Dating Your Spouse

Dating your husband seems to be a hot topic nowadays. I’m not sure if this was the case when our parents were young and married with children, or if maybe it’s because of the types of media I consume (blogs written by religious women, magazines, websites) but the pressure is on when it comes to dating your spouse. Look at Pinterest for instance, there are at least 20 different links about “how to date your husband” complete with 30+ ideas of how to really keep that marriage roaring.

I jumped on the bandwagon last year after reading another blog post about somebody’s brilliant ideas of how you can date your spouse. I asked our siblings in town if they could all rotate through a 3 month cycle to watch Gwen and sat down to plan a date per month.

It never worked out and fizzled into the background, to which made me panic that our marriage was sure to crumble into pieces because we weren’t taking time for it and OMG all we’re going to care about is Gwen and before we know it we will surely fall out of love and get divorced because we didn’t have a pre-scheduled date on a monthly basis. Everyone knows that’s why marriages fall apart.

The truth is, in this stage of our lives officially dating doesn’t work. Our weeks are chaos-filled attempts at making it through the day-to-day routine with grace while our weekends are packed full of lord knows what plan or sickness we need to recover from. Scheduled date nights aren’t helpful right now and just create a lot of stress. This has taken awhile for me to accept.

If you read the “30 ways to date your husband” posts, you’ll see in between the cutesy little date ideas of hikes, miniature golf and romantic picnics there are the watch a movie with your husband once the kids go to bed ones too. And when  I really think about it, we’re dating each other just fine.  We make time for one another plenty enough. While it’s not an official “date” that doesn’t mean that we don’t sit down on the couch once the baby is in bed and watch TV while sharing a chocolate chip cookie or cook dinner together sneaking kisses in between tasks. We (more Jake than I, admittedly) try to make it a priority to step back from the daily “to-dos” and gaze into eachother’s eyes while cooing sweet nothings to one another as often as possible. Ok, ok, we totally aren’t those types of people, but you get the jist.

And those official date nights happen when they can, stress-free. Sometimes grandparents make it up for a visit and when they do we capitalize on the opportunity. They might not happen once a month or weekly, like everyone harps to make a priority but we’re fine with that.

Someday, I can see the value of these scheduled dates and would love for such a thing to work out in our lives, but that day isn't today, no matter how many times the internet advises me to do so.