At the beginning of the year, I wrote down several blog post ideas and link up times. One of the blog post link ups was apparently this prompt: How Do You Do Date Night? I have no idea where this link up is or why I choose this post topic, because admittedly…our strategy for date night is NOT the typical strategy that you might hear about.
We don’t do weekly date nights. We honestly don’t even do monthly date nights.
We have been married for nearly 10 years this summer and our strategy is to not build our marriage on date nights.
Now hear me out before you close out of this blog post.
I am not against date nights- I think they are wonderful and that they can add some much-needed life and conversation back into a marriage.
But about three years into our marriage, I started to become frustrated with it. The idea that in order to have a solid marriage, we had to have regular date nights. I started to panic- our marriage was going to fail! We didn’t have a regular babysitter. We didn’t have anyone who was approved to babysit foster kids! We didn’t have money to pay for a babysitter! My husband worked wonky shifts at the fire department and we struggled to get anything on the calendar! I started to believe that our marriage was doomed simply because we weren’t going on regular date nights.
Now, if I stepped back for one moment I would have realized something: Our marriage was very healthy, even without date nights. But because of the cultural push to GO ON A DATE! And GET AWAY FROM THE KIDS! I felt this inner turmoil that I was failing us and our marriage just because it was not a priority to get out together.
So once this realization started to dawn on me, I started to give myself a new mental strategy. I did not want to build my marriage on date night. Instead, I wanted to build my marriage on intentional time together. And you know the cool thing about intentional time together? It can literally happen anywhere and anytime! It can happen when we are driving to church. It can happen after we have put the kids to bed. It can happen while we are on a walk with our kids. It can happen around the dinner table. It can happen when we do get to go on a date night. It can happen when we are on a hike. It can happen even when our kids are present and involved in the conversation.
Are date nights fantastic when they do come along? Yes, they are.
But can we still try to be intentional in the everyday, even if there is a long time between date nights? Yes, we can.
Now, if you give me the option of going on a date night every week for a year, or taking a weekend to get away just the two of us one time a year, I would pick a weekend away every time. A date night feels short and rushed, like we always have to get back to the kids as soon as the clock strikes a certain time. But a weekend away feels like I have some time to relax and sort some thoughts out and spend some time with my man. Honestly, we have gotten away two times in our entire marriage, once in 2016 and once in 2018. So imagine my enthusiasm when Theo suggested we head to a marriage conference for the weekend! We were very excited and now that we do have reliable childcare for the first time in our marriage, we jumped at the opportunity to spend the weekend together at a conference in Indianapolis.
We made the two hour drive on Friday afternoon and got into our hotel around 5. We dropped our stuff off, and immediately went to register/sign in for the conference and then out to grab a quick bite to eat. Our hotel room was on the 19th floor of the hotel!
Last year when I went to Indy for a conference, we found that the lines waiting for the restaurants were an hour or two. Somehow this trip we completely lucked out by finding unique hole-in-the-wall restaurants and didn’t have to wait at all for a table. Friday night we got some Thai food! I took a picture of Theo and then he took a picture of me….HAHA.
Friday night the conference began and kept us up in sessions until 9:30. Ya’ll, the conference was SO GOOD. It was gospel centered, and spoke so much life into our marriage. The speakers were excellent and we so enjoyed sitting under their teaching.
Friday night we wanted to crash hard and ENJOY our first night away from kids in 4 years. But we both slept horribly! I don’t know why we couldn’t fall asleep, but around midnight Theo was up rooting around in our bag for some melatonin and I asked him to give me some, too. Even after the midnight melatonin, I still didn’t sleep well. But the most annoying part was that the hotel alarm clock went off at 6 am!!!!! We were SO annoyed. If it had gone off at 4, I probably could have rolled over and gone back to sleep, but at 6am my internal Mom body clock was telling me it must be time to get up now that I was awake. Sigh. We got up, got dressed and went downstairs to get some breakfast. We ended up eating at the hotel restaurant, which was fine, but not great.
Our hotel was FANCY. It looked nice, it had all the nicest accommodations and set ups, but we were not impressed. We kept running into these random snafu’s that made the hotel feel more like a 3 star than a 5 star. When we arrived in our room, we found an insulin pen in the mini fridge. It’s a little unnerving to find a used needle in your room, even if it is a medical one! The line for the elevators was like 80 people long and the elevators were SO SLOW, so we went searching for the stairwell, only to be told by an employee that “this is a POSH hotel. Guests don’t use the stairs….”. Okayyyyy, then. We did eventually find a stairwell that could be used and ended up using it several times over the weekend. We also called down to the front desk to ask if there was a microwave we could use in the hotel. They were very helpful and told us there were microwaves on the 3rd floor in the laundry room. We about died of laughter when we arrived in the laundry room and found THIS microwave as the ONLY microwave for a NINETEEN FLOOR HOTEL. WHAT?
But the thing that finally tipped me over to being really unimpressed with the hotel was a sink issue. Between sessions around 10 am I went to use the ladies restroom and discovered that 3 out of 4 sinks in the bathroom were clogged. Keep in mind there is an event with 1000 attendees at this hotel. So I went all the way down to the front desk and told them that the sinks were clogged and they were looking pretty gross. Guess what? I went to the same bathroom SIX hours later…………
Um. Not ok, posh hotel. There was absolutely no indication that anyone had even looked at it. No effort to close the restroom, or clean it up, or put signs indicating that someone was coming. Absolutely zero change in six hours when this was one of the main bathrooms for an even with at least 500 women. YIKES.
ANYWAYS- it seems that the hotel just needed to get their act together, and only the sink issue really bothered me. The rest of the stuff kept me fully entertained for the weekend.
We spent most of Saturday in sessions. They had sessions on the design of marriage, the fall of marriage, conflict in marriage, sex in marriage, the hope of marriage and then separate mens and women sessions to really call us each into our unique roles. It was a lot of sitting and note taking, but man was it good!
Once or twice every session they would pause and have the couples write or discuss the relevant topic by asking fairly pointed questions. They also had several check-ins that involved either using the app or using some type of provided activity outside of the conference sessions. They encouraged us to go on a date on Saturday night and go over some questions.
Saturday’s sessions ended at 4, so we had the rest of the afternoon and evening to just be together. We decided to explore the city and found a mobile self-guided scavenger hunt and took ourselves all around Indy to find some cool landmarks. It was wayyyyy colder than these pictures make it look, but we kept warm by walking as fast as possible haha.
We spotted an Ethiopian restaurant and stepped in and felt immediately transported to Africa. Even though I haven’t ever been to Ethiopia, it still feels home adjacent to me š
We headed back to the hotel after dinner since it was getting really cold out, and we totally just crashed and rested for the evening. It was luxurious. We watched some house show, talked through so many different areas and aspects of our marriage, and read some of our books.
We slept so much better the second night and woke up very refreshed and almost eager to get back to our babies! We attended the mens session (Theo) and the women’s session (Suzanne) and then skipped out on the very last session of the conference to go out for brunch. We ended up waiting for almost an hour at the brunch place which wasn’t ideal, but the FOOD WAS SO GOOD.
We headed back to our van and hit the road back to our real life! It was so wonderful and refreshing to get away, and I can highly recommend the Weekend to Remember events. If you find one near you, they have fantastic early bird pricing!
