Marriage Advice: Three Dates Per Month

Here is a question worth sitting with: when did you last look forward to time with your spouse the same way you looked forward to things before life got in the way?

Not the dinner that happened because it was someone’s birthday. Not the night out you stumbled into because a babysitter was already booked. The kind of thing you had circled on the calendar, something you genuinely anticipated.

If the answer takes a while to come, you are not alone, and you are also not off the hook.

A year ago, I implemented something in my marriage that I have come to call Three Dates Per Month. The concept is almost embarrassingly simple. Three recurring appointments sit in Google Calendar, set to pop up on the first of every month like clockwork. One breakfast date, one lunch date, one evening out. When the first of the month arrives, Jamie and I look at our schedules and move each appointment to a date and time that actually works. Then we treat them like any other commitment we would not dream of canceling. Because that is exactly what they are.

The breakfast one is my personal favorite. We drop the kids at school, and instead of splitting off to conquer our respective to-do lists, we drive somewhere we like and sit down for a meal with no agenda. No work talk required, no mental load to share, no logistics to sort. Just breakfast. It sounds almost too small to matter. It is not.

Lunch is deliberately low-key. BIBIBOP, Chipotle, whatever sounds good that day. The point is not the venue. The point is the intentionality. We chose to be there, together, in the middle of an ordinary day, when it would have been just as easy to eat separately at our desks or over a kitchen counter. That choice is the whole thing.

The evening date is the one that takes the most coordination, a family member watching Leah and Owen, a reservation or a plan, the logistics of a proper night out. It is also the one that carries the most obvious weight. But I would argue it carries less weight than the other two precisely because it is expected. Everyone understands why married people go out to dinner. The breakfast, the lunch, those are quieter acts of devotion that most couples never get around to, not because they do not love each other, but because no one scheduled them.

That is the key insight, and I want to be direct about it: love is not enough to protect your marriage from neglect. Love is the reason. Systems are the method. If you rely on spontaneity to maintain your connection with your partner, you are gambling with something too important to leave to chance. Life will fill every available gap. Work will expand. The kids will need something. The house will need something. The car will need something. If you do not carve out protected time in advance and defend it, it will not happen. Not because you are a bad spouse, but because you are a human being managing a full life.

I am, by nature, a calendar person. I have recurring reminders for things most people would consider bizarre to schedule: changing the blades on my robot lawnmower, cleaning the robot vacuum, printing my monthly checklist. I do not clear the email notification until the task is done. It is a system, and systems work because they remove the need for willpower on any given day. You do not have to decide whether to do the thing. The calendar decided that for you weeks ago. You just have to follow through.

Applying that same logic to my marriage was not a romantic revelation. It was a practical one. And it has made my marriage more romantic as a direct result.

I have written before about the power of having something to look forward to. The phrase “I look forward to it” is not filler. Spoken with intention, it is a signal to your own brain and to the person you said it to that something good is coming. When you have three dates on the calendar every single month, you always have something good coming. That low hum of anticipation in the background of ordinary life is not trivial. It is fuel.

Thirty-six dates per year. That is what this system produces if you hold to it. Thirty-six mornings, middays, and evenings carved out of lives that would otherwise swallow them whole. Thirty-six reminders to each other that the relationship is not on autopilot, that the person across the table still deserves your actual attention, not just your proximity.

Some months the logistics get complicated. Someone travels, a kid gets sick, a work emergency lands in the wrong week. You reschedule. That is allowed. The point is not rigid adherence to the first draft. The point is that you never let a month pass without the intention being there, revisited, renegotiated if necessary, and ultimately honored.

If you are a parent reading this, I will say what you already know but may need to hear: your children are watching how you treat your marriage. The lessons they absorb about what a partnership looks like, what effort looks like, what showing up for another person looks like, those lessons come from you. Three dates per month is not time stolen from your children. It is time invested in the foundation they are standing on.

If you want to try this, the setup takes about four minutes. Open your calendar app. Create three recurring monthly events, one labeled “Breakfast Date,” one “Lunch Date,” one “Dinner Date.” Set each to recur on the first of the month. Add your spouse to each one. When the first rolls around, move them to dates that work. Show up.

The calendar will handle the remembering. You just handle the showing up.