Three Things Your Marriage Needs More than Date Night

Laura Range offers three spiritual tools for building up your marriage during the month of love—and beyond!

Date nights are fun. At least, I think they are. With a breastfeeding baby every other year for most of our marriage, dates have been few and far between. Dressing up, eating delicious food someone else cooks and cleans up, and spending time with your spouse where the only interruption will be the waiter asking if you want dessert? Yes, please!

But what if date nights are a rarity in your marriage? Many couples don't have family in town to help with childcare or extra money in the budget for restaurant meals, movie tickets, or babysitters. Date nights are often touted in our culture as a must for a good marriage. But does that mean if you don't go on dates, your marriage is bad? Definitely not! While dates certainly offer an opportunity to intentionally connect with your spouse, they are not a necessary ingredient for a faithful Catholic marriage, and the number (or lack) of them is not an indicator of your marriage's well-being. If you are in a season where the dates are slim to none, take heart. The Lord sees you, and His Church offers every married couple many tools and resources to nurture their marriage.

Wondering what some of those might be? Here are three things that will improve your marriage more than a date night!

Humility

The Catechism defines humility as "the virtue by which a Christian acknowledges that God is the author of all good" (glossary). Saint Thomas Aquinas describes it as "seeing ourselves as God sees us: knowing every good we have comes from Him as pure gift" (Summa Q161). Too often in our marriages, pride slips in and we feel offended, frustrated, and self-righteous about things our spouse knowingly or unknowingly does.

The virtue of humility softens our hearts to remember we too are sinners in need of God's grace, that both husband and wife are on a journey of growing closer to the Lord and to each other "til death do we part." Humility helps us surrender our illusions of control or superiority and loosens our grasp on wanting things our way, which in turn produces deeper peace and joy. The Litany of Humility is a great prayer to begin asking the Lord to grow this virtue in you!

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Gratitude

In all circumstances give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus. (1 Thessalonians 5:18)

We know God's will for us is an attitude of gratitude, but it can be hard to follow this in our marriage on the daily! We slowly begin to forget all the good things about our spouse and become critical of them. Sometimes even lacking gratitude about the other gifts in our lives such as our children, homes, friends and community, can produce a negative, bitter spirit that pushes our spouse away and leaves us feeling farther from both God and spouse.

Even in challenging times, our Father blesses us abundantly each day and counting the ways lifts our minds, hearts, and spirits. Begin today by thinking about three general gifts in your life and three specific things you are thankful for about your husband.

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Sacramental grace

Finally, and most importantly, the Lord offers us sufficient and unending supernatural grace from the Sacrament of Matrimony we received on our wedding day. He knows marriage is hard–two sinners becoming saints is going to be a messy process. But He also knows it is good and beautiful. He wants you and your spouse to grow ever deeper in love and holiness together.

If God is for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31)

We can also receive the grace from other sacraments, like Reconciliation or the Holy Eucharist. Each time you go to Confession, the Holy Spirit gives you specific graces to combat the very sins you confessed, including those against your spouse and marriage. When you receive Jesus in the Eucharist, He is physically living inside of you, closer to you than at any other moment. Tell Him your deepest desires for your marriage. Believe in His love for you and ask Him for the grace to see and serve Him in your spouse. Can you get to Confession this week with your spouse or go to a weekday Mass together?

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The Church offers every married couple many tools and resources to nurture their marriage. #CatholicMom

While in this month of February the world may tell us the most important thing for your marriage is to go on an elaborate date night, complete with roses and steak and Instagram photos, we as Catholics know that our Faith offers us something more lasting; a feast no date can provide. When we cultivate virtue and respond to grace in our marriages, God gives us “here on earth a foretaste of the wedding feast of the Lamb” (CCC 1642).

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