Dating Your Spouse

How to complete Dating Your Spouse

Eight dates in roughly eight weeks forces the thing long-term couples quietly stop doing: deliberately planning for each other. The restaurants aren't the point; the point is proving that attention and effort, not leftover chemistry, keep a long relationship alive.

1. Tell your partner you're doing this and put all 8 dates on the calendar now, about one per week.
2. Alternate who plans each date; the planner keeps the details a surprise until the day.
3. Define 'proper': out of the house or a deliberate at-home event, phones away, no errands attached, no kids along.
4. Mix formats: one nostalgic date recreating an early one, one activity new to both of you, one dressed-up night, one cheap and silly.
5. Book sitters and reservations for the first month immediately; logistics kill more dates than disinterest does.

Tips

• A cancelled date gets rescheduled within the same week or it breaks the run.
• Ban logistics talk (money, kids, chores) for the first 30 minutes. Ask questions you don't know the answers to.
• Cheap counts: a sunrise walk with good coffee is a proper date; takeaway in front of the TV is not.

What counts as done

Eight completed, planned dates with your long-term partner inside a two-month window.