When we left for The Amazing Race, the biggest source of anxiety I had was the fact that we could not bring our phones with us. No way to communicate with our kids, no way to check the news, no way to get lost in a TikTok scroll. But, you know what happened? Not having phones ended up being our favorite part of the race experience. In our downtime, we found ourselves bonding over foreign TV shows that we actually watched together without distraction.
Once we got home, we had a lot of catching up to do and found ourselves going in the other direction. We were on our screens ALL.THE.TIME. It felt like digital adultery spending more time in connection with our phones than in connection with the people in our house. We realized we needed to create some boundaries to keep our relationship with each other (and our family) healthy.
The Penn Commandments
Back in 2019, Penn and I had a discussion on how screens were wrecking intimacy in relationships. (Little did we know the pandemic was right around the corner.) A lot has changed in our world since then, so we invited our marriage coach Christopher Edmonston to discuss.
Penn came up with another installment of The Penn Commandments, to help us maintain healthy screen boundaries for our marriage. One of them is spending time talking with your partner every day without any screens. If you need help getting your conversations started, this conversation starter pack is a good jumping-off point. Listen for more suggestions and tell us if you have any good tips we should know!
