Nationwide Date Night is the 18th! Are you planning a date with your spouse? Are you fresh out of ideas and maybe fresh out of money too?
Don’t let money stop you from dating your spouse. Get your copy of 20 Dates for $20 here.
Please leave a comment below sharing some of your date night ideas. You might be the winner of all of Kathi’s marriage books!
Last week, we ran a series of posts featuring articles and five books that will change your marriage. As part of the series, we gave away each of the five books to five winners. Yes, one person per day won five books! This series was such a hit. Now it’s time to announce the winners:
Congratulations to Sarah M, Tracy H, Missy B, Heather L and Rachel V! Your books will be on the way soon so watch out for them.
Now if you missed this series, be sure to check out each post and please consider buying the books that we featured. These truly are marriage-changing books.
It’s Easy Being Married to You by Arlene Pellicane featuring 31 Days to Becoming a Happy Wife.
The #1 Secret to Ending Arguments in Marriage by Fawn Weaver of Happy Wives Club featuring The Argument-Free Marriage.
Sex is for you, too! by Sheila Wray Gregoire featuring Nine Thoughts that Can Change Your Marriage.
The Secret He Secretly Wishes You Knew by Shaunti Feldhahn featuring Through a Man’s Eyes.
How to Be a Hot Mama in Your 40’s by Kathi Lipp and What it Looks Like to Be a Hot 30-something Mama by Erin MacPherson featuring Hot Mama: 12 Secrets to a Sizzling Hot Marriage!
My publisher has decided to run a month-long sale on two of my ebooks!
The “What’s for Dinner?” Solution: Quick, Easy, and Affordable Meals Your Family Will Love is on sale for $2.99. Click here to purchase!
Image borrowed from Elisa’s post
Also, we’ve picked our five winners from our 5 Books to a Better Marriage series. Congratulations to Tracy, Rachel, Sarah, Missy and Heather! We will be in touch with you soon and you should have your books in no time.
Thank you everyone for leaving such great comments and for joining us each day!
Don’t miss this: 10 Hot Date Night Ideas for Married Couples is FREE on Kindle!
“Earlier this year 37-year-old Maggie Gyllenhaal revealed in an interview with The Wrap Magazine that she was denied a role opposite a man almost 20 years her senior because she was ‘too old’.
‘There are things that are really disappointing about being an actress in Hollywood that surprise me all the time,’ she said. ‘I’m 37 and I was told recently I was too old to play the lover of a man who was 55. It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made me feel angry, and then it made me laugh.” DailyMail.com
I love Maggie Gyllenhaal’s evolution of feelings when it comes to being judged as “too old” at 37 to play the love interest of a 55 year old actor.
First, she felt bad.
Then, it made her angry.
Then, it made her laugh.
When one of us is made to feel badly about ourselves, for our age, our weight, our sags, our lines, I know very few people who embrace such a body positive image that we’re able to just laugh straight off. Just as there are seven stages of grief, I believe these are the three stages of self-acceptance.
As a woman who is trying to make sure that I’m doing all I can to feel great about myself and my marriage, the world is definitely not making it easy on us.
[Tweet “How to be a HOT MAMA in your 40’s #bettermarriage5”]
And so at 40-something, when I start to feel bad about the criteria the world uses about how I look, about my sex drive, my energy level, I realize I need to move from stage one to stage three pretty quickly. (For my sake, and for the sake of my husband.)
Because the sexiest things about a wife are confidence and the ability to laugh at yourself – and fellow forties friends – this is where we have it all over our younger sisters.
We mamas in our forties know a few secrets that our younger friends may have yet to discover:
Our teens think we’re hard of hearing because we play the TV so loud, (but really that’s just to cover up the sounds of our nooner on a Saturday after lunch.)
We realize that naps aren’t just for sleeping anymore. (Daytime sex is awesome, especially since most of our kids aren’t so “little” anymore. When they stopped taking naps, we started.)
We love Meghan Trainor’s song “All About That Bass” (and buy lingerie with some structure so we too can keep “all the right junk in all the right places…”)
We understand that while the visual is important (that’s why, even at our “advanced” age, we’re STILL going to the gym,) that the pat on the butt and the “Can’t wait to see you tonight, the kids are staying with friends overnight…” as he’s going off to work can have a pretty daunting effect.
