If you only had about 2 hours a week to spend on your relationship, how could you use that time most wisely?
The truth is relationships can be incredibly challenging, especially in today’s fast-paced world where it can be hard to prioritize the relationship. Even when partners deeply love each other, they may face difficulties in maintaining passion, resolving conflicts, and growing together over the long term. Many couples are stuck in unfulfilling patterns, feeling more like roommates than lovers, or constantly bickering over small issues. Without the right tools and support, it’s easy for relationships to stagnate or deteriorate over time.
My wife Violet and I created the Evolutionary Couples program as a structured experience to help couples revitalize their relationships and foster deeper connection. Through 12 carefully designed “epic dates,” couples are guided to explore key areas like communication, intimacy, finances, and shared purpose. The journey provides a mix of themed dates addressing practical issues and polarity dates to reignite passion and play. With options for self-paced learning or a more immersive experience with coaching and community support, couples can choose the level of engagement that works for them. By dedicating just two hours a week to intentional relationship building, partners can develop new skills, heal old wounds, and cultivate a thriving, passionate partnership that just keeps improving over time!
Learn more and sign up at evolutionarycouples.us
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Jason Lange: All right, and welcome back. So I'm Jason Lange, host of the Evolutionary Men podcast here with my beautiful wife.
Violet Lange: And I'm Violet Lang. I'm the host of the Pleasure Path podcast and I'm a coach for women on dating, intimacy, love and relationships.
Jason Lange: And we're here to talk today about our own journey as a couple. And particularly this idea that if you only had about two hours a week to spend on your intimate relationship, what would be the most profound and deep way to do that?
Violet Lange: Where should we begin? I think about our own journey. I'll tell the beginning. So I had a dream, and this guy was in my dream three weeks before we actually met in real life. So I came into it a bit maybe starry eyed or spiritual bypassing, you could say. I had had a lot of relationships and none of them were easy. I think I was still searching for that, like, golden relationship that was just easy and smooth and felt perfect. And on our second, first or second date, I can't remember what date, Jason said something like, yeah, I don't think relationships are meant to be easy. You can create ease, but they're not like, meant to be easy. Relationship is like a spiritual path. And part of me hated that answer or that wisdom because maybe an inner child. Part of me still wanted it to just be a Disney movie, but a deeper part of me was like, yeah, that's right. And I do want to be with someone where we can cultivate ease but also have depth and connection and healthy fighting and a lot of things that were missing in my first marriage.
Jason Lange: Yeah. And I think there's this idea that we both certainly buy into that, you know, real love is created. It's actually something that's mended together by really more than anything else, a process of rupture and repair, being able to come back to each other over and over and over again. And certainly something a lot of you guys who have worked with me sometimes have the realization of and that we talk about is we're, you know, we're pretty much fed this myth of, oh, then you get married and then you live happily ever after. And the truth is that's actually where the journey really starts for most couples. And something I've talked about here, which is this idea that when we come together, you know, there's a lot of novelty, there's a lot of excitement, there's a lot of hormones, there's a lot of sexual energy. There's not necessarily as much trust, as much intimacy, as much bonding and oneness. And the longer you go in a relationship, the more those two things start to invert, where oftentimes you start to build more trust, more sameness, more togetherness. You're spending time together, you're sleeping over at each other's houses, you might move in. Suddenly you're going on vacations, you're waking up in your pajamas. You're not even getting dressed. You're going out for the day. Right. Which is very different. And early in a relationship where every time you see each other, it's a conscious choice. We're coming together intentionally to put our energy on each other. And as we go, that intention often goes down. In a sense, that sameness and just being in the same space goes up. And then the hormones start to wear off. And if our relationship to some extent is safe enough, in particular, then all of our attachment wounding. So all the stuff that we never really had the opportunity to heal and mend in our childhood or with our primary caregivers and. Or in previous relationships comes rear into the surface. Because it's like, oh, hey, here's an opportunity where maybe I can get those needs met that I never had met before. And it's that point that a lot of relationships go off the rails and where what we're going to talk about today, I think, can become so important.
