(This is a guest post from my wife Jenny. Follow her on Twitter for more awesomeness!)

This is going to surprise you, but Jon and I don’t have the same exact interests. Shocking, right? Case in point, exercise. He likes to go to the gym and I like to power walk with friends. In the past, that might have been a division moment for us. He’s headed in one direction and I’m headed in another.

What we’ve learned though is that even as we work on different things, there is a simple way to create momentum in our marriage. I call it “the art of starting together.”

Let’s continue with the exercise example. My favorite time to walk with my friend Emily is early in the morning before the rest of the world wakes up. I get out of bed at 5:45AM and head out the door. Jon used to sleep while I did this, but then we discovered that if we start together even as we do different things, there is some momentum. Now, when I get up, Jon gets up too. He doesn’t walk with me, someone needs to be home for the kids, but he uses the time to write. This simple trick of using my exercise schedule as motivation gives him hours of uninterrupted writing time. More than that, it put us on the same schedule. If I get up early and need a quick nap on a Sunday afternoon, Jon will need one too since he got up early with me. If I get up early and want to go to bed early that night Jon will too if we’re on the same page. Momentum in a marriage doesn’t happen by accident. It takes big decisions and tiny actions too.

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Is it a huge thing in our marriage? Maybe not, but starting together gives our day a much greater chance of actually ending together.

And that matters to me as the spouse of a dreamer.