How do you stay connected to your spouse after years of marriage? In this post I share my favorite ideas, and why dating my spouse is so important to me.
I have been married for almost ten years! That simultaneously feels like a very long time and not very long at all. I feel like we’ve learned so much about being married and yet I still have so much to learn.
One thing I have learned is how important dating is! Even though we’ve been married for “so long” dating my spouse has been incredibly important. The stretches where we haven’t been able to date or connect with some one on one time have been the harder stretches in our marriage.
Another thing I’ve learned is that dating doesn’t have to mean the typical dinner and a night on the town or whatever the case may be. Especially during this crazy time of pandemic! We haven’t really been able to “go out”, so we’ve had to find some creative ways to connect, which has been more rewarding than I ever could have imagined.
Ideas to Date Your Spouse.
Date Nights In
One of our favorite ways to date is to have a date night “in”. We put the kids down, order food just for us, watch or rent a movie we haven’t seen and snuggle downstairs on the couch. (Thank you grubhub, doordash, ubereats, etc. for providing easy options at my fingertips.)
Usually when we snuggle at night, it’s upstairs in our bed. Snuggling and watching downstairs provides a change of scenery and helps change the tone of the evening.
We also usually choose to dress up for each other. In this house, that means no sweats, but nothing too fancy. We try to make this feel different than a typical night in snuggling and watching a show.
Talk it Out
Another one of our favorite date nights “in” is to just talk. Either we come up with questions we’ve been dying to know the answers to, or we print off a questionnaire and go back and forth giving each other our responses.
This has helped us learn new things about each other and not get stagnant in our relationship. It helps me to figure out how to best love my husband when I know details about him.
Write Love Notes
We also choose to write love notes to each other often. Whether it be a little note in my school notebook encouraging me or a sticky note on the mirror, we try to tell each other we love each other often in written words.
To this end, we bought a small journal that we pass back and forth. It lives on our nightstands and whenever we write to each other it goes to the other nightstand. I love seeing it on my nightstand! It gives me butterflies and makes me giddy.
During some of our rougher patches, like infertility or just generally feeling disconnected, writing love notes to each other helps remind us why we love each other. My husband is not a writer, but even his short notes of what he noticed that day that made him love me more makes my heart swell.
There are tons of ideas, choose your favorite activities and go for it! These happen to be some of ours.
Why It’s Important.
There is a saying in our church that you need to “choose your love and love your choice”. That really puts it in perspective for me. Dating and relationships don’t just magically stay amazing once you say “I do”. All relationships take hard work and effort every single day. And there are some hard days!
I once had a friend who was convinced that if marriage was hard then you were doing it wrong. She was absolutely convinced that she would marry her prince charming and nothing would ever go wrong again.
I wanted to shake her! (Gently and with love of course.) All relationships are hard work, and they are SO worth the effort! Just because a relationship is hard doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. The best things in life are worth fighting for.
Dating my spouse hasn’t always been easy. But it has always been worth it.
Find more fun “out-of-the-box” dating ideas here.