Men, you need to come up with your own ideas for how to date your wife. You know your wife better than anyone else. Only you know how to best cultivate and guard the woman God has given you. But, sometimes it helps to build off other people’s ideas in order to form your own … My prayer is that the power of the gospel would drive how you date your wife and implement these ideas.
1. Attend a wedding. Sit in the back row and spend the whole time whispering memories from your own wedding.
2. Make a list of ten things your wife loves to do. Each new time you take your wife on a date, do one of those ten things as your date.
3. Take up a new hobby with your wife; do something new that you’re both excited about.
4. Do the classic date: dinner and a show. Take your wife to dinner and to a movie she wants to watch.
5. Take a twelve-month honeymoon with your wife. Relive your honeymoon by scheduling a 24-hour getaway for every month of this year. Each month go somewhere new with your wife.
6. Devote one hour each night for alone time with your wife. Talk about how your days went. Joke around with each other. Cultivate your friendship. Talk honestly about what’s going on in your lives. Help each other. Encourage each other. Pray together.
7. Mark your wife’s birthday, your wedding anniversary, and Mother’s Day on your calendar every year and plan to make those days special.
8. Write a love note to your wife. Tell her all over again what she means to you.
9. Spend an evening stargazing with your wife and talking about dreams you have for the future.
10. Spend an evening reminiscing with your wife about all you’ve been through together and all God has done and redeemed in your life together.
11.Devote the next month to studying a book of the Bible with your wife. Take twenty minutes several nights a week to read, discuss, and pray through a shorter book such as Ephesians or Philippians.
12. Visit your roots. Visit where your wife grew up and where you grew up. Learn more about each other’s backgrounds.
13.Hold your wife’s hand often, in public and in private.
14. Tell your wife that you love her.
15. Tell your wife that Jesus loves her more than you do.
16. Set a weekly date night. Each week rotate going out and staying in for your date night.
17. Cancel work for the day and do something special with your wife.
18. Take dancing lessons with your wife.
19. Cut something from your schedule and use that time to date your wife.
20. Vacation with your wife without your kids, without your work, and without your cell phone and computer.
Taken from Date Your Wife by Justin Buzzard, © 2012, pp. 133-139. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.
This article originally appeared on JustinBuzzard.net. Used with permission.
Justin Buzzard is founder and lead pastor of Garden City Church in Silicon Valley. Buzzard has been dating his wife for nine years and is the father of three young sons. He speaks widely, writes at JustinBuzzard.net, and is the author of Date Your Wife, Why Cities Matter, and Consider Jesus.
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