192: Marriage When You’re Both Busy and Exhausted

 Welcome to Shoot It Straight. The podcast for women building businesses and lives they actually want. I’m Sabrina Gebhardt, and around here we believe in clarity over hustle, alignment over burnout, and giving yourself permission to want more, more ease, more beauty, more income, more space to live. So if you are ready to grow without losing yourself in the process, you’re in the right place.

Welcome back to the Shoot at Straight Podcast, my friends today. I want to address something pretty big. Nobody talks about the version of marriage. That’s actually the most common, and we’re gonna dig into it today. This is not a marriage in crisis. It’s not the romantic part, but it’s the Tuesday night.

You’re both depleted. You still have to choose each other part. That’s where we’re going today. That’s what this episode is about. I realized that this may feel like a bit of a pivot from regular content. I’ve never talked about my marriage on the podcast before, but I know the conversations that I have with my mastermind women, my coaching clients, and at my retreats and marriage, comes up a lot like a lot, a lot.

So I thought it was time to bring this chat to the podcast. First of all, this is not me giving you advice from a preachy place. Or from a place of expertise or even a therapist. This is just me sharing my own experience of what our relationship has been through in hopes that you, A, feel less alone, and B, maybe you’re inspired to make a change or two, if that makes sense for you.

My husband and I have been married for almost 21 years. We worked together for five before that, and we have been through a lot of ups and downs over the years. So that’s the position from which I am sharing with you today. So the cultural narrative of what a quote strong marriage looks like is super romantic getaways.

Deep conversations over candlelit dinner, always being in sync, having this influencer like couple that shows up online together all the time. That’s what we see as quote unquote strong. But the reality for most entrepreneurial moms looks nothing like that. So I wanna normalize this gap between quote unquote ideal and actual.

And I also wanna reframe that a strong marriage isn’t perfect, but rather it’s consistent and committed even in the mundane, especially in the mundane, in a moment of true vulnerability. I want to share our lowest point with you. And this isn’t to say that we have had some serious lows before, or that we won’t have more lows in the future because both of those things are true.

But most recently, in January of 2025, we hit a low. We had found ourselves living like roommates full of doing things for the kids and for ourselves and our businesses, and choosing each other last. We both became silently resentful, and it was just easier to ignore. We both become complacent, each in our own unique ways.

It started with our annual New Year’s Eve dinner at the very end of 2024. I remember sitting through our fancy dinner, which had historically been filled with great conversation about goals and dreams for the new year and our, our favorite moments of the that, of that previous year. And I remember sitting there and it was a, a fancy dinner and we were both dressed up.

I was thinking to myself, this is the worst date that we’ve ever been on in almost 30 years together. I came home feeling so sad and I was wondering how we got there, and I didn’t say anything, but he didn’t say anything either. Neither of us said anything. We just let it lie. A couple of days later, I was headed out of town to host a retreat, so I had other things to worry about, other things on my mind.

After that retreat, I came home with my cup absolutely filled up again from being around women and friendships and laughter and having fun. And the very next day my husband came home from work and he told me he was unhappy and listener. That is unheard of. My husband is average in that. He’s not a guy that likes to talk about his feelings.

I’m sure many of you can agree with that. In the almost 30 years we’ve been together, that had happened very few times, and generally in times of, you know, losing a family member or something deeply, deeply, crisis like. So for him to flat out say he was unhappy, I immediately panicked. We talked very rationally and we decided that we had to double down.

It was time to double down. It was time to fight for this. 2025 was really hard, and it took so much effort. There was a lot to untangle, many of which were things that were habits and ruts that we had just found ourselves in. But I can honestly say that it ended up being one of, if not the very best year of our marriage, we ended 2025 in a dramatically different place than where we started.

You’re probably hearing this and thinking, okay, you guys have full schedules. How are you changing things? What, what changed? We added a lot of touch points, and I’m gonna share those in in a few minutes. We added a lot of touch points to an already overwhelming schedule, to an already chaotic life, to an already overwhelmed marriage.

We have three kids and their sports, and at the time they were at three different schools. We were also navigating each of our own businesses, so two businesses and our individual friends, friendships, and travel plans, both individually and as a family, and the frustrations of living in a home that’s 120 years old and the ups and downs of having two dogs, plus college visits and disciplining children and health and so many more things.

Things were so busy and they still are. We chose each other first every single day, even when the kids had chaotic schedules, even when work was stressful, even when we were exhausted, we were determined to break the old habits, get out of the old ruts, and to fix what we had broken. There are so many pressures of marriage that people don’t really talk about, and then they wonder what’s wrong, and so I wanna share a few of them that were specifically a part of our story.

Again, maybe you can relate to some of these. The first of which is the mental load and balance that the woman usually is the one that feels, um, I know that I was carrying my business and also all of the household logistics and also the vast majority of the kid logistics and also all of our financial stuff because that’s my job in our house and also all of the travel plans.

It felt like every single day I was drowning and overwhelm. I know you can relate to that. There was another part that’s the whole ship’s passing season. You know, like parallel lives living under one roof. This is such an easy place to find yourself in if you don’t fight for it, and we absolutely had gotten there.

It was so easy, easier in fact, to just divide and conquer with the kids and work schedules. And before we knew it, we’d gone an entire week without having a real conversation. Without talking about just what’s for dinner and who’s getting who to what place on time. Another thing that happens is decision fatigue, decision fatigue that bleeds into your relationship.

