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Welcome back to Feeding the Mouth That Bites You, a weekly podcast guide on parenting teens and launching them into the world.

I'm Jessica Pfeiffer,

and as always, I'm joined by psychologist and author, Dr. Ken Wilgus.

Hey, Ken. Jessica, how are you? I'm good. Doing good. It's been a full week, and I'm, you know,

I'm glad we're talking about this topic topic because today we're talking about keeping your marriage alive when your teenagers are killing you.

And it's been a busy week, and I find that it's hard to connect with my husband, Charlie, when it's been busy.

The kids have been, adult kids have been in and out at home and not home. And the younger kids are really busy with sports and things lately. And it's been hard for us to

maintain the lines of communication. He's traveled some. And so how that goes, where you're just

running, running crazy, trying to get everything done. Well, I know it, but I can tell you that, you know, I do a fair amount of marriage therapy,

and that's probably the most common sort of hidden issue is that, you know,

you can't neglect your marriage and expect it to still flourish. And it's just very common to be too,

quote, too busy to spend time together. And both of the married, you know, the couple will agree,

yeah, we need to do this. And they just can't find that time because, you know, you just,

your time tells you what your priorities are. And, you know, so many parents feel like,

you know, I would love to spend time with my spouse as soon as we get all the priorities

taken care of. And marriage is like a cherry on top after everything's taken care of.

And that is a disaster.

And so it, but I always tell couples, I get it.

I know it's really hard to feel, not feel like you're doing something wrong by taking time for your marriage.

Yes, I think so too.

And then there's a lot of friction sometimes over parenting specifically.

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