The facial muscles that make you smile when you laugh are coincidentally (or not!) neighboring the very part of the brain that is also responsible for the production of serotonin.
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Serotonin controls sleep, memory, learning, temperature and—you guessed it—mood and behavior.
Here comes a simple truth.
A Good Measure of Your Connection
Laughter is an excellent measurement as to how connected you are with your husband or wife. The more laughter in your home, the more connected you are.
Laughter is one of those wonderful things that make us feel good inside, both from a mental and physical standpoint.
Just stop and think about it for a minute. When you laugh, how do you feel after?
You feel better, you feel more relaxed, your tensions ease. If you make your husband or wife laugh more often, what is this going to do to the mood in your household or in your relationship? If you are laughing along with them, how’s that going to affect your relationship? How about if the kids are around and they join in on the laughing?
[callout]Besides connecting and having fun, there’s another reason to laugh with your partner as frequently as you can, and this is the most important one. <strong>Your loved one’s subconscious starts associating you with something pleasant every time they see you</strong>. That’s powerful stuff. [/callout]
So, How Often do You Make Your Spouse Laugh?
How often are you laughing together? Every day? Every second day? Once a week? Only seldomly?
If you are finding that your laughter levels are lacking, or even if there is lots of laughter in your marriage, it can never hurt to add some more.
Your goal should be to make them laugh, at the very minimum, once per day. If you don’t know how, read on.
[shareable cite=”Gina Barreca”]Laughing together is as close as you can get to a hug without touching. [/shareable]
How to Infuse More Laughter Into Your Marriage?
- Send a simple smile your spouse’s way every chance you get.
- Make a funny face at your wife when she is least expecting it.
- Every once in a blue moon do something silly for them. For example, put on a funny outfit.
- Play ‘I’ve got you in my sights’ in the backyard. On a hot summer day, buy two large water pistols (you can get Nerf® Super Soaker water guns for very little money online). Throw one to your spouse and have a water fight. Side note: This game will be extremely well accepted by your kids too. Why not have fun together?
- Have an indoor Nerf war. We do it occasionally at our home and we all enjoy it. Really gets your heart beating. 🙂
- Have a tickling contest. Who will cry uncle first? It’s a great exercise to touch each other non-sexually, make each other laugh, and feel good at the same time.
- Write a silly poem and leave it someplace for your spouse to find. The goofier, the better.
- Have a joke contest. If you have kids, involve them too! At dinner, each of you tells a joke. It doesn’t matter where it comes from (Google is such a wonderful thing) and then you vote as to which one was the best. Make it into a wager or contest. Stop at the dollar store, pick up some ridiculously useless or stupid items and use them as the prize. You might very well get a bigger laugh over the prize than the jokes themselves. Have a weekly prize where the funniest joke teller of the week gets their favorite meal cooked for them by the loser, or they get taken out for their favorite dish at their preferred restaurant (this might get pricey, so maybe best joke of the month?) Be careful though, for this may quickly turn into a family tradition.
- Do a similar contest with funny YouTube videos.
- Text your spouse outrageous jokes you come across. You should have some idea as to what your wife will find funny, so capitalize on this.
- Have a pillow fight with your wife’s prior knowledge.
- Ambush with feathers! Ambush your partner on their way out of the bathroom and hit them with a (soft) pillow. Run as fast as you can while they go to get one to hit you back!
And now comes a big bonus:
If your loved one frequently has a smile on their face, then it’s awfully hard for them to have ill feelings towards you.
That’s not a bad side effect too, right?
[callout]If you want to find out about many more ways to laugh and have fun without worrying about money, you might want to have a look at my latest book. The book comes with an awesome cheat sheet with 46 more ideas how you can bring back laughter to your marriage and have fun together.[/callout]