So as I work at being a Hot Mama in her 40’s, I want to give you a real glimpse of what it looks like:
My Hot Mama Marriage: Recently, I had breakfast with Elisa Morgan, the founder of MOPS. Elisa and I have known about each other for a long time, but hadn’t spent any time together until this breakfast. After the food had been placed on our table, she turned to me and said, “I want to know about you. Well, what I do know about you from Facebook is that you are madly in love with your husband.”
Yep – after the fact that I’m a Jesus girl, that’s the most important piece of information you could know about me. But it hasn’t come without a lot of struggle and pain.
Two divorces (one his, one mine,) two kids, two step kids, and two exes. Debt, death, and did I mention exes?
It hasn’t been an easy road, but now, in our forties (OK he’s in his fifties, but he acts like he’s in his forties – in the best way possible,) we have the gift of having a few years under our belt and being supremely and utterly comfortable with each other. It’s such a gift.
My Hot Mama Bedroom: OK – you know how all those romance books tell you to reserve your bedroom as a sanctuary for your romance?
For me? Not so much.
I run a business from my home, and grand central is a corner of our bedroom. BUT, one of the advantages of being in my late forties? Pretty soon all the bedrooms in our house will be vacant and I will have my own little office. I will be able to dedicate our bedroom just to bedroom activities (which include sleep, Seinfeld reruns, and sex. In that order.)
My Hot Mama Exercise Routine:
I was trying to be a runner.
Keyword: trying.
Until the scourge of Planter Fasciitis hit. And now I’m a walker. (But at least I’m not using a walker, so that’s a good thing, right?)
So while I’m not “crushing it”, I’m taking exercise more seriously than I ever have before. I’m walking a mile every single day, and have walked two 5Ks. I’m trying to challenge myself in new ways. And part of the reason is I can feel the difference when I exercise like never before. When I don’t move? I feel it for the rest of the day. That’s even more motivation than looking great – feeling great.
My Hot Mama Clothes:
I spend more money on my clothes now than I did when I was younger, but I’m also way more confident in what I look good in, and what I should avoid at all costs. And remember – confidence is sexy.
My Hot Mama Nights:
Monday through Friday? I love to cook a good dinner, and after a long, long day, relax with my man for an hour or so, (I get up at 5 AM, so the hour between 7 and 8 PM is the best one I have,) where, if Roger had his druthers, I would spend the entire time scratching his back (and sometimes, that’s exactly what happens,) and then Roger goes back to work in his office (his team is India) and I wind down for bed.
Hot – right?
But that connecting during the week pays off on the weekend when we go out with friends or travel on the weekends. It’s a comfortable routine, with a little hot thrown in on a regular basis.
My Hot Mama Sex Life Challenges:
Let’s be honest – if you’ve hit the forties, you’ve noticed some changes in your sex life. Physically, things have changed – for you and for him.
It’s at this point, you can’t be shy about talking to your doctor. There are meds, there are over the counter helps. Don’t be shy! Your great sex life depends on it!
My Hot Mama Confidence:
I am absolutely more confident than I was in my 20’s or even my 30’s. In your 40’s, you stop trying to please the world and start working on pleasing the ones that are important. In my case, that’s God, my husband, and in my forties, I can finally say, myself.
Are you a hot mama in your 30’s? Then head on over to Erin MacPherson, my co-author’s post about hot to pull off being a Hot Mama when you still have some kiddo in the house… http://wp.me/p33YCp-Kz
Want to up the heat in your marriage, no matter what your age? Check out Kathi and Erin’s new Book Hot Mamas! http://shop.kathilipp.com/product/hot-mama-12-secrets-to-a-sizzling-hot-marriage/
Hey friends- this is Kathi. I could NOT be more thrilled to have Shaunti Feldhahn on the blog today. This woman changed the course of my marriage with her book For Women Only – Understanding the secret Lives of Men and now she’s done it again with her latest book. Keep reading! And don’t forget to comment at the end and be entered in to win all five of our books featured this week!
Ladies, did you know your man has a secret? It may not even be an intentional secret, mind you, but a very personal burden that often stays hidden by default. Nearly all men face it, but few feel able to really talk about it with their wives. Yet if we know how to talk to our husbands about this and show them that they can talk to us about it, we will learn so much more about each other and go to a new level of intimacy we didn’t realize we were missing.
