85: Spring Cleaning Your Relationship Pt. 1: Am I Still The One?
Meet the Host
Five years ago, after achieving my degrees and teaching as a professor, I was feeling proud that I had checked everything off my life list. But, I wasn’t satisfied in my marriage.
Today, I’m a relationship coach on a mission to resurrect the side of you that got lost in your relationship and responsibilities teaching you how to stop arguing and have more sex. Millions of people around the world soak up my content for advice on how to have a more satisfying relationship.
This week, we are kicking off a brand new series called Spring Cleaning Your Relationship! This is a four-part series that you can use to check in with your partner, strengthen your relationship, and make sure you’re still a team.
Part One of this new series will focus on one question: Am I still the one? Notice how we’re not asking, “Do you still love me?” And that’s because the answer to that question is not enough. You can love someone and not want to do life with them anymore. This is why we’re checking in with our partners and creating a safe space to hear their answers.
Check out this week's episode to hear how having these heavy conversations improved my marriage and how I help my clients create a safe space within their relationships to have these conversations.
Click the link to listen below and email me back with your thoughts, I want to hear from you!
If this episode resonated with you and you're ready to work with me during this season of your life, then I invite you to book a sales call below.
During the sales call, you will share what is going on in your life, what you have tried so far, and how I can help. I can't wait to meet you, chica.
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Episode Transcript:
Karina: Amigos, como estan? Welcome to Relationships. You Understand? with Me. Your host, Karina F. Days, relationship expert and speaker. We are doing a series called, I'm spring cleaning your relationship. Okay. Y'all recognize spring cleaning your home. We are doing a four-part series called spring cleaning your relationship, where I am breaking down for you, the four questions that I want you to ask your partner as you spring clean your relationship.
Okay. These episodes are going to be very short and to the point. Today's episode, we're going to focus on asking your partner the question, am I still the one? Now, before we get into it, I just want to say thank you for coming back for another week of Relationships You Understand. And how grateful I am to have this wonderful, beautiful community of people that trust me and my expertise.
And I just am super grateful for God allowing me to be the very vessel, um, to share a lot of the messages that come to mind. Okay. So. Here we go. And at the end of this episode, I will be answering a relationship question. So please feel free to DM me your relationship questions, email them to me, send me your relationship questions and comments of my reels.
But today we are hitting the series off with spring cleaning your relationship. Um, four-part series. Here we go. Ready? The first question. When you are getting ready to spring clean your relationship that I want you to ask your partner, as is, am I still the one now? Q Shania Twain, here's the thing. Am I still the partner that you desire to do life with?
That is how I want you to ask the question plenty of times the way that we ask this question is do you still love me and the reason why You're gonna even Be confused from the answer is because it's not enough Your partner is going to love you for a long time. Even if things are not working out You There's this love that was created there, right?
There's a care that was created there. They may not be a desire to be together, but you're asking the wrong question because the answer to, do you still love me is most likely going to be, yes, you are asking the wrong question. When you are spring cleaning your relationship, you need to be asking the question of, am I still the partner that you desire to do life with?
Okay. I don't care if you've been together five months, five years, 10 years, 15 years, 25 years, whatever the case is. When you are trying to recalibrate your relationship, when you are trying to get answers in your relationship, I no longer want you to ask the question of, do you still love me? I want you to ask the question straight up.
Am I still the partner that you desire to do life with? It is a very different question than, do you still love me? Now, when you are thinking about, do you still? desire to do life with me, I am talking literally about all of the things and decisions that you make in a relationship. For example, do you still, do you still desire to go to church with me?
Do you still desire to achieve these goals with me? Do you still desire to have sex with me? Do you still desire to have kids with me? Do you still desire to own property with me? Do you still desire to make sure that God is our third knot? Do you still desire, uh, to, uh, achieve our independent goals of this marriage, which is like, maybe you have a business, may I have a career goals, whatever that is, do you still desire to go on vacation with me?
Do you, do you still desire to joke around with me? And have parties with me. Do you still desire to go grocery shopping with me? Do you still desire to have late nights where we're eating ice cream in the kitchen with me? Do you still desire to do life with me? So when you ask this question and your partner then says, what do you mean?
