 Happy Monday. Welcome back to Lauren Learns. This is Kira. Hi. I hope you're all doing amazing. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for watching this and subscribing to this channel if you haven't already. Like this if you're married or if you know someone that could benefit from this video. Here are the five most important things I think everyone needs to be able to date their spouse. Let's get started. Number one, I think every marriage, every couple, should have time scheduled out on their calendar. And that means scheduling your date nights. And a lot of people I don't think like to hear that. I've heard that before. Like, oh, we want to be spontaneous. It's so silly when we have to like put it on the calendar. But let's just face it. Life gets busy and we need to even be able to make a priority of putting our spouse first. And then we can look forward to it all week. And I don't know about you, but like when I have something to anticipate, it just makes it so much more special when that time actually comes. And I enjoy it so much more. So schedule your date night. Number two, find people you trust that can watch your kids. And this seems like a no-brainer, but I actually have a really hard time paying babysitters. Like that's just like mind blowing to me. Why would I pay someone to watch my kids? So what I've done is I've found a few girlfriends that I really love and trust. And then I'm able to date swap with. So what that looks like is we both pick a date once a month on the calendar, where I go over to her house and watch her kids after they've already been tucked into bed. And she'll come to my house and do the same. My kids have already gone to sleep, so it's easy. And then it's a built-in me time night for my friend and a built-in me time night for me. Okay, so yeah, so we have a little bit of family in town, but no one that I feel like I can just call up and be like, hey, can you watch my kids? So this is a great little, um, hi, arrangement that we have going on. And I really highly suggest it for anyone out there that can swing that or, you know, you have people you know you can count on that way. Number three, creativity. It's not always in the budget to go on fancy dinner dates, right? I'm like, we try to do that on anniversaries and stuff, but like for this the the weekly monthly date night, I see it gets so creative. It just it just doesn't take a lot of money or a lot of planning even to get a really great date night up and running. A really good friend of mine, she told me the other day that her and her husband got some canvases and they went on YouTube and they had their own like painting with a twist night. They got some wine and I'm guessing that was just like so much fun. I can't wait to try that myself with my husband. That would be something we would totally do and that way we don't even need a sitter because our kids are in bed and we can still spend some time doing something fun that we wouldn't normally do together. Number four, don't be afraid to try new things. That can be really hard if you're in a rut, especially in your relationship and you're like, oh, I don't like to do that. I'm not a blank type person, but if you're if your spouse is into something and like like my husband's really into video games and that's not really my thing, but I probably everyone's no way out could pick up the controller with him in play. We tend to really like board games though, so that that's a good compromise for us. There was even a point before we had kids that I was like, if you can't beat him, join him. And I got like an online gaming account with him because I was like, yeah, you might as well actually learned a lot and had a lot of fun. And number five, this is a hard one, but let go of expectations. I think a lot of unhappiness in our life actually comes from mismanaged, mismanaged expectations. We expect something to go so incredibly amazing or, or maybe we expect, you know, this date night to just be perfect. But if you just let go and have fun with your like my husband's my best friend, if I could just let go and have fun and forget about the agenda, forget about the to-do list, put life on hold for a little bit and just have fun with him. Time is so much more meaningful and we get so much more enjoyment out of each other because we're not trying to accomplish anything. I another good friend of mine before they go on a trip, before any kind of big event, they will even talk about expectations. What are your expectations for this trip? And each of them will both, you know, give their two cents about what they see happening or what they would like to see happen. And then everyone's on the same page and no one can get upset about what happened or didn't happen. No matter how far you are into your marriage, remember, like you could be, you know, a month or 25 years. We have been in our almost, we've been married almost 14 years this year. I don't think you can ever stop learning about one another. We're always reinventing. We're always processing. And if you're trying, if you're trying to keep your marriage as a priority in your life, you do want to always be working on yourself and bettering who you are. And we don't ever want to get complacent for the person we're in relationship with. That's how you stay in love. And love is an action. Love is not a feeling. We choose to be in relationship with someone. We choose to work on our marriage and have a healthy outlook on our relationship. And I believe that comes through having regular date nights. Thank you so much for watching. Please like or comment if this is helpful to you. And we're like, like for Kira. And I'm so glad to be spending this time with you again. Thank you. And I will see you again next week. Go get messy, have fun and learn.