Even if you're happily married you might find dates with your spouse kind of awkward sometimes. What do you talk about? I know we struggle at times to have an easy flow of conversation, too.

I don’t know what it is about dates that make it difficult to know what to talk about. Sometimes we’re just distracted or exhausted but sometimes if you’re up to date with each other then you’re also not sure what to go over. Certainly, if there’s an ‘elephant’ in the room, that gets in the way too.

This is a good place to start because where couples struggle sometimes is they haven’t dealt with something that’s pretty major. One spouse initiates the date as a way to try to repair or even extend a peace offering.

We could go down quite a rabbit trail with this but I think it would be good just to point out that you want to set up your dates so that you have the same goal/agenda when you go on them.

If your marriage is distressed, be sure that you’re both heading in with an open mind that you’re doing this as one little step to move towards repair and reconciliation. If this is your situation, don’t go in with super high expectations and give your spouse the benefit of the doubt and show some generosity by extending good will.

This is one time that we’d actually recommend avoiding the elephant in the room. If the ‘elephant’, or issue, is too big for you, put that out there before you go and also suggest how you’d like to resolve that: set up a time to talk, ask for help from a spiritual leader in your church, or get some counselling. On the date itself, though, is not the time or place to hash out difficult issues.

What you want to try to do is to set up your dates to allow a little sweetness to percolate into your marriage. Warmth. Kindness: both given and received.

When you’re going on a date in the context of the distressed marriage you want to point the conversation toward topics that help you to build little wee connections with each other again. On the other hand, if your marriage is reasonably healthy but you just need a way to freshen up your dates and your relationship we’re going to point you toward the same topics!

We know that life happens. We all get super busy and because we’re always in the whirlwind we tend to lose track of those little details that are happening in each other’s lives. Remember how when you were dating you used to love finding out those tiny little facts about each other? Well, date conversations should steer in that direction.

Talk About Relationships and Experiences

Generally, and looking at research on conversations that people tend towards, about 55% of conversation times for males and about 2/3 for females is devoted to talking about relationships and experiences.[i] See, most people like to talk about relationships and experiences because these are the most influential forces in our lives in terms of our emotional wellbeing.

A much smaller amount of time goes to work or school-related trips, then to sport, then arrangements for future social activities, then culture and art and politics and religion.

So let me give you a few different ideas about this.

You definitely want to spend more time asking your spouse about the relationships you see less of. For example, how’s it going with their boss, with their mother, with their closer friends that maybe you don’t hang out with as a couple too much. These things are really important to your spouse.

Watch for little hints of emotion there and try to catch those and expand on them to learn more about your spouse’s feelings. Be curious. Rather than assuming you know something, ask about it.

Watch how you add your interpretive layers to what they’re saying, though. You may find more value, instead of thinking about how you see something just to stay with more neutral non-judgmental questions to ask your spouse how they experienced their friend or the specific circumstance at work.