When Date Night Feels Like Mission Impossible

If you’re anything like us the idea of a “Date Night” makes you quiver with excitement and lament that it will never happen. And yet, date nights are one of the most heralded ways of improving your marriage. Some would even say that if you’re not having date nights, at least once a week, your marriage is doomed. Wow! Isn’t that inspiring?! Might as well hang up the wedding rings now!

Here’s the thing: I agree that Date Nights are extremely important in a marriage, but who has the time, the money, the babysitter, or the ENERGY to have a date night! I know we don’t. Any babysitter that we can find wants $15 an hour {and that’s before they know we have 5 kids}. What is a couple to do?

You have a couple of options here:

Forget date night and just plan on co-existing with your spouse for the foreseeable future, inviting discontent and divorce into your marriage
Rethink the whole concept of date night

I recommend rethinking what date night looks like.

We don’t get out much, about once every 6-8 weeks we do make a point of asking the grandparents to take kids, so that we can either go out for a quick salad {it’s a cheap date} or stay home and cook dinner {even cheaper}. Most of our date nights consist of putting the kids to bed, doing the dishes, then sitting down together with a pot of tea {and maybe a dessert or special chocolate}. At that point we do 1 of 4 things:

Play a board game or some sort of activity that allows for good conversation
Watch a movie that we both agree on and sit next to each other on the couch, NO PHONES or any thing else that might be a DISTRACTION
We watch a video/discussion series through RightNow Media
Read a book independently and spend time discussing what was read

The point of whatever you are doing is that you are doing it together, that it is creating intimacy with your spouse, whether physically or through communication. If it is not an activity that you both enjoy or it is not creating intimacy with each other DON’T DO IT! The whole point of an at home date night is that you and your spouse are focusing on each other and on your marriage.

One warning of an at-home date night: They’re not perfect! The kids may interrupt, there may be distractions {that pile of laundry glaring at you from the back of the couch}, it may not last more than 30 minutes. It’s annoying. It’s not conducive to lengthy, deep conversation, but that’s life. The same things can happen when you’re out, you just don’t notice them as much. You have to train yourself, and your kids, to deal quickly with whatever distractions there may be and move on. You can’t let it take away from the purpose of this time together.

Just as you schedule anything else in life, you have to make the time to have a date night. If you want your marriage to thrive you have to put the time into it…no excuses {whether it’s a date night or anything else}! Figure out how you can work with the time you have…be creative! If you’re at a loss for ideas then Google is always right there for suggestions. There is HOPE: a date night is do-able at least once a week, maybe even twice.

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