You Don’t Have to Earn Your Joy: Reclaiming Play in Your Relationship

Carolyn goofing with her husband on their wedding day, setting the precedent for many hijinks....

Let’s talk about something serious.

Silliness.

No, really.

I’ve built an entire career helping people work through the hardest, messiest, scariest parts of being human, and one of my most reliable tools?

Play, which my clients will tell you most often comes through a well-timed dad joke, or my go-to self deprecation about how I have been difficult in my relationships, is a tool always in my arsenal. It is always something that I push my couples to learn.

Here’s the truth: I didn’t just stumble upon humor and play as a strategy, I depended on it.  Like many people who grew up with difficult circumstances, I learned early on that if I could make people laugh, I could make things feel safer for them and for me.

Humor helped me survive by regulating my nervous system when things felt overwhelming, and it helped others stay close when I was scared they might turn away.

(Also? Being the one to laugh first kept bullies from beating me to it. Hello, self-deprecating humor, my oldest frenemy.)

And here’s the beautiful twist: That once-scrappy survival skill became my art form as well as my therapeutic signature and my superpower. I do have to admit I sometimes use it poorly. I use it intentionally in therapy to keep people grounded and safe when the work gets hard. I use it to help the medicine, the hard truths and feedback, go down a bit easier. 

And I built it right into Fire It Up (both the book and the program) and serious exercises are paired with playful ones.

Deep emotional work is softened with moments of absurdity, levity, and creative joy.

I tell you all of this in a suspiciously unfunny way not to sell you on that program, but to convince you to begin using it yourself, right now. I want you to reclaim silliness as a valid, even sacred, relationship tool.

Because while it doesn’t remove the stress, it does gives you something to hold onto while you’re moving through the difficult moments.  It reminds you that you can still enjoy each other, like each other , even when in struggle.  It reminds you that you are still in it together. Laughter re-regulates the nervous system and shared joy creates micro-moments of safety. And best of all, play together keeps the spark alive.

So if you’ve been telling yourself that your relationship is too messy or too serious to have fun, please let me interrupt that thought. You don’t have to earn your joy. And your relationship isn’t too far gone to laugh again. Even if you are mid fight, you can use this to reconnect and decrease how long the fight lasts.

So, do one (or more) of the following things, right now: 

• Send the dumbest joke you can find to your partner. 

• Send them the eggplant and the frog emoji while you sit across from each other. 

• Put on their favorite song and dance like an idiot. 

• Make up a stupid song (my go-to) set to a popular jingle. 

Do it now.

You get bonus points if you are annoyed with them. Tell them you are just doing what I told you to do. If it makes things harder, reply to this and tell me and I will both help you fix that and tell you why this happened.

And if all of this sounds way too hard, if you need help reconnecting to this kind of play, I’ve got you.

Grab Fire It Up: Four Secrets to Reigniting Intimacy and Joy anywhere books are sold, or get lifetime access to the Self-Study Program here, which is $99 off through August 15 with the code AUGUSTLOVE.

You can build this skill. It’s not fluff, it’s fuel. It’s a superpower my healthiest couples have.

And your partner, your relationship, and your whole life will thank you.