Dating Your Spouse!

Dating your spouse….

I am pretty sure all married couples have heard about how important it is for you to date your spouse and this may be easier for some more than others. But, once you have kids how realistic is this statement? I completely agree, you should definitely make time for your spouse, I am not talking about just intimately, I am talking about going out with them. The question that I ask myself often is “how in the world do you stretch the 17 hours I am awake between working, kids, church and home?” This is something Marcus and I have been talking about for a few months now and I think we finally have found a way to do this.

Marcus and I celebrated our 13th year wedding anniversary on February 11th. Yes, thirteen years and we are still madly in love with each other. We celebrated by taking a last minute trip to Vegas, just the two of us. Now when I say last minute I mean like its Wednesday night at 10pm and we book a flight for 9am Thursday morning, crazy right. We had a miserably amazing time...we were both sick as dogs the entire trip, it was wonderful. That’s not important though, the important thing is that this is our reality, unfortunately we have to literally plan things out months in advance or literally last minute. We have been doing this our entire marriage regardless if its dinner with friends, family outings and vacations that is just how our life is.

We hear it all the time, you have to make time for each other and sitting on the couch for an hour watching TV together does not count. We understand that and we get it. It’s not that we don’t want to do it because we have literally sat down and planned how we were going to do this but executing this is the big issue. We love spending time together, he is my favorite person to be around. However, like I mentioned before finding a day to ourselves is the issue because if you are like us you need 34 hours a day to get everything done.

All jokes aside we really understand how important this and we understand that we are not the only couple that struggle with this area. So I am being very transparent in my hopes to help another couple. With that being said this is what we discussed…

Realistically we cannot just drop everything and go on a date, Maiya is not old enough to be a babysitter, in our eyes. Also, our family lives 45 minutes away from us so we either have to drop all three kids off or someone would have to come to our house. This mean we would have to factor that time into our date time. So the next best thing is to schedule a monthly day that we can spend together. We can go to the movies, go to brunch or if it’s nice take a walk downtown all before the kids need to be picked up. I think this may actually work, now if we can decide on an actually day.

This is real life. I know we are not the only couple out there that struggle with making time for each other and I want you to know that is ok. We get so caught up in our everyday life that it becomes a routine. Nonetheless, if we make time for everything else that is temporary we should make time for what is permanent. My marriage means everything to me and I refuse to neglect it all because I feel like I did not have time for it. If you make time to take your kids to extra activities then you can make time to go to lunch with your spouse.

What do you and your spouse do to keep dating alive in your marriage?
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Love Jo

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