Recently, my husband, Mike, and I had a great time talking with Ron Deal, bestselling author, licensed marriage and family therapist, for his Family Life Blended Podcast. 

Our episode, “Daily Practices for Happy Stepcouples” offers advice for all kinds of couples, not just stepcouples and not just happy couples.  On the contrary, it was about the little things Mike and I did when we came together and starting experiencing challenges. We’ve shared these practices with hundreds of couples through the years. They are for any couple who, like us, just wants small ways to make big changes in the middle of whatever craziness they find themselves in. 

We hope Episode #38 gives you a reason to smile or brings up a laugh for you.

There’s quite of bit of laughter throughout, and, yes, it’s real.  It was a such a pleasure and honor to work with Ron Deal. In large part, it was thanks to Ron and his ability to make us feel at ease and comfortable, as well as the wonderful engineer of Family Life Blended.

Also, we think laughter as a daily practice is important. We don’t actually talk about this practice in the podcast but a long time ago, when things were really hard due to the messiness and complicated stuff of life, Mike and I decided that we were going to have to make a point of laughing every day … even if things didn’t feel funny.

During our toughest times, we would watch Seinfeld reruns together every single night, just to force us to laugh when we didn’t feel like it.  We developed our own secret, bizarre sense of humor and jokes, so that we could make ourselves see difficult items as manageable. After almost 20 years together, we just keep doing these practices because they create a consistent rhythm of love to our life, and they have continued to help us get through any challenge we face. We hope they help you too.

You can listen to the full podcast here.