(This turned out super long, so I am breaking it up so as not to take all your free time today with my ramblings haha!)
Mr.Pate and I are jumping back into a lost old tradition for us this week, date night.
When we first got married... well let me back up even further. During our engagement, we were very intentional about preparing for marriage. We read books, did counseling and spent alot of time talking about meaningful things. One book we read or went through really, was called "Preparing for marriage" by Dennis Rainey and some other folks (We highly highly encourage people to go through it, it was fabulous). It was a workbook that required each person to do work on their own, then it had a session you did together. We would head to Starbucks, grab some coffee and dive in. These are some of my best memories of our relationship.
Once we got married we declared Thursday nights as Date Night. Since we were both in ministry at the time, there really was a need to set a night where we could not do ministry, seminary work etc, and instead had to focus on quality time together. It was lovely. Most of the time we wouldnt even "do" anything on Date Night, just a nice night in with dinner and games.
Its hard to remember exactly when we got away from this practice but I think it might have dwindled when mr.pate lost his job and then I had surgery. I think that was a season of life where a lot of our routine and traditions changed. I was tired all the time, and it has taken quite a long time to get back to feeling like myself. Then mr.pate started working three jobs and was never home, so our quality time consisted of me hanging out at Starbucks all the time! Haha!
Somewhere during all of this, I think we both lost the reasoning for a date night. I mean we dont have kids and see each other practically every night, why should we set aside a night to do the same thing we do every other night?? And so we stopped having date night. During this time we really got lazy within our marriage. For those of you who arent married, when people say marriage is hard work, they arent lying! It always confused me when people told me that, because how could hanging out with someone you love so much be work? ...
I will tell you how tomorrow in part 2. For now, do any of you have a regular scheduled date night? What do you do? Please share!
we generally do date night on saturday evenings b/c he always has to film on fridays. usually dinner and then wandering around town. we skipped this for a few months around the holidays and it definitely hurt us! now we're trying to get back on track, but unfortunately one of us will be out of town for the next two weekends! :(
ReplyDeletewe do not have a scheduled date night. since we are at home together nearly every night, its kinda like every night is date night. when baby girl arrives though, we'll have to schedule a nigth!
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