This post is adapted from Date Your Wife by Justin Buzzard. It originally appeared on Crossway.org; used with permission.
Pursue Your Wife Thoughtfully
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 care for the woman God has given you. But, sometimes it helps to build off other people’s ideas in order to form your own. Look these ideas over.
Act on some of them this month, and let these ideas spur your own creativity for how to help your wife and your marriage flourish. Just as God has put a lot of love and thought into his pursuit of you, we husbands want to put a lot of love and thought into how we pursue our wives.
20 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.
This article is adapted from Date Your Wife by Justin Buzzard.
Justin Buzzard (MDiv, Fuller Theological Seminary) is the founder and lead pastor of Garden City Church in Silicon Valley. Justin writes regularly at JustinBuzzard.net, speaks widely at conferences nationwide, and is part of the Acts 29 Church Planting Network. He is the author of many books, including Why Citites Matter. He lives in Silicon Valley with his wife, Taylor, and their three sons.
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Publication date: June 7, 2017