A Gift of Two

Of all the rooms in your house, the master bedroom is the most important. Yet, most couples put much less effort into making their love nest into a place that they’d want to be together, than they put into making their living room a nice place for the kids to watch TV. Even worse, lots of couples pile all sorts of junk in their bedrooms, using it as an extra storage room.

When we visit people, one of the things my wife and I do is try and get a peek into the master bedroom. It’s amazing how much you can tell about a couple’s marriage, just be taking a peek into how they care for their bedroom. Couples who have a good marriage tend to have nice, neat, well decorated bedrooms. I’m not saying that they’ll be perfect, there’s always something lying around, but they’ll be pretty darn good. On the other hand, couples who have struggles in their marriage will tend to have messy bedrooms, with stuff piled in there that really doesn’t belong.

Why don’t you get together with your wife and make a decision to clean up your act? Make your bedroom into the refuge that it’s supposed to be. Cart the pile of clothes that don’t fit anybody off to Goodwill. Put the dirty clothes in the laundry room and put the clean clothes away. Then get your fishing gear out of the corner and put it in the garage. Maybe your old work boots should go there too.

Let’s get radical now and paint your bedroom. Find a nice color, that you both like, and relaxes you. Hot pink probably won’t do the trick. Maybe put a wallpaper border around the ceiling, and some new pictures on the wall. If you have room, add a love seat or at least a nice big chair.

Here’s where the “gift of two” comes in. To kick off your redecorating project, buy a statuette of a couple. If you can find a statuette of them embracing, that would be perfect. Give that to your wife as a gift. When she opens it, say, “Now we’ll have to find a place in our bedroom to put it.” From there, you can go on to explain the whole project of redecorating your bedroom.

Having a bedroom where the two of you feel comfortable, a place where you feel that you can go to get away from everything, and just be alone as a couple is an important part of romance. When your bedroom looks like a storage shed, your wife won’t feel very romantic in there. But, when your bedroom becomes what it should be, a place of sharing yourselves with yourselves, then the two of you can enjoy your time together.