I want you to then give the example of our everyday life outside of the routine. Do you still desire? For us to be together in doing the things that life and God is throwing our way. It is very important that you know the answers to these questions, because if you don't know the answer, if your partner still desires to do life with you, you will just stick around because of the time that you put in.
You will convince yourself and say yourself, we've been around each other for X amount of years. There are, you know, the person I've been with the longest, we've put it so much effort and so much time into it. You will just stick around for convenience and not necessarily for a desire because you're a match.
There is a big difference between Staying with somebody because you desire to do life with them and being with somebody because you feel like you put all of this time into it and now it's just convenient that you remain together. And my husband and I were actually having a conversation about relationships in the past, and how many of our family members, older family members, are with each other for a convenience, right?
In the sense that either the marriage may have been, you know, arranged and people may have said, you know, neighborhood Johnny marry Patty, or in the sense that, you know, They felt like one person can take care of the other person and that they could have kids together and whatever like their vision of being together was very Convenient and now what I want you to understand is that you have the privilege of no longer really needing convenience I want you to focus on the desire to be happy on the desire to receive love on the desire that You have every right to be with somebody that you desire to do life with.
You understand? And when you and your partner start answering this question of, you know, uh, am I still the life partner that you desire to do life with? You will answer the question that everybody asks At some point in their relationship, especially when they are upset, which is what are we doing here?
Every single couple has asked themselves that question in frustration. Like what are we doing here? Right? What is our purpose? What are we doing here? And what is our purpose? Why are we even together? I want you and your partner as you spring clean your relationship to really start talking about are you each other's person?
Because when you start unraveling that answer, you will then figure out what your purpose of your relationship is. Do you know at this point what the purpose of your relationship is? Cause I'll tell you one thing, the purpose of your relationship is not just to have kids and buy a home. The purpose of your relationship is much bigger than that.
You understand? God did not place my husband, Terrence and I to just have kids and pay a mortgage and have successful jobs. That is the worldly desire. That is the worldly view. That is not what God wants for us. I want to challenge you and your partner to really start having these heavy conversations, especially as you spring clean your relationship, to start having these heavy conversations of not only am I still the person that you desire to do life with, but what are we doing here?
What do you feel like God is calling us both to do? Okay. Now I want to give you a little bit of transparency into some of the work that I do with my clients, but specifically where it is rooted from. And I can share with you personally, uh, in my marriage, what my purpose is. Right. So I w I wrote a couple of things down that I know for sure is our purpose.
So here goes, when I think about my marriage and I think about. The fact that we are choosing to be with one another, that we are choosing to have a desire to do life with the other person. I think about the purpose that God has for us. And for me, these are the purposes that I know God was meant I know that God put us together to have, which are one, he put us together to break the cycle of divorce, divorce, and being together for convenience is a spirit that lives in both of our family lineages.
Number two, he put us together to build. and pass on generational wealth. So it is a very common in both of our family lineages for there either not to be anything to be passed down or things to be built, but nothing gets taught to the next generation. Three, we were put together to stop emotional traumas.
So the way that we parent, um, is very different in the way that we were raised. And I think that Terrence and I definitely struggle with, um, balancing gentle parenting and also balancing, you know, making sure that our kids grow up to be good people. So like, how do you show them street smart and book smart?
Right. And, uh, the next one, which is, listen, this is a value that him and I have come up with together, but I couldn't have imagined any differently. God put us together so that we can be the life of the party. And what I mean by that is that when you walk into our energy, when you walk into Terrence and I space.
You can just feel joy. You can feel that no matter what it is that we have going on, we put all that aside and we're here to have a good time. You can invite us anywhere and we will have a good time. And the last part kind of goes hand in hand, which is that I know that God put us together to mentor and talk to people.
I think that our story is very unique in the way that many of the things that we've gone through. You know, ended in us no longer being together, but with God being so sovereign and really coaching us and putting angels of support in our lives, whether it was a marriage group, whether it was our therapist, whatever it was, we were able to overcome a lot of the challenges.
Take those testimonies and be able to coach and mentor other people, not necessarily just couples, but other people that when they come to a house party at our home, we're, you know, having these conversations with individually or as a couple. And I think that when I look at that list, that's exactly what I help my clients in my private one on one coaching program.
