Date Night: 5 Ways to Make It Great

Dating your spouse is a great way to sustain and nurture the intimacy in your marriage. We highly recommend taking the time to have a regular date night with your husband or wife. Taking time away from your day-to-day life to focus on one another is a fantastic way to stay connected in spite of whatever else is going on in your life.

Today, we’re sharing a few ways you and your spouse can create awesome dates–and great memories along the way.

1. Tie Up Loose Ends at Home

This may sound like a strange way to create an amazing date, but especially if you have children, it’s essential to tie up as many loose ends as you can at home before you leave for your date. Identify any urgent or pressing tasks that need doing or issues that need to be resolved before you leave the house. (We don’t necessarily mean dishes and laundry–those can wait!)

Put in the effort before your date to remove as many potential distractions as possible, and reap the rewards. Your spouse will thank you!

2. Ditch the Negativity

Make it a point to only talk with one another about positive things that spark happiness and romance. No news, politics, complex home issues, relationship problems, or negativity allowed!

Allowing a conversation to take a bad turn, or venturing into negative territory, can easily and quickly kill the mood of your date–and it will be hard to recover from. So it’s your job to work together to keep your special time on track for good feelings and happy memories.  Nurture one another and feed your marriage by focusing only on good things for a little while.

3. Unplug and Connect

Meaningful face-to-face connection is valuable and hard to come by these days. We’re so busy and inundated with technology that it’s easy to get distracted by devices and notifications. Do your best to unplug when you’ve got some intentional one-on-one time together, and concentrate on one another.

Have a good conversation, hold hands, go dancing, play a game–if even just for a little while. Have fun doing things you can’t do with a phone in your hand! Resist the urge to check your email, text messages, or social media, and just be in the moment with your spouse. You can watch those funny cat videos at home later.

4. Revisit Old Haunts

There’s no way to tap into that amazing romantic nostalgia quite like revisiting places you used to go–back when you were falling in love, or even when you were newlyweds. If you still live in the same place, you’ll have easy access to those old haunts. And if you’ve moved away, you could plan a weekend getaway to your old stomping grounds.

Reliving happy memories together will inspire and invigorate you. If you’ve been going through a difficult time in your marriage (or just in life), it will help you get back in touch with those feelings you may have been missing due to stress or other factors. Travel back in time together to recapture that spark!

5. Get Creative

Put your heads together and come up with some unique and adventurous ideas for your date nights. Make a list of experiences you’d love to have together, then share your lists with each other. Decide which ideas you’d like to act on first, and have fun! Creating new experiences and memories will help to increase the intimacy in your marriage.

What are some of your tips for creating awesome dates? What’s your favorite dating memory with your spouse? We’d love to hear from you in the comments section!