How to Nurture Your Marriage without Hiring a Babysitter

If you’re a mom, chances are you’ve occasionally felt overwhelmed by all of your responsibilities. And if you have a girlfriend or mentor mom to whom you’ve expressed your fears, it’s likely they’ve said something very much along these lines, “Girl, you need a date night.” Those words, “date night,” might have glimmered like pixie dust in the air for a moment, bringing back memories of the first blush of love. Memories of a simpler time, when all that seemed to matter was that, at long last, you and your love were alone.

Those memories may have turned you into a woman with a mission. You were going to find a babysitter and make reservations at that restaurant that doesn’t allow kids, the one you and your husband joke about going to “someday.” Afterward, the two of you would see a movie or go to the theater like you used to do and somehow, magically, your life—your marriage—would be back on track and stress-free. That’s not how the story ended for me and my husband. At the end of our big night out, we’d had a date, but life was still just as overwhelming and stressful as it had been that day at lunch.

Where did that leave us? I was told Oh, it just takes time to get in the rhythm of things, but when you’re doing it every week, you’ll look forward to that time away from the house and kids. I wanted to cry. Every week? I couldn’t go through that every week on the off chance it would help eventually. We couldn’t afford to do date night every week. Now what?

You might need to start with a shift in mindset. We tend to equate date night with relationship nurturing, but it wasn’t always that way (ask your parents or grandparents, if you can, how often they went out on dates after they were married). I think it’s easy for us to get caught in the trap of thinking marriage is supposed to be dancing with Prince Charming at the ball for the rest of our lives. But that’s the wedding, not the marriage. Marriage is doing life together, including the sticky, messy, hard, and boring parts that make up the majority of our days.

[Tweet “Your marriage is a unique relationship between you, your husband, and God.”] Are you praying for your husband? Are you asking him how you can pray for him? Are you asking him to pray for you? Are you praying for your marriage? What are you doing to grow in your personal relationship with God? How are you encouraging your husband to grow in his? Keeping your eyes on the Lord is a critical first step.

Because your relationship is unique to the two of you, talk about what you believe nurturing your relationship looks like. Spend a few minutes thinking about when you felt closest and most connected to your husband; listen to him when he talks about a similar time from his perspective. This will give you clues to figuring out the best way to feed your marriage. Maybe you’ll find out he really does crave that night at a restaurant (or you do), or maybe you’ll find that those family trips to the hardware store on the way home from a kid’s basketball game are more than running errands on Saturday afternoons.

Next, think about little things you can do to let your husband know you love him. (This may be easier if you know his love language. (There’s a quick quiz here: http://www.5lovelanguages.com/profile/ but the book is also a highly recommended read.) Maybe it’s a text randomly during the day, maybe it’s a note in his day planner or in the calendar on his phone, or maybe it’s making a meal you know he enjoys. Choose things that are his love language (even if it’s not how you would immediately prefer to show love.) Sprinkle those little acts of love into his life.

Even with those little changes, you might still want some uninterrupted alone time with your husband. You can do this at home with relative ease if you have one simple thing in your world: bedtime. As the kids get older and are staying up later, banish them to their room at eight o’clock a couple of nights a week. Keep your dinner in the oven and eat by yourselves—maybe even at the dining room table instead of in the kitchen. Play cards, a board game, or a computer or video game; put together a puzzle or read a book aloud together. Do something you both enjoy. Something that encourages you to talk (I’m voting against watching TV or a movie together here unless you’re going to talk during and after the show.)

Our kids have started looking forward to these nights at our house because they get chicken nuggets or mac and cheese for dinner and I make something they don’t like but we do for our later dinner. (You don’t have to do that, but I like to cook something special now and then, and this saves me from watching my kids make gagging motions as they choke it down. Everyone wins.)

When you boil it all down, what I’ve found to be the key to nurturing our marriage is making sure my husband knows that he’s my priority—that our marriage is a priority. Maybe you’ll still decide you need that out-of-the-house date now and then, and if that’s what works for you, do it. But hopefully there are some ideas here for ways to nurture your relationship at home, without a babysitter, too.

Elizabeth Maddrey is an author of several contemporary Christian romance novels. She is also a wife, mother of two amazing boys, Awana Commander, and beloved daughter of the King. Though her PhD in Computer Science does little to help her succeed in any of those tasks, she owns her nerddom just the same. She blogs at elizabethmaddrey.com.