Your relationship is a living breathing entity that needs to be fed and cared for like all living things. Plants need soil, carbon dioxide, and sunlight. Humans need food, water, and oxygen. Relationships require time, thoughtfulness, touch, and talk to flourish and thrive.
What a relationship needs most is love, and according to Brett Williams love is the free gift of our attention. Knowing this it becomes easy to see why time, communication, and gifts of attention are needed for the love to stay alive.
A relationship needs to spend at lease 30 minutes every day and a larger block of time every week (date night). Your date night evaluation will assist you to see how much time and the quality of time you spend together. There are several factors that play into how well that time is spent, frequency, variety, balance, intimacy, connection, and sex. Test how you rate.
Once you are done go back to datenightplus.com and check out the Date Night Deck, the book You Can Be Right Or You Can Be Married, or the weekly date night idea to better improve your time together.
Frequency: “I told you ‘I loved you’ when we got married if anything changes I will let you know.” The expression of love and affection needs to happen frequently, once a life time is not going to satisfy any relationship. Frequency looks at how often you to make your relationship a priority by seeing how often you making time to be together.
Variety: As everyone knows attention is drawn to novelty and energy. When something is new it grabs our attention, but over time and repeated exposure the newness is lost, as is its attraction. For your dates to be lively and refreshing they have to be new and different.
Balance: Therefore the first two elements to a good date night is that you go out and that you make it new and different. Balance refers to the fact that attention is evenly distributed between the two parties. Attention must be given both ways for it to feed both people in the relationship.
Intimacy: Intimacy refers to how vulnerable each person will make themselves in the relationship. This fundamentally is how we love ourselves, and bring attention to ourselves. With no significant opportunities or disclosures the relationship will remain superficial.
Connection: Love is not a mental activity it is something that a couple must engage, and contact, as well as conversation, are how that is done. Making physical contact and eye contact is how the attention is transmitted. Your level of connectedness is evaluated by the amount of touch and eye contact.
Sex: Physical intimacy is the canary in the cage which monitors the health of the relationship. Sex is the first thing to die when a couples starts to fall off course. Therefore when the couple has a healthy sexual encounter (with both people getting their needs met) this is a good indicator that the date did it’s job and connected the two of you.
Prep time: Steven Covey, author of 7 Habit for Highly Effective People, states that anticipation can be as satisfying as the event itself. Couples can double the value of their date nights by simply putting time into the planning stage. The attention you bring will connect you even before you get out the door.
Time: The general rule is that couples need to spend at least five hours together a week. In addition they need to add a half hours for every year the pair has been married. So after 21 years of marriage Lynda and I should spend 15 1/2 hours together. A five hour date night is going to be a third of our time together.
Events: If you are going to be spending time together then you need to keep things active. Some passive kinesthetic (physical) lovers as well as those auditory lovers can sit for hours, but if your partner is not the same style, you will lose them if your date does not involve activity and simulation.
Money: There are a lot of cheap dates, but there is also a relationship between our money and our level of investment. The more expensive something is the more likely it is that we will take care of it. Therefore we need to value our relationship by investing some of our resources.
Score:
Your point scale works like this:
0 to 10 date life is pretty lame
11 to 20 Average- doing more will increase you attraction.
21 to 30 Doing well.
Check out our DATE NIGHT DECK as a tool to build up your date life.
