Lesson #15–Date
Chances are you went on quite a few fun, memorable dates before you got married. We did! But after we got married, things slowed down a little bit. Fortunately for us, we received great advice from lots of happy couples. One piece of advice that seemed to come up more than any others was this: Date your spouse. When we didn’t have kids, everything we did was a date! We had plenty of time together and we could go places and do things as long as they didn’t interfere with our work schedules. Five kids later, dating is a whole new challenge.
Get Creative
We are living on a budget. We don’t hire a babysitter every weekend or go out to expensive dinners on the regular. But we do make dating a priority, and have declared every Friday night “date night.” We have just gotten more creative with what our “dates” entail.
-We often buy ice cream at the grocery store and save it for our “date night” which begins once the kids are in bed. Our favorite flavor is Kroger’s Private Selection Denali Moose Tracks. If you haven’t tried it, we highly recommend it!
-Sometimes we rent a movie from Redbox and watch it at home (if you check your emails, Redbox sends out free rental codes ALL THE TIME) once the kids are asleep. Tip: Did you know that you can plug headphones into many Roku remotes and get the sound directly into your headphones? We have used a splitter in the headphones jack and then both of us can plug in our headphones and enjoy the movie without worrying about the sound waking our kids.
-We play games together. Catch Phrase, Monopoly (we prefer to play this on the iPad app–no setup or cleanup and you can add extra players), Wordfeud,
-Date nights are a fantastic time to dream together. You can draw up a floorplan to your dream home or go window-shopping for your dream vacation home on Zillow.
-Work together on a project. We redid our half-bath a couple of years ago. I love working side-by-side with my husband!
-We have had fun with taking personality tests together and reading the results. 16personalities.com is an excellent–and free–personality test that we both found to be very insightful. We learned a lot about each other through those insights!
Our 15th Anniversary
After our 14th anniversary, we decided we wanted to do something big for our 15th anniversary. Our kids are young (9,9,7,5,& 2), so we had not yet left them for any sort of overnight vacations. We decided to plan to return to San Diego, California,–where we were married–for our 15th anniversary. We plotted and set aside money for our trip. My husband worked the scoreboard at extra football games to bring in additional income that we funneled straight to our “San Diego fund” in YNAB. We found affordable airfare and our angel moms were willing and able to come to our home and care for our kids for the three days we would be gone. Even the day before we were scheduled to leave, I was nervous about going. I was nervous to leave our kids in Texas and travel to California. I was nervous to spend so much money–did we really need to go?
The moment we arrived in San Diego and walked hand-in-hand to get our rental car, I knew we had made the right decision. We needed that!
We spent three glorious days in San Diego, celebrating our lives together. Because we are usually so busy, we kept our schedules flexible and we spent plenty of time relaxing and doing things that mattered to us. We tried great restaurants and even walked through the library! The trip was exactly what we needed. I didn’t realize how much we needed it until we got there. If I would have given in to my nervousness and fears, we may never have had this glorious experience. It was simply perfect. I almost messed that up. I am so glad I didn’t! Fortunately, we had decided together that we would make our anniversary trip a priority. It strengthened our relationship more than I could have imagined.
Make it a Priority
Because of our fantastic experience (and the fact that our kids are getting older), we decided we need to plan an annual anniversary getaway each year. We don’t plan to do a BIG San Diego trip every year, but we do want to prioritize some sort of getaway–even if in our own backyard. Every relationship is different and you may be in a different season of life than we are, but my recommendation holds true regardless: make spending time–alone–together a priority.
Lesson #15: Date your spouse.
15 Things
We have come to the end of our 15 Lessons! I hope you have found some sort of takeaway that will bring more joy to your life and to your relationship. If you have missed any of the lessons in the series, here they are:
I’ve read over each thoughtful piece of advice and had many thoughts of either “oh we got this one” or “man we could be doing better”! I can’t wait to apply the pieces of advice that I know can add much joy to my own marriage.
Thank you for sharing your wonderful insights! Your relationship is awe inspiring!
Thanks, Hilary! You made me cry!