This is a fun exercise to let your spouse and you learn a little bit about your day. Often spouses are separated for many hours throughout the day. During these hours your spouse can go through a myriad of thoughts, feelings, experiences, and interactions. You know how it can be after you both finally get back together after a long day apart. The wife asks you, “So how was your day?”  You give her the monotone, “Fine.”  If you ask her about her day you get some small response and you go on to enjoy the rest of your night.

Every once in a while all of us have one of those interactions. Yet as a counselor I have known couples that have interactions like that go on almost indefinitely day after day, year after year. When that happens certain feelings of aloneness, separation, and even indifference can creep into a marriage not to even mention the feelings of being unappreciated.

The two E’s can help start this conversation with your spouse to go in a slightly different direction. With the two E’s you share two specific occurrences in your day so your spouse gets some window into where you have been in the separate part of your day. When you do the two E’s you also want to be facing each other and giving each other eye contact when you are sharing. Secondly, keep your sharing to something that did not involve your spouse.

The two E’s are “energized” and “effort.”  What you would be sharing with your spouse is something that energized you. Secondly, you are sharing something that really was some effort. Let’s look at an example of the two E’s. Our couple for this demonstration is Eli and Vanessa.

Eli  “Today I was energized by one of my coworkers. He was sharing how it went in his sales meeting with the ideas I had shared with him over lunch last week. He closed a good account and he actually told the owner that I had a part in that working out to be a sale.”

“Today it was an effort for me because I was stuck in traffic due to construction and that caused me to get behind and I really didn’t catch up to what I wanted to be done for a couple of hours. Just sitting stuck in the car took every ounce of strength not to scream.”

Vanessa “I was energized today when I talked to my sister Carol. She was so excited about Jon. Jon started to walk yesterday. It reminded me of when our children started to walk and just how fast the years go by.”

“It took effort for me not to bust the phone when I was dealing with the mortgage company. They had the menus to push buttons and three times in a row I was disconnected.”

I think you can see what we are doing. We are just sharing a slice of our day with our spouses. This exercise also takes a very short period of time to do but really can make a difference for your spouse to feel like they were part of the day you had. I will warn you though that you can really get into this exercise and talk about the other parts of your day as well. As a counselor, I say the more sharing, the better.

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