And even the couples that I coach really come up with, which is. What is your purpose? What are y'all doing together? Why are you with one another? Right? Like, why do you think God put you and your husband together? Why do you think God put you and your wife together? I'll tell you one thing. It wasn't just to have a wedding, have kids, get married, buy a house.
Like it, it was much bigger than all of that. And plenty of times couples remain so stuck. And listen, you may not agree with me on this, I love attending a good wedding, but there are many many couples that get so caught up in Planning for a really long time and heavily and deeply for the wedding But don't put the same amount of effort into the marriage and I know you've heard it before which is like the marriage is Is the real work?
Absolutely. And I'm not asking you to work on the marriage so it could be perfect. I'm asking you to come up with strategies that can just progress your marriage in the right direction so that when life hits you, you can go back to your value so that when life hits you, you go back to your purpose and you don't end up empty handed.
You understand? And so what I want to offer you today is really asking your partner, the question of, am I still the person that you desire to do life with? I was working with a client that had, uh, that had coached recently in asking her partner this, and the answer that she received wasn't one that she liked.
Her partner shared with her that he was confused and that he didn't know if he wanted to be in this relationship anymore. They had been for a while, and he just said that he wasn't the person that he felt like. Needed to be a partner like he just felt like he didn't have the requirements to be not just her partner But anybody's partner And it wasn't something that she was expecting.
It was something that she felt, but it wasn't something that she expected. And it was something that she felt was happening because of his actions or because of the way that their relationship was going. And she really wanted to communicate with him, but she could never get him to answer the question.
And through our time together, I was able to coach her. Through how to create a safe space to be able to answer this question. This is a deep ass question, by the way. Okay. Your partner, in order to answer this question, your partner needs to feel safe enough to even give you the truth about how they actually feel.
Okay. I want to help you and teach you how to create that safe space so that your partner can answer these difficult questions as you sprinkling your relationship and try to figure out. If this is the relationship for you. Okay. And I get it. It's much harder to answer these questions, especially in long term marriages.
Okay. But that's the work that I want to do with you. So go to link of my bio book, a sales call. So we can talk about everything that's happened so far, what you've tried and how I can help. I want to help you and your partner have open and safe conversations. and difficult conversations in a manner that help you both begin to comprehend each other and get you out of this cycle of communication and arguing.
Okay. Because sometimes we think that we're communicating, but communicating is worthless if you're not comprehending each other. Okay. Okay. Now let me answer the question that was sent to me recently. So at the end of my podcast episodes, I'm doing a new thing, which is that I am having Y'all just send me questions of your relationships, and I'm just going to answer them live here.
All right, you can email them to me. You can send me a DM. So here goes. This is from my DMs and for the sake of their names, I'm going to keep it private. So this is the question. Karina, good morning. You're truly a great positive source of wisdom. Thank you. They say my job is very stressful. 26 years in healthcare profession.
My only daughter went off to college in fall of 2023. I got remarried in 2022. I was recently diagnosed with a mild mental health challenge resulting in a protected LOA from work. So leave of absence while on leave at month one at one month, I felt alone, sad. Simply the blues, I still cooked and cleaned, but my husband seemingly isolated me with comments suggesting that he does not acknowledge my issue.
Asked what should he do, leave, go stay with a family member, or go stay with a family member. He sent insensitive social media reels regarding being married to a bipolar wife with images that reflect stereotypical out of control animals kissing their spouse then hissing. Intimacy is none. He's been avoiding me like the plague.
We just wrapped up a three to four day silent war. I'm starting to think his who disposition had become a trigger for me. What the heck is going on? I'm feeling stronger now taking a mild antidepressant and preparing to return to work. But I am concerned that the person husband who I've lived with for 15 years inclusive of two years of marriage may have a direct influence on my mental health and well being.
What happened to in sickness and in health vows your thoughts? Okay. So to summarize this person, uh, recently was diagnosed with a mild mental health, um, diagnosis and had a leave of absence from work and felt like during that diagnosis and leave of absence, her partner changed on her and asked if he should, you know, leave or stay with the family member and began to send her really insensitive social media reels.