Violet Lange: Right.
Jason Lange: There's ways we can support each other in doing that, but there's a level of we have to learn to take care of ourselves. Which sometimes for me, very much looks like me going off and being with my men in men's groups, on retreats, doing my practices, taking time off and for her to go be with her women friend and go on retreats and do practices and get into the world and resource herself in the way she needs to resource. So then when we do have time together, we can actually be there for each other. And that's all woven into our program. When you do the guided group part with us, in that you're going to have time with us as a couple. The men are going to have time with me independently with the other men, and the women are going to have time with just Violet and the cohort of women there. So we're each getting to have a space just for ourselves and a space together while we're going on this journey and exploration through the evolutionary couples program and 12 epic dates.
Violet Lange: Yeah. And what we have found is that different times in your relationship, you need different things. So sometimes we needed a lot more erotic energy. And having that polarity actually decreased a lot of the bickering or a lot of the Little patterns that we were noticing because we. We had forgotten just about our passionate connection or life had kind of gotten in the way. And then there were other times where there was fundamental things we needed to look at and shift related to finances, related to parenting, related to how we healed our resentments or even talked about our resentments and worked through conflict or how we infuse more creativity and play. There's this David White, who's a poet quote that says the lowest form of relationship is a logistical team of two. And that really hit home for me because I just can see how easy it is and it has been for us too, to just focus on getting by. Like getting by with parenting, getting by with finances, getting by with the time we spend together, but without that added energy and aliveness and intentionality and skill like he talked about, then it's just. The relationship is just another check the box. And it's not really living to its full potential and it's not supporting us as individuals to live to our full potential too.
Jason Lange: In, you know, behind this whole idea of our program and what we're creating and just what we buy in and believe. It's, you know, unfortunately, I've talked about this on some episodes before. Might be you, might not be you, but for a lot of couples, it's surprising. Yeah. At. At the bottom end, their relationship is like a war. It's just this constant battle with each other where you're getting triggered and defending and protecting and it's quite dysregulating up to the middle, which is kind of that. Yeah. That logistical team of two. Yeah, we're kind of best friends. We're good co parents, we get along. There's not any acute problems, but there's not much passion, there's not much novelty, there's not much energy, there's not much devotion. And that's probably the sweetest spot to be doing a program like this because then we can take you beyond that to really taking on your relationship as a path of growth, as a way to deepen yourself and open yourself up to the fullest version of who you can be in the context of your relationship. In that all these triggers and problems and frictions and conflicts, they're actually the pathway in to greater intimacy and connection. And the more you can go right into those, the more you're going to get closer to each other, which, lo and behold, will often create so much more safety and allow all that erotic energy and passion to flow through in ways that sometimes maybe it never has before. But the idea Is the growth is part of the point of a good relationship, that it helps us grow and see ourselves and become whole versions of ourselves. And that when we're both holding that, and then when we wrap it in this greater container of, you know, our relationship having a purpose, which is something we work on in the program, suddenly.
Violet Lange: It'S.
Jason Lange: What'S so powerful is your relationship should be a source of regulation in your life. You all know there's plenty of stress coming at you from the outer world or from your kids or from your work or from culture. There is just so much we have to deal with. So ideally, our relationship becomes a place of solace for that, where we can get resourced in our connection with each other so that we can be more available, more spacious, more present back in the world. And that shift is possible when you have the right tools and structure and community to pull it off, which our Evolutionary Couples program is really aiming to do.
Jason Lange: So what are some of the things a couple could look forward to if they did 12 epic dates or the full evolutionary couples program?
Violet Lange: What are going to be some of.
Jason Lange: The themes we hit?
Jason Lange: So definitely check it out. Evolutionary couples, us. And until next time, if you're interested in working with me around dating relationships or your masculine presence in the world, just go to Evolutionary men. Apply.
