Esther Perel

And I'll hug her and the kids just, they look so happy.

But then my wife, Penny, will all straight away,

grab my hand and say, look, we're dancing.

And she'll do like a really funny dance.

And so it's not affectionate, sort of silly that they're laughing at.

And so in that moment, it plays out every time there's me trying to trick her into being affectionate.

And she's then tricking me out of being affectionate by making a joke of it.

Sometimes.

Yeah, I guess I have that, yeah.

Yeah, I would say that's very true.

Yeah, it's beautiful.

As far as, so you're saying with what my wife and I, the issue we have here.

We've been trying to check in with each other once a week to have Monday nights.

We will sit down and talk about our relationship.

And we found it really problematic because we don't.

In fact, so this is a question that she wrote for you because I've had a question.

So she gets a question too.

So this is from my wife, Penny.

We're trying to establish weekly check-ins for our relationship, but we're finding it difficult to know what to talk about and how to contain our emotions when the other one talks about something they're not happy with.

What would be your advice as to how to structure these check-ins so that they can be effective but not end up with us feeling resentful or annoyed?