If you could reboot your marriage, would you do it? Would you clean out the memory leaks, glitches and bugs so that the joyful stuff could shine even more brightly?

Rod and I are in our 20th year together and we’ve decided to do just that, looking ahead to the next twenty.

And after much thought and discussion, we’ve agreed I’ll blog about this personal “lab of life” experiment. So I introduce The Year 20 Reboot, my chronicle of our year-long experiment in having more joy and cleaning out the gunk. Here’s an excerpt from the About page:

I’m a professional mediator and conflict resolution consultant, he’s a college professor. I’m from New York, he’s from the Midwest. I’m given to gesticulating wildly, he keeps his body fairly still (sometimes I say, hello, anyone alive in there?). I tend toward the overstated, he toward the under. We both love animals, hiking, the outdoors. We’re politically left of center but independent at heart. He’s happier where concrete is visible, I where I can’t see neighbors at all.

2009 marks 20 years together. Twenty joyful years of compatibility and incompatibility, laughter (much, much laughter) and tears, good news and sorrowful moments, many changes in our lives. And 20 years of a bit of garbage that’s crept in, inevitably.

After a disagreement one night, I sat in the living room, and thought to myself, That argument happened because I’m carrying around all sorts of judgments and beliefs about him, and he’s doing the same about me. Our own certainty got in the way.

And I began to wonder. Wonder if it’s possible to make the decision to let go of a bunch of beliefs and start some things over after 20 years.

I’ll continue to write here at Conflict Zen®, which focuses mostly on workplace conflict resolution. But if you’re interested in the challenge and joy of resolving differences in your marriage or with your lifelong partner, I hope you’ll subscribe to The Year 20 Reboot. I’ve got five posts up so far:

1. I think we should reboot our marriage
2. Blogging the reboot
3. Memory leaks and software glitches
4. How to reboot a relationship
5. Soft or hard reboot?

Gosh, hope I’m not either completely mad or a narcissist. Or a masochist, come to think of it, since I’m leaving comments open over there.

If you’re a blogger or active on any of the social media sites, I’d sure appreciate you helping me get the word out about the Reboot project. If I’m going to do this, I might as well get a bunch of smart people reading along and sharing your insights.

Conflict Zen® by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at ConfictZen.Lenski.com.