Love this idea for 5 minutes
Love this idea for 5 minutes is a marriage rule from So You Married a Human by Jackie Kelley. Before you judge your spouse's new idea, you give it genuine enthusiasm for five minutes instead of shutting it down the moment you hear it.
In Jackie's words
Super-Hot Husband and I are both heavily into hobbies. Any and all hobbies. Big and small hobbies. Safe and dangerous hobbies. Seriously, our hobbies run the gamut from crocheting axolotls to building welders out of old microwave parts. The big problem with this is that the two of us tend to define “fun hobbies” very differently, which means our interests cover a large spectrum. I don’t think you would believe the insane activities we’ve agreed to let each other engage in. In case you don’t believe me, here are just a few:
- Getting a full tattoo sleeve (Jackie)
- Buying a sixteen-year-old motorhome (Super-Hot Husband)
- Getting a pilot’s license (Super-Hot Husband)
- Becoming a social media influencer (Jackie)
- Buying multiple broken cars (Super-Hot Husband)
- Shaving my head (Jackie)
- Driving out to the middle of the desert and learning motorcycle parkour (Super-Hot Husband)
- Hiking the Grand Canyon together (Super-Hot Husband)
- Painting a ten-foot-tall mural freehand in our foyer (Jackie)
- Quitting a cushy job to start a business (Super-Hot Husband)
- Hoarding 150 used stuffed animals in our guest room to donate to charity (Jackie)
Did I mention that we have fun brains?
I’ll admit we have grown much more similar during our tenure together. But even after twelve years of marriage, we rarely have the same level of excitement about anything. In fact, there are plenty of things I have gotten jump-out-of-my-chair excited about that my husband has hated and vice versa.
Because of this, we both developed a yearslong habit of shutting down the other’s dreams the moment they hit our ears. Our less-than-stellar reactions often stemmed from us making immediate and sweeping judgments about what we thought the other’s idea would entail or how we thought it would affect us.
Looking back, I can see that these assumptions stemmed from a major lack of trust partnered with the inability to give each other the benefit of the doubt.
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