language, right? So for me, over the years with my own partner, I, I kind of take mental notes when we’re doing something that I think is going to be a significant memory, right?
Like our honeymoon or a special vacation or a really memorable date night. I’m trying to pay attention. What are we eating? What does he really seem to enjoy? What’s unusual about this? And then later on at home, I’m going to try to find a way to bring that back.
So you know. I, at one point early in our marriage, I reached out to a restaurant we had eaten at on our honeymoon and I got one of their recipes that I knew was going to be recognizable to him. And I made it one night when the kids were in bed and that was a really nice way of kind of showing him, hey, I remember. Right? And I’m prioritizing this memory for us, and I’m trying to bring this back into our lives.
Or, I know for you, you had, you had mentioned, this even goes beyond for just couples you had mentioned when, you know, your father was aging, you had some kind of food as love language things that you did.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah, I mean, my father was losing his sense of taste and smell in his 90s, but he loved to have a baked apple which reminded him of his childhood. And he loved to have a sweet potato pudding that my mother used to make for him, and even though maybe he didn’t taste it the same way, the memory of it, the colors of it, all of that was so evocative that it was very, very tasty to him, and he really looked forward to those foods.
Bri DeRosa: And, and I assume that strengthened your connection, right? That little, yeah, that little exchange of, of love through food.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes, yes. Yeah. I think, as with your husband, my father felt seen by me and as though I was paying attention to him. And I, and yes, those would be bonding, connecting moments.
Bri DeRosa: And I think it’s, I think it’s really important. To remember that that’s one of the whole, one of the whole things about eating together, right? That’s food, fun, and conversation. One of the things about food being involved is that it is such an expression of nurturing and care. And if you can take it to the next level, to really, and even if it’s just like, look, you’re not a cook, but it’s just you went to the effort to get your partner’s favorite takeout after they had a long day, right? Like you just, whatever that little thing is that makes them feel seen and understood through food, I think is really valuable
Dr. Anne Fishel: yeah, I love that.
Bri DeRosa: And, and speaking of helping people feel seen, you, especially during the pandemic, I know you developed some conversational habits with your husband that I think are really great, and I, I’d love it if you would share those so that people have a sense of how to expand their conversation beyond the, like, how was work?
Dr. Anne Fishel: Right, right, just as it gets a little tedious with children to say, how was your day? It can get tedious with our partners to say, how was work today? But yes, during, during COVID, I was thinking about often this quote about marriage, which is, a great marriage is a conversation you hope will never end.
During COVID that conversation sort of never did end, because we were together so often and really only saw each other at least for the first, you know, eight months or whatever. And so I started to pay attention to questions I had never asked him, or topics we had never gotten into, despite having been together for decades by the time COVID came along.
And so a couple of the ones that really sparked great conversations were what would it have been like if we had met as children? Can we imagine those encounters? And it would not have gone well at all, really.
Bri DeRosa: Me either. It would probably really would have been a disaster.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Or what trait of mine, do you wish you experienced a little less of, or what trait of yours do you wish that I appreciated more?
That was also kind of a fruitful topic. Or what’s one story about your childhood that you haven’t told me? That, that was a, another one that kept us talking for, for many hours. Because, of course, there was that one story, but then there were other stories, too. Or what book really has changed the way you think about me, or changed the way you think about the world? Could we talk about that?
Bri DeRosa: Those are really rich conversations, and they’re, what I’m noticing is kind of the thread of them being very much rooted in trying to know things about one another more deeply that you maybe didn’t know before. I would imagine you can even take this in a more playful direction, too, or a more imaginative direction.
Like there, I think there are some couples for whom those very intimate questions, the very direct ones of like, what about me do you wish you experienced a little bit less? That, that might be hard for some people, right? You and, you and Chris, I think are pretty evolved and can handle that conversation. Not everyone might be able to do that.
But I would imagine that you could possibly take things in a broader direction that’s a little less on the nose, and you could talk about things like, you know, what would be if we could have an ideal vacation? Let’s vision that, you know, and what would we be like together?
What would we be doing together? What would we be saying? How would we be feeling? Right?
Dr. Anne Fishel: Or what would an ideal day be like for you?
Bri DeRosa: Exactly. And, and not necessarily that you’re going to be able to recreate that, although maybe it will inspire you, but that you have a better sense of what your partner really values, you know, and what they hope for, what they dream about. If you just ask the question in a different way.
So the last, we haven’t talked about fun. Hopefully spending time together is fun, but if you do need a little bit of a boost, things that you might do besides cooking together and all of the things that we’ve already said, one way you can shake things up at dinner is to actually spend the time delving into an interest together.
So you might actually use dinner as an opportunity to listen to and discuss a podcast. Like, I know my husband right now is super into the West Wing Weekly podcast. If we didn’t have the kids with us at dinner, we might listen to the podcast together at that time and stop it and talk about things and, and, you know, go down memory lane a little bit about the show, because we both love it.
So you could do that. You could also, some couples enjoy doing like a book club. You might choose a book and either you’ve both committed to reading a certain amount that day or that week and you’re going to sit down and talk about it at dinner, or you can even read to each other a little bit at dinner.
There’s something very intimate and lovely about reading to someone or being read to that kind of hits on, on a core memory from childhood, hopefully, for many of us. And it’s very sweet, it’s very soothing, and that can be a nice opportunity, too.
Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah, I love that idea of reading. Reading aloud, remembering some families with one parent and one child have done that, because sometimes they felt like they ran out of things to talk about.
But it works really well with two adults, too.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah. It absolutely, absolutely does. And, you know, it can, you can take turns picking the book, right? You might not have the same taste in literature, but it’s a great opportunity to also get a little bit more exposure to what your partner is interested in.
What are they reading? What are they loving? What authors do they like?
Dr. Anne Fishel: Bringing a poem to dinner, if reading for a long time seems too effortful, to bring a favorite poem to read to the other one would also be something for a variation on that.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah, that’s really nice or even, you know, not that we always want everything to be rooted in the day to day or news or whatever, but even just if you came across an article during the day or a think piece and you want to highlight part of that and bring that to the table and read it to your partner and say, Hey, what do you think about this?
Right? There are different ways to kind of open up that line of communication that I just think in the day to day, we don’t think about it. You sit down and you go, what happened today? And that’s where you kind of get stuck. So hopefully we’ve given people some ideas, some ways to make dinner together. A more rewarding couple’s experience and not just kind of about the kids or about we’ve got to eat.
So, do you have any last thoughts for our couples out there, Annie, that you want to convey?
Dr. Anne Fishel: Well, we didn’t talk about couples beyond the middle, the messy middle, and actually, research suggests that retired couples or couples in their 70s and beyond are the happiest of couples, which may, may seem counterintuitive, but they have the lowest conflict and the most comfort spending time with each other.
I just, I think about that as something maybe positive to look forward to those, those later meals.
Bri DeRosa: I think that’s that’s a great note of hope to end on, right? That even if things feel a little complicated right now, it’s very possible, probable even, that they’re going to feel a lot better. Yeah. I think that’s a message we can all get behind no matter what we’re talking about, and so I’m gonna wrap us up for today and say thank you so much for your insights and your wisdom.
As always, Annie, it’s been a pleasure.
Dr. Anne Fishel: And right back at you, Bri.
Bri DeRosa: And listeners, don’t forget to find us on social media at Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and to always reach out to us if at any point in time you have questions or comments. We’d love to hear from you, so take care.
