Date night and a little relationship advice

My husband and I had a great date night on Saturday. We ate at one of our favorite restaurants and then checked out a Halloween store that had set up shop a few doors down. Nothing too impressive there. So we headed out again. This time, we went to the mall.

I haven't been to the mall since I got my phone for free from the Sprint kiosk, so it's been a year at least. Things have definitely changed in that year. There were old stores gone and new ones in their place. There were a few stores that have been there since the mall opened years ago. I think it was close to 25 years at least. I wasn't quite a teenager when it first opened its doors.

We found a store that we both absolutely love and plan on going back to when we get the chance. It's called Teavana, and it is, as might be evident from its name, a tea store.

We're not talking ground up herbs in little packets here. We're talking loose leaf tea made with interesting ingredients. There was green tea, black and white teas, interesting teas made from little balls that bloomed into a flower in the hot water (we didn't actually see one of those in action but we saw the balls), and purely herbal teas made up of fruits and other herbs. Also chai teas, which happen to be my favorite.

Himself and I don't often agree on stores. He's got his favorite and I have mine. So to find a place the both of us could enjoy (and plan on going back to), is an amazingly fun thing to do. We spent a good half hour at least talking teas and getting a chance to smell a bunch of awesome stuff. We aren't tea snobs, but this place made us both interested in becoming some.

Himself and I go out together often, but we don't have a real date night more than once a month. We've always got some business we're taking care of when we go out, whether it's the grocery store or the vape store. Or dropping something off in the mail. There's usually something going on that leads to us being together.

But sometimes we want to be together for being together's sake. Yes, Saturday started with me needing to go to Shopko Optometry to get my glasses fixed, but then we headed out for our actual date. Going out on our date actually relaxed me, and for the first time in ages I was actually able to forget the issues going on in our lives and just enjoy my time with him.

Special nights together are an important, but often overlooked, part of every relationship. If you continue on in the same tracks and patterns it becomes stale and dull. So every now and then something needs to happen to change the pattern.

It doesn't have to be a "going out to eat and catching a movie" date. I know how bloody expensive movie theaters are. Instead, you can pop some popcorn and watch a movie you have on DVD or through Netflix. You can read a book to each other. You can even just massage each other's backs and talk about random things. Anything where you are together and just enjoying each other's company.

Remember to shake things up once in a while. Do something unusual for you and your partner. Just let go and hang out with each other. Relax a little. Do something fun. It'll help you in putting things into perspective.

Relationships

Sometimes I feel like Himself and I have gone back to the beginning of our relationship again. We're relearning each other's limits, personalities, and how the other feels about things. Four years ago something happened that caused a huge rift in our lives and it's taken its toll on us. We've been married for 12 years and have had to go back to the start to work things out. There's been a lot of pain shared between us and we've finally gotten to the point where things are starting to balance out again.

A marriage is a partnership, one that has to be an even balance between the two roles for it to work. Notice I didn't say equal. There are going to be things that one does better than the other. What needs to be figured out is how to work within those limits. A newlywed couple starts out with a preset notion of how things are going to be. As a relationship matures and grows, that balance is going to have to be restructured again and again as new knowledge and skills are gained.

A long term relationship like what my parents had before my mom died (45 years, I think), a lot of compromises had to have been reached. Learning to compromise is one of the hardest things in the world, especially when both partners think they are the ones in the right. There will be arguments, harsh words, hurt feelings. But the whole point of the thing is to keep going and not give up. It's when people give up on talking to each other that things can fall apart.

I'm not trying to tell anyone how to run their relationships. I'm definitely the last person you want to ask, given the kind of examples of marriages/families I've had in my life. I'm fighting to sort my own marriage out right now. I can share what I've noticed through trial, tribulation, and pure observation. Your experiences are different from mine, so you may see something different that I don't. We are, after all, the sum of our experiences.