When I first started doing research about men, I was stunned to realize that this applied even to men who were very trustworthy, even to men who worked to keep their thought lives pure, even to men who adored their wives and wanted to honor their wives (and God) in their choices. And it wasn’t just other men – it was my man! I started to realize that there was big part of my husband’s life, including how his brain processed the world every day, about which I was completely clueless.
[Tweet “The Secret He Secretly Wishes You Knew by @ShauntiFeldhahn #bettermarriage5”]
And if I was missing a big part of my husband’s life, wouldn’t there always be a limit to how close we could be? I didn’t want him to carry a burden on his own only because he didn’t know how to talk about it – or didn’t know if he could trust me with it.
So I started to ask questions, tentatively at first. (“Um… What do you think, when you see something like that hot woman in the skin-tight shirt who just walked past us at Target?”) And he started to give some answers, definitely tentatively at first. (“Uh… why do you want to know…?”)
But as I showed him that I wasn’t going to bash or condemn, but truly just wanted to understand (“Honestly, honey, it’s because I love you and just want to understand what life is like for you”) he began to open up and share things we’d never talked about before.
Some of it was hilarious. (“She must have paid a lot of money for those.”) Frankly, some of it was hard to hear. (“Well, OK, to be honest, sometimes when I see someone almost undressed, there’s this micro-second flash of wanting to picture what she might look like if she is undressed. And then I have to immediately stop that flash and think about that work email instead.”) There were times I was sad, or hurt, as my husband shared certain struggles he’d had on and off over the years. But I tried so hard to not let those feelings control me and instead tried to show my husband that I wanted him to be able to share what was going on inside him.
Because as I began to do more of the research on the male brain wiring, I began to realize: men’s brains are actually designed by God to be visually stimulated in this way, because the only revealing image a man was ever supposed to see was of his wife! And yet today, this culture is filled will very public images that were only supposed to be seen in private. Our men and boys are living in a visual minefield.
[Tweet “Men’s brains are designed by God to be visually stimulated.”]
Some men make rigorous choices to look away, look down, take those thoughts captive. Others have grown weary of that struggle and have given into the temptation to look at things that they shouldn’t have, and many feel great shame in doing so. Still others—although a much smaller number – have become trapped or addicted.
Yet many of them have one thing in common: they wish they could talk to their wives about it. They wish they could open up about their struggles. They wish they could come in from a particularly bad day at work and say, without fear of condemnation, “Wow, Kerri at the office missed doing up those top two buttons on her shirt again and I couldn’t focus on a thing she was saying.” Or if they are trapped in looking at porn, something deep inside sometimes wants to come into the light and get help – and yet the self-protective side says “no way!” So all of it stays hidden. All too often, a man handles all of this on his own.
But I think lots of us as women wouldn’t want our men to handle this all on their own. That was one of the main things that spurred me to do the research that became my book For Women Only and later, my new book Through A Man’s Eyes. I wanted my husband to know that I was safe to talk to about this, even as he also knew that if there were any real issues (which, thankfully, there hadn’t been in recent years), I would expect him to get help. And once we started talking about this, once he saw I wouldn’t freak out or condemn, we found that if we could talk about this in a healthy way, we could talk about anything.
I urge all my sisters out there: show your husband that you are safe to talk to. Even if you are hearing some difficult things, show him you love and support him anyway and you’ll walk with him through it. Learning how to talk about those things you’ve never talked about before will take your marriage to a whole new dimension of intimacy. A place where you have no secrets and where you know and love each other fully, regardless.
Sounds a lot like what marriage was supposed to be, all along.
Do you want Shaunti to share life-changing truths – including helping women understand men – at your event, church service or network? Inquire about Shaunti speaking, here.
Shaunti Feldhahn is the best-selling author of eye-opening, research-based books about men, women and relationships, including For Women Only, For Men Only, the groundbreaking The Good News About Marriage, and her newest book, Through A Man’s Eyes. A Harvard-trained social researcher and popular speaker, her ?ndings are regularly featured in media as diverse as The Today Show, Focus on the Family, and the New York Times. Visit www.shaunti.com for more.
