You deserve to feel celebrated in your relationship.
How often do you celebrate with your partner? Maybe you reserve celebrations for your anniversary or birthdays. Or maybe holidays come to mind, like New Year or Christmas. But if you limit your celebrations to these calendar dates, you may be missing the chance to infuse more fun, happiness, and connection into your relationship.
What if you celebrated more often? What if you celebrated passing a difficult test or making a big decision? What if you celebrated changing jobs, chasing new opportunities, or moving houses? Even better: what if you celebrate the mundane things, like getting through a tough work week or just buying a new sofa? Bonus points if that new sofa replaces an embarrassingly old one.
What if you celebrated just being alive, even when some things aren’t going according to plan? You – and your partner – deserve to feel celebrated in your relationship.
Why You Should Celebrate
If you’re not convinced that popping a bottle of champagne on the regular is necessary for your relationship, here are some of the top reasons why celebrating will improve your relationship and bond with your partner.
Liven Up the Ordinary
Keep things from becoming too routine and stale in your relationship. Make your everyday life a bit more special with a nice dinner for completing a project or a day trip for getting a promotion. Sometimes, our accomplishments get mentioned in a conversation to our partner, and perhaps they give us their congratulations and a kiss – and then move on. But regular celebrations allow for quality time together while keeping the relationship fun and unpredictable.
Mutual Support
I once had a partner who had an interesting response to me getting my dream internship. His response was no response. While I know now that he had his own struggles that kept him from celebrating with me, at the time, it made me question everything. Does he love me? Does he think I don’t deserve this? Does he not support me pursuing my goals? That kind of doubt can fester. By making a genuine point to celebrate each other’s accomplishments, you show your support for each other and allow each other to strive for bigger and better things. After all, relationships should be a space to be your whole, authentic self, not a smaller version of who you are.
Show Your Solidarity
Celebrating life with your partner shows that you’re in this together. What makes you happy makes them happy, and vice versa. When you share that celebratory experience, you can increase your trust and feelings of belonging. It can also increase compassion in your relationship by sharing the feeling of excitement or relief.
Expand Your Circles
Celebrations in your relationship don’t just have to be between you and your partner. It’s easy to imagine a wedding ceremony with perhaps hundreds of guests. What if you included your friends and family in other celebrations, too? While romantic dates with your partner may be a great way to celebrate sometimes, other times you could have a group dinner or backyard get-together. This is a great way to mingle with each other’s circles.
Be Positive
Okay, so I’m not actually a proponent of advice like, “Have positive thoughts!,” or, “Just be positive!” I know life can be hard, and looking on the bright side can’t solve everything. But it can also be tempting to focus on problems, complaints, and what isn’t working in our lives. Instead, when you take more time to celebrate, even small accomplishments, it creates more space to focus on the good things. When you take time to celebrate and have fun, you may find yourself distracted away from some of the bad things – or they may just start to seem less significant after all.
How to Celebrate With Your Partner
(10 Ideas, Both Big & Small)
- Bake a favorite treat
- Buy a nice bottle of champagne
- Get a small gift, wrapped nicely with a bow
- Have a BBQ or home get-together
- Go to a local theme park and feel like a kid again
- Have dinner at a favorite restaurant and splurge a little on dessert
- Have celebratory sex
- Take a day or weekend trip to a nearby destination
- Write a heartfelt message or get a personalized card for the occasion
- Take a trip to a faraway place you’ve always dreamed of