Keep the routine of marriage (Video)

by Rabbi Bentzion Greiper 

Excerpts continue below the video player.

The second commandment of marriage is to keep routines, and it’s a good thing to create the routines. For example I know a man who just got married, twenty three, so he’d wake up early in the morning to daven early so he can come home and have breakfast with his new wife.
​

Start a program of creating routines that are good

He would drive her to work, he went to yeshiva then he came to lunch, picked her up, and they went home for lunch and then he brought her back to her second job, and then he went to yeshiva and then after that he came home and then picked her up after.
 
It was a routine, it was unbelievable, so it’s important to keep routines. If a man always throws out the garbage and you come home angry, you throw out the garbage. A woman makes her husband lunch, you're angry at him, you make him lunch...
 

For some reason we have routines every day at work. We go to work, you have your coffee, you do this, you make this phone call. And we have routines at night, learning sedra, or a woman has her routines.
 
But routines, husband and wife we don’t have such a thing. Routine between husband and wife must be kept and created. Create positive creative routines. It’s crucial.
 
I know a couple, when they got married, they decided every Tuesday night they're going to go out, before children they took walks and when they had children they had a babysitter for an hour or two just to go for a walk, for an icecream, sometimes they got excited, they had a dinner. Every Tuesday night…
 

Every once in a while you go away for a weekend. I know one couples who’s doing it still. You know how it started, eleven years they were married and the wife called me up and said I want out. He comes home, he complains, he doesn’t change any diapers, he was learning and now he’s working.
 
So I said, let me speak to him. The man had a big big Rabbi but he didn’t speak to him. So I said to the man, I finally spoke, he finally listened to me, I said you come home the routine is not to complain, look you have, like the chofetz chaim, good eye, bad eye, look at the good. Business is booming. Help, he started that. I said you want to make a big hit, take her away for the weekend, put the children with the in laws.
 
He did it, after two weeks you have to understand she calls me up she says the weekend was a honeymoon, a honeymoon. And they do it once in a while now…
 

Rav Miller’s one routine I saw, I was there at the shabbos table, every dish, danken, thanking the rebbentzen, thank you, thank you, thank you. Start a thank you program. Let that be a routine, thank you for the meal.
 
So the very important thing to start, start a program of thank you’s, start a program of keeping routines and creating routines that are good, positive.