Building a home together– while it may be super stressful– can also be one of the most fun couple’s activities in a lifetime of life, love and laughter. If you’re currently building a house, this 10-step blueprint might give you some tips. But more importantly…if you’re married, reading today’s post showing how building a house is like building a marriage could help strengthen your relationship. And if you’re married AND building a house together with your significant other... God help you ('cuz that ish can be stressful).

In appreciation for 23 years online, for the first 23 days of January 2023, the first 23 sales each day of almost everything we make and sell* will receive 23% off automatically.

Marriages are dying every day because of couples’ failures to continue dating-- years and decades after the courtship period-- when it feels hard to make time due to our urgency addictions, modern busyness, procrastination and inertia. Yet we MUST make time to date our significant other regularly-- especially after marriage and children. It’s important…but IT'LL NEVER BE URGENT (until and unless it becomes almost too late). You can make it easy despite a busy life by creating a date ritual with some basic pre-planning of what to do, where and how. Here's one date ritual we have to ensure quality time together, both free and costing money-- time without kids, having zero errands to run, no tasks to complete and with no agenda except enjoying one another’s company. -- Mr. and Mrs. Cubic Zirconia

Beyond great entertainment that brought in $170+ million US dollars at the box office globally, few movies have been more influential in stirring a call for change than this 5-time Academy Award nominated film.  For humanity: the world became more aware of the human rights abuses, dangerous labor practices, terrorist funding, money laundering, and environmental destruction wrought by the mined natural diamond industry. For our business: new customers had yet another powerful reason to choose our 5A diamond-quality CubicZirconia.com CZ stones instead of buying a mined, natural diamond. For the marriage-minded, engagement proposal planner with a future fianceé on the fence about choosing natural mined diamonds or an alternative: he/she can simply have a movie night and watch Blood Diamond together (you won’t have to say much, and if you haven’t seen it…he/she will want to talk after watching). 

The discussion with your future spouse about a non-diamond engagement ring can be a tough conversation when society has a certain expectation but you want to do something different. We call it being "between a rock and a hard place". This article will provide a few ideas and resources to help couples talk through the options for a non-mined-diamond alternative. Just as you can create your own wedding experience, you can choose an engagement ring that actually reflects your values-- individually and as a couple. And if you do it together, it's a great test-drive of many future values-driven decisions a marriage will be better off for if a couple makes together.