Steal the Moment

If you’re married to the military, chances are you know something about long distance relationships.  Deployments, training, circumstances that prevent us from PCSing with our service members, there are a million different reasons we wind up separated from our other halves, sometimes by hundreds or even thousands of miles.

Whether for a week or a year or longer, almost all of us have experienced the pain of missing our service member.

While we all know how truly awful it can be, we know something else, as well. We know that there’s something beautiful about missing someone. The long nights spent on the phone talking about anything and everything, the joyful reunions and tearful goodbyes, the longing and the heartache, it’s all terribly romantic, and it helps us appreciate the time we do get to spend with our service members that much more.

My soldier and I spent the first year and a half of our marriage living thousands of miles apart. During that time, we perfected the art of making the most of every moment we had. We cherished every romantic getaway, every date night, and every quiet night at home. Being together was enough.

Being together was everything.

It’s been about a year now that my husband’s been home for good, and while I love having him home and wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world, sometimes I feel like there’s something missing. Sometimes I miss missing him. Our life has become very routine, which is exactly the thing I wanted, but routine makes it easy to take things for granted. When you sleep in the same bed together every night, there’s always tomorrow night to stay up and watch a movie together after the kids go to bed, always next weekend to sneak away for a date night.

It’s so important to not take the people in our lives for granted. It’s essential that we put the same amount of love and work into our marriages that we do into the other things in our life: our children, our homes, our jobs. After all, a strong marriage is the foundation on which all of the rest of those things are built. We have to keep that foundation strong, and sometimes, we have to give it a little reinforcement.

Here are a few simple ideas on how to do that:

1. Create quality time. 

Set some time aside that is just for you and your spouse. Depending on your situation, this could be a weekend, a night, or even just a few hours after the kids go to bed. I realize that not all of us who have children are blessed with the luxury of having someone we trust to keep our kids overnight. Work with what you’ve got, but however much time you set aside, make sure that your only focus during that time is each other.

2. Get away.

Go somewhere significant to your past (or your future) together. If you can get out of the house with just your spouse, don’t go to dinner and a movie. If you still live in your hometown, revisit where you first met or recreate your first date. If, like many military families, you find yourself living in a place where you and your spouse have zero history, make some! Go somewhere you’ve always talked about going “someday,” somewhere you can start a new tradition for just the two of you. For my husband and me, that place was the Bed and Breakfast we stayed at on our honeymoon. The best thing about honeymooning less than a half hour from home is that it’s an easy getaway for us to recreate. After we booked our room, we made plans to eat at the same little Mexican restaurant we ate at on our first night as husband and wife.

3. Turn off tech.

For the love of God, turn off your phones…and your laptops…and your tablets. If you don’t have children, do exactly that. Turn off your phones. In fact, don’t even take them with you. If you do have kids, obviously turning your phones off completely is not an option. You need to be accessible in case something happens.  Choose one phone to leave on, either yours or your spouse’s, and tell your babysitter to only call in an emergency. Ignore anything else that comes in. Don’t even touch your phone. Show your partner that they are more important to you than that electronic device that has become permanently attached to your hand.

4. Do something different.  

Don’t just watch TV or a movie while sitting in the same general vicinity and call it quality time. Interact. Shake things up. How you go about doing that depends on the things you and your spouse like to do together and will take a little pre-planning. For my husband and me, what we needed more than anything was peace and quiet, so our whole trip was based around that.  The day before our overnight getaway, I gave him a list of things to get while I was out running my date night errands. I told him to pack a board game, a movie, something romantic that cost no more than $5, and a gift for me that cost no more than $5. I also packed some games, a movie, something romantic that cost no more than $5, and a $5 gift for him. Neither of us talked about what we bought, so that our night would be full of surprises.

• The Movies: The rule was that we each bring a movie that we’d never seen together. He chose School of Rock. I chose Gatsby. We both knew there would be a movie marathon at the end of our evening, but until the time came, neither of us had any idea what the other had chosen.
• The Games: Turns out, he’s a Scattergories man. Who knew? Not me. I brought the makings of three games: 20 Questions, The Newlywed Game, and Would You Rather.  For 20 questions, we took turns asking each other questions from a list of thought-provoking, conversation-starting questions about both our past and our future together. For The Newlywed Game, we answered questions about the other person to see how much we knew about each other. For Would You Rather, I printed out a list of “would you rather” questions I found online, cut them out individually, and put them in a bag. We pulled questions out of the bag randomly and asked them of each other, laughing the entire time.
• The Romantic Things: He brought as many tea light candles as he could buy with $5 and placed them on just about every open surface in our room. He only got about half of them lit before I got bored on the balcony and ruined his surprise. I took a box of fortune cookies, as we’ve long credited a well-timed fortune cookie for bringing us together.
• The Gifts: If we’d not spent the money on a hotel room, we probably would have set the gift buying budget a little higher than $5, but it was fun trying to find something thoughtful too surprise my husband with. I settled for a toy car (a Camaro, his favorite) and a bag of gummi bears, which is what he had in his hand when I picked him up from the airport for the first time after we started dating. He got me a collection of Hot Wheels lowriders, as a subtle hint that he will someday own a lowrider, and a bracelet with an infinity symbol on it to honor our matching tattoos.
• The Food: We chose to stick with the same restaurants we went to on our honeymoon: the Mexican restaurant for dinner and the best burger joint in the world for lunch the next day. My plan was to be all romantic and have a bunch of finger foods, but due to a lack of time and options, we wound up with what was essentially the biggest package of lunchables ever and a container of seedless watermelon cubes. Oh well.  It was still delicious.

I know, I know, it all sounds like a lot of work. It really wasn’t, though. It took some pre-planning and research, but it was worth every bit of it.

My favorite thing about it all is that most of my date night ideas are reusable and would be perfect for a night at home. We don’t do that enough. Our life, like most of yours, I’m sure, is crazy busy. We don’t get a lot of romantic moments. Sometimes, though, to maintain a healthy marriage, you have to find a way to steal one, and when you do, be sure to make it memorable.

How will you steal the moment for you and your spouse? Share your ideas with us!