Five Ways to Date Your Spouse, and Why It Matters to Your Kids

After you have kids, it can feel difficult to prioritize your relationship with your husband. You both have so much going on, not to mention keeping a little human alive and thriving! But it’s very important to continue to date your spouse, and not just for the sake of your marriage; it matters to your kids, too.

Picture this: you are on a first date. You spend hours getting ready, try on dozens of outfits, and your hair and makeup are on point. The doorbell rings and you heart skips a beat. You go to the door and he’s standing there with a beautiful bouquet of flowers.

You enjoy a lovely dinner and can’t stop talking as you get to know each other. Perhaps you take a walk in the park or enjoy live music at an outdoor venue. He walks you to the door to say goodnight and maybe steals a sweet kiss. After you go inside, you replay that entire night over and over because it was so fun and romantic, and he’s just so great.

Sound fun? If you’ve been married for a few years, that entire scenario may be a distant memory. Nowadays, you and your hubby seem to barely have time to give a quick kiss on the cheek in passing as he heads off to work in the morning. Maybe one of you sends a quick “I love you” text during the day, but it’s likely the other won’t have time to reply. The evenings are filled with caring for the kiddos, and by the time you fall into bed, you’re too exhausted to do any more than share a quick kiss goodnight.

Dating your spouse is important

Before I got married, I remember hearing a lot about the importance of dating your spouse. My single self thought, Well, yeah! How hard can that be? Pretty darned, as it turns out. It’s so easy to get in a marriage rut. Life happens: the kids need constant attention, bills need to be paid, and it’d be nice for the house to be clean and laundry done (but honestly, who are we kidding?). Before you know it, it’s been days since you and your partner have talked about anything other than the bare necessities.

It’s important for your marriage

It’s extremely important to take time as a couple, just the two of you, to recharge and work on your relationship. Next to your relationship with God, your relationship with your spouse is the most important. When you said, “I do,” you promised to love and care for your spouse for the rest of your life. There’s no way your marriage relationship will grow if you don’t water it, and one way you do that is by dating each other.

It’s important for your children

Not only is dating your spouse beneficial for your marriage, but it also benefits the rest of your family. When the relationship between mother and father is loving, supportive, and strong, those qualities trickle down to the relationships with the children. Children need to feel secure, and nothing helps them feel that way more than seeing their parents’ loving relationship grow. Your marriage sets the standard for what your children will come to expect in their own relationships, and if you put things, activities, and commitments above people, they will learn to do the same.

How to Date Your Spouse

There are many ways to date your spouse, and not all of them involve actually going on dates. Here are five simple ways to date your spouse and keep your marriage growing strong.

1. Learn their love language

I hope you already know your spouse’s love language, but if not, now is the perfect time to learn. Essentially, a love language is how a person communicates love, both in giving and receiving it. There are five basic love languages: physical touch, quality time, words of affirmation, giving and receiving gifts, and acts of service. In his book, The 5 Love Languages, Gary Chapman goes in-depth about the characteristics of each language and demonstrates how to speak your partner’s language.

Learning your spouse’s love language will go a long ways in discovering what makes them tick. For example, my husband’s love language is quality time. He feels the most loved when we are doing things together. It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate; he’s fine just hanging out watching a movie. The important thing to him is that we’re together. My love language is physical touch. I feel the most loved when my hubby holds my hand, snuggles on the couch, or plays with my hair. Becoming fluent in your spouse’s love language is an important part of dating them.

2. Pursue your spouse

Remember when you were dating and you and your spouse pursued one another? You’d call or text each other all the time, visit one another at work, and send each other little gifts. That shouldn’t stop once you get married! Many people lose the thrill of the chase once they tie the knot and kind of just settle.

Pursuing your spouse helps them know that they are important to you. If you don’t make a conscious effort to pursue them, it’s easy to take them for granted. It’s easy to become complacent in marriage unless you consistently pursue your partner.

3. Love and Respect

Men and women are wired very differently. Women desire love, while men desire respect. In Ephesians 5, wives are instructed to submit to (or respect) their husbands, and husbands are instructed to love their wives (vv. 22, 25). It’s extremely important to recognize this difference because, like love languages, you need to address your partner’s needs.

4. Carve out time together

Time spent communicating is one of the best ways to date your spouse and grow your marriage. Before you got married, I bet you spent hours on the phone with your significant other, learning everything you could about each other and sharing your hopes and dreams. How often do you do that with your spouse?

Quality time is vitally important to your marriage. When your husband gets home from work, try spending the first fifteen minutes together for couch time, without the kids, talking about your day and catching up. Train the children that this is mommy-and-daddy time and they should play or read quietly in another room until you’re finished. Those few minutes will make a huge difference.

Another part of carving out time together in regards to dating your spouse is to actually go on dates. Some people suggest having weekly date nights, but if that seems impossible, start with once or twice a month. You can even try an afternoon date while the kids are in school. Meet up for lunch and an afternoon stroll or window shopping excursion. Take a road trip with your husband, or even try a date night for homebodies.

5. Spend time in the Word

This may be the most important tip of all. Set some time, either in the morning before the kids are up, or in the evening after they are in bed, to do devotions together as a couple. Pick a book of the Bible to go through verse-by-verse, or choose a marriage devotion book to study. Spend some time praying together and sharing the struggles and triumphs in your walk with the Lord. It makes a huge difference! As you grow closer to the Lord, you will inevitably grow closer to each other.

So that’s it! Those are my five tips on how to date your spouse. Even though it takes time and effort, the benefits far outweigh the work you have to put in. Not only will it help maintain a healthy marriage, your kids will learn that Mommy and Daddy’s relationship is important and this will help them to feel secure in the family structure. Give these a try and see the difference it makes in your relationship.

How do you date your spouse? Tell us about it in the comments below!