Between carpool, grocery shopping, dinner, laundry and other miscellaneous mom jobs, it’s easy to let a little thing like dating the hubby slip through the cracks. After all, you’re already married, and you have a million other demands for your time—and money! However, I learned the hard way that date night is not an optional expense. Of course, by the time you pay a babysitter, you can barely afford dinner and a movie.

And, when you pull it all together, you sit through dinner talking about the kids before sitting in silence at the theater. Sure, it’s nice to get out of the house now & then, but you need something more to truly reconnect. After a long, hard journey of destruction & repair, I think we’ve finally stumbled on a date night plan that works—we’re dating our way through the alphabet!

Selecting a Date Night Theme

Each date night, we plan a theme around the next letter of the alphabet. It forces us to come up with something a little more creative than dinner & a movie. In fact, we established an official rule that movies don’t count! We’re looking for activities that allow us to interact & reconnect. We’re having a ton of fun together, from planning each date’s theme to enjoying the actual experience.

Alphabet Date Night Ideas

We’ve been geocaching, shared a romantic fondue dinner and explored downtown—twice! Most importantly, though, we’re enjoying one another and falling love all over again. As we try completely new activities & visit places we’ve never been, I’m getting to know my husband again, and we’re discovering unexplored interests.

I’m not in charge planning the next date—K is for King of the Day. It was a sacrifice I had to make to get letter Q all to myself! We’ll be continuing our alphabet dating straight through letter Z, but it’s obvious the dating game needs to continue even after that. Using a theme to plan our date nights adds a little more fun & anticipation, allows us to get a little creative and makes us more purposeful about spending time alone.

Purposeful Date Nights for Marriage Strengthening

If you aren’t being proactive and purposeful with your relationship, it doesn’t have an opportunity to grow. Our marriage was definitely stagnant (and very nearly non-existent), but we seem to be on a much better path now. In fact, we renewed our wedding vows earlier this year.

J is for Just Married!