So a couple of things her question is what happened to in sicknesses and health and for my thoughts a couple of things one is that You're most likely right about You know, she's been with this person for about 15 years. So the first thing I'm gonna say is that this is Should not be a surprise in the sense that there probably were other instances where similar things happened, where there was lack of empathy, where there wasn't a need for care, whether that was, you know, you may have gotten a cold, you may have, you know, been sick from work, you may have needed them, whatever the case is, these red flags were shown before.
So for your partner to act as insensitive as they did now, especially after 15 years, I'm going to tell you right now that they had been bottling up a lot of this resentment, and which is why their question was, should I leave? Right? That's not that question is not from somebody that this is, you know, Oh my God, you just got sick.
Let's figure this out. This is somebody that's been bottling up a lot of resentment from other things. So while and The biggest hurt came from this instance. I'm going to tell you right now with like 100 percent certainty that this is not the first time. Number two, it is very clear that he doesn't understand your diagnosis and understand where you're coming from.
I think that there is still space to leave the offense on the side and Share with your partner what it is that you need from a place of listen. This is new for me, too I've you know, i've never gone through this. I've just been diagnosed You know, maybe the time that we spent together in you know x amount of years Um, there has been something wrong and I just found out and i'm this is new to me as much as it is as it is Navigating, um this new thing for you, too.
So I do think that there is still space to try and do this together, um, but it does require leaving both of your offenses at the door and having open communication regarding how you would like their assistance in solving this together, okay, or just even support of this together. I think to your last question of like what happened to in sickness and health, I think that it goes back to my original comment, which is like, your partner has shown.
Previously that they don't deal well with this part There is I get the sense that there is either an annoyance on their part or resentment on their part. Something else is going on Um, and i'm curious actually to hear after you hear this episode if there was But I think that for you If you have a partner right now that is not able to really support you through something that Is new to you something that is hurtful something that is harsh for you to go through I think that it's important to let your partner know That you're having a difficult time that you're realizing that you really can't lean on them to support you and that you will figure out other ways to Um be able to put yourself first because at the end of the day You're going to waste a lot of energy trying to get them on board to help you When my biggest advice to you right now is to help yourself first Don't waste your time in trying to get them on board to help you.
Instead, spend your time in taking care of yourself and figuring out what your support circle looks like, regardless of how your husband feels. Understand? Okay. I hope that helps. Um, listen, can I pray for you? I'm going to pray for you anyways. All right, here we go. Father God, I thank you so much for the revelations and the messages that you give us, Lord.
I thank you for being such a good father to us. I thank you for the love that you give us. I thank you for the desire that you put in our hearts for us to desire to connect with each other. Thank you for the children that you created. Thank you for the opportunities that you created around us. And I thank you for the partners that you have given us, Lord.
I know sometimes it can be really difficult to be married to somebody that. We can wake up and look at every day and wonder why you put us together. And so in this moment, Lord, I just ask that you give us the reason why we're together. Whether it's a sentence, a theme, a word, whatever it is, I think many of us are searching for those answers because it's difficult for us to find that clarity when we feel really clouded by our hurt.
Our resentment, the shame, the embarrassment, whatever it is that exists in the relationship right now. I ask that you send down an abundance of clarity for us. We love you so much. In your name we pray. Amen. Okay. Listen. If right now you are struggling in your relationship and you are ready to stop arguing and have more sex and You want more?
strategies on how to be able to communicate better so that your partner understands you and You don't make them feel like a piece of crap and they actually start feeling safe with sharing what's on their heart I want to help you. I want to help you I want to help your partner and I want you to know that like you don't have to do this work together I've worked with plenty of individuals that have come forth to do the work themselves because a better relationship begins with a better you.
Amen. Okay. Go to link of my bio and book a sales call so we can talk about everything that's happened so far, what you've tried and how I can help. I really can't wait to meet you. Thank you for coming back for another week. Of relationships. You understand where I am doing a four part series on spring cleaning your relationship in which today we started out with, am I still the one?
My name is Karina F. Dave's. I am a relationship expert, a speaker. And if you enjoy this episode, please make sure to subscribe to it, share it with all of your amigos and leave me a review and Apple iTunes. All right. I love you so much. Ciao.