It’s that whole, I’ve made 47 decisions and it’s only 6:00 PM and I have nothing left to give. It’s so common and is similar to the mental load balance or mental load imbalance I should say. We get so exhausted by just living our lives and managing everything and all the decisions that that we have to make throughout the day.

Leave us an absolute empty. Well, by the end of the day, we have nothing to give, and our partner can often take the brunt of that. They don’t need to be quote unquote, taken care of like the children. They don’t need to be managed. And you end up in that ship’s passing season, and then there’s the guilt.

The guilt of wanting more from your marriage, but you know that you’re already maxed out. That’s exactly what I felt after that New Year’s dinner. I knew we weren’t in a good place, but I brushed it off outta guilt. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe things aren’t as bad as I think they are. Maybe it’s just my hormones.

We have so much going on. This must just be a season that we’re going through. These thoughts all weigh on me out of guilt, and that weight just adds to the pressure of everything else. So if you’re still listening, I wanna offer up some practical thoughts, things that worked for us. This is not Pinterest marriage advice or advice from a therapist, but real practices that have completely shifted our marriage over time.

They are small but mighty. And again, we started off the year at our lowest point and ended the year at our highest point. It took a year. Honestly, it didn’t even take a year. We were feeling fantastic about each other, just a few months into this practice, but we kept doing it and we are still doing these things and so I wanna share them in case you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, oh my gosh, I’m feeling this way too.

So the first thing we did is we both went to therapy. I had been seeing a therapist for years on and off, and I had, I had been taking time away. I knew it was time for me to actually like start working with a new therapist because my needs had shifted. And so this prompted me, okay, it’s time. It’s time to find a new therapist and start going to see somebody again.

My husband, on the other hand, had never seen a therapist and as you can imagine, again, typical guy, this was not as easy of a decision for him as it was for me. But I stood my ground and I said, you need this as much as I do. We are doing this together. And he did, and he still is. We needed this so that we could support each other or that we could get the support that each other needed, that we couldn’t do for one another.

That outside support that is absolutely necessary. Then, and this is the biggest thing, we started choosing each other in the small moments and intentionally creating those moments because small moments of connection matter more than the big gestures. They are the daily moments, not the big extravagant vacations.

So we started building in as many touch points as possible into our already chaotic schedules. We started going on evening walks almost every day. We started leaving the house early Saturday mornings to go on long walks together, just us and the dogs and our kids are old enough that we could leave them home.

We started working out together three to four times a week in the morning before work and school. Getting up early and getting in that time. Oftentimes we were doing different workouts. We were just in tandem together in a space breathing air, complaining about the workouts and how hard they were just being in the room together, and we became religious about date nights.

Again, religious. About every other week we are going out and if my oldest can’t babysit, then my middle can babysit, and if he can’t, we are asking one of our kids’ friends. We are going back out and prioritizing each other again. Another thing was. Starting to bear the load together. I was tired of doing all those mom things alone, and as simple as it seems, my husband started coming with me to all the school and sport related parent meetings.

I know that sounds like such a no brainer, but we were going to sit through those and be miserable together. That gave me so much joy this past fall, um, when school was starting, having him tag along to all the sport meetings, all the school meetings, all the meet the teachers, all of the open houses. And sit through that stuff together, which we could laugh about, but not feeling like I was the one that had to do the chores.

And having him with me in those really, really made a huge difference. And then the last thing, and again, this sounds so obvious. We started talking, really talking. He needed a place to vent about work stuff. And I needed a place to just word vomit. And in all of our small touch points that we created, we had these conversations.

Again, we had a place to talk. Sometimes about the kids, sometimes about each other, sometimes about what happened in therapy, sometimes about what happened at work, sometimes about random conversations that we had with friends that we ran into that day. It didn’t matter. We were talking again and it wasn’t just about what’s for dinner and what time the kids had to be at something, but really, really talking.

So I wanna give you permission to look at your marriage with fresh eyes and be honest. Are you in a similar season, do things feel stale and empty? This is a really painful realization to come to, but hear me when I say this. You can fix this. You can, even if you have a whole gaggle of kids and sports and a business that keeps you so busy, my friend.

A strong marriage in a busy season doesn’t look like what you see on Instagram. It’s choosing each other imperfectly and consistently. That is enough, and it will make the biggest difference, not only in your marriage, but in your life. Your business will feel lighter. Your parenting will feel lighter.

Everything feels lighter when your marriage is truly strong and thriving. I wanna close this episode by mentioning something that may feel a little bit random, but hear me out. I have a group called The First Class Lounge. It is an online membership for women who are carrying a lot and need a place to process the whole picture of business and life, not just strategy.

I give weekly coaching on anything and everything. I get dms on all kinds of things. This is your place to come for support. I also bring in incredible guest experts. We have a couple of monthly calls on Zoom for that face-to-face community that we crave. So if this sounds like something that you’re looking for, I’d love to see you inside.

You can find more@sabrinagabhart.com slash membership. I’ll have that linked in the show notes, and as always. If this episode resonated with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me a DM over on Instagram at XO dot Sabrina Gehart, and I’ll see you guys next week. Thanks so much for listening to the Shoot at Straight podcast.

You can find all the full show notes and details from today’s episode@sabrinagehart.com slash podcast. Come find me and connect over on the gram. At Sabrina Gab Hart Photography, if you’re loving the podcast, I’d be honored if you hit that subscribe button and leave me a review. Until next time, my friends shoot it straight.