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How to Have a Successful Weekly Date Night

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One of my TOP priorities in life is to have a strong marriage. I want my kids to see a strong marriage, I want to still love and enjoy my husband once the kids are all gone, and I just want to enjoy my marriage every day right now and beyond! One way that we focus on making our marriage stronger is to have a weekly date night.

Russ and I have been married nearly 10 years, and for the first 6-7, we tried to find a solution for weekly dating, but nothing seemed to stick. Then, 3 years ago TODAY, Russ and I started a new system that has us on dates every single week (other than a 6-month hiatus after Holly was born/during the beginning of Covid). Here’s what works for us!

Some of the obstacles to a consistent date night in the beginning were money, lack of preparation/planning, and pressure to do something exciting every time vs. being boring and watching a movie every single time. Our system solved these problems for us, and I hope it will help you, too!

Logistics

To keep things simple and easy, we trade off planning dates monthly. So Russ plans all of January, and I plan all of February, etc.

We also have date night on a consistent day of the week — Tuesdays. Russ works Wednesday-Saturday, Sunday is a rest day, and Monday is our family movie night, so Tuesday is really our only option anyway, but having a consistent date night makes it super easy to NOT plan other things for that night. If anyone asks me to do something on a Tuesday night, it’s a no for me! Tuesday nights are not an option on my booking calendar, and if a potential client ever asks if I have any sooner availability, I’ll never say yes for a Tuesday — that’s date night, and date night is not negotiable.

At some point in the future, we’ll probably also have a consistent date night babysitter (because getting a babysitter at the last minute is seriously my least favorite thing ever), but that’s not our current situation.

We can do double dates/group dates whenever we choose. We have no system for this, so it’s purely up to the date planner! We keep it just the two of us probably 90-95% of the time.

Our System

There’s a spectrum when it comes to date nights, and to me that spectrum looks like this: on one side, you have fancy/exciting/expensive dates, and on the other side you have boring/repetitive/cheap dates. To help us cover all points of the spectrum rather than swaying toward one extreme or the other, we have four specific date nights each month: movie date, game date, dinner date, wildcard date.

  • If there are five date nights in one month, the last date night can be a repeat of any of the categories.

  • All categories are flexible on whether they’re home dates or out dates.

  • All categories are flexible on whether they’re expensive dates or cheap/free dates.

Movie Date

A movie date every single week is SO BORING for me, especially since we often watch shows or movies throughout the week (so a weekly movie date doesn’t feel much different from a normal night), but a movie night once each month is perfect. It gives at least one date that is super easy to plan and carry out (we almost always do at-home movie dates), which is helpful when you’re in charge of planning the whole month. Plus, we make it fun because about 75% of the time, we choose a movie that one or both of us has never seen.

Some options for the movie date include:

  • Watching at home

  • Going to the theater

  • Going to a drive-in theater

  • Doing an outdoor movie at home or in your community

  • Watching a few episodes of a tv series

  • Themed movie nights (eat nachos while watching Nacho Libre, for instance)

  • Building a fort to watch the movie in

Game Date

Game dates is a fun category because it includes any type of game. Here are a few options:

  • Board games

  • Card games

  • Video games (we like Dr. Mario)

  • Wii games (Just Dance, Wii Sport)

  • Sports

  • Bowling

  • Mini Golf

  • Jackbox games (we like Guesspionage, Trivia Murder Mystery Party, Fakin’ It, Quiplash, and more)

  • Party games (like charades, signs, fishbowl, etc.)

Dinner Date

Our rule for dinner dates is that it has to be something NEW. It can be a new recipe we make together, or it can be a new restaurant we try, but we almost always eat something new. Although this can be an at-home date, this is almost always a date we go out for. We’ve loved trying so many new restaurants together, and the best part of every dinner date is the uninterrupted conversation we get without kids!

Wildcard Date

If I had it my way, every single date would be a wildcard date, except that’s just not sustainable (at least for us!); we need some easier dates in the mix! BUT, having one wildcard date each month is the perfect amount. It helps keep date night interesting without being overwhelming.

The rule for wildcard dates is simply that they can’t be a plain ol’ movie, game, or dinner date; they can add on to the other types of dates (so for instance, a drive-in movie could count for a wildcard date if you want it to, since it’s different from just watching a movie in the living room), or just be something completely different. They don’t have to be fancy or expensive, just different! Technically, even going on a walk through the neighborhood could count as a wildcard date.

Some wildcard dates we’ve done in the last 3 years include:

Accountability

Another thing that has helped us stay consistent is to have an Instagram account solely dedicated to date night (@RushleyDateNight). No matter what we do, we always snap a picture to add to our grid. And it’s not the followers that help us be accountable (we only have about 130 followers anyway), it’s more just the account itself — like, I don’t want to forget to track our dates! That’s our record that shows how consistent we are! Haha :)

Having an IG account dedicated to date night also allows us to easily look at and search through our past dates because we use hashtags for each date category (#rushleymovies, #rushleygames, #rushleydinner, and #rushleywildcard), so those are fun to look through when friends ask for movie/game/restaurant recommendations or just fun things to do for date night :)

Our date night isn’t perfect — sometimes we forget to make a plan until Tuesday at 5pm, sometimes we start date night mad at each other, and sometimes we even get through a whole date night and still aren’t feeling great about each other. BUT, for the most part, it’s something that adds a lot of joy to our marriage, something we look forward to, and something that serves as a weekly reminder to reconnect if we’ve gotten too busy with other aspects of life. I love our date night, and I love our date night system that has worked so well for us.

Do you do a weekly date night? What works for you? :)

And if a date night seems COMPLETELY out of the question because everyone is too exhausted to even think about how that would be possible, please let me help! Set up a free discovery call to discuss how we can work together to get the whole family get more sleep.