Prioritizing the People Who Matter Most Through Consistency

In 2015, I took a solo birthday trip to Thailand, one of a handful of annual trips I used to take to different places to mark another year around the sun. On that trip, I met a couple who’d been together for over 30 years. They were in their early fifties at the time, raising four boys who were by then in their twenties, with 6 grandchildren, running a construction business, and deeply involved in their community back home in Utah. Life was full and jam-packed.

They were often giddy as teens or newlyweds, and I wasn’t all that familiar with relationship and marital dynamics like theirs, especially after that many years together. I asked them how they made it work for so long.

Their answer was almost embarrassingly simple: keep having fun and date nights.

Despite the demands of raising a family, running a business, and everything in between, they tried to have fun and honored their “date night.” The fun part I could understand and process, but what was this date night concept they spoke of?

At least, once a week, every week for over twenty years, they had date night. It didn’t have to be fancy. In fact, most weeks and for many years, it wasn’t. Sometimes it was the standard dinner out. Other times it could be an evening walk together at the park or something even simpler. The gesture wasn’t intended to be big, expensive, or complicated. What mattered was that it happened on repeat, regardless of how loud the rest of life got.

At the time, I was single as a Pringle, but the idea resonated with me. I told them I hoped to bring it into my own life one day…you know, when someone could match my crazy, that is.

Date Night Through the Seasons

Fast forward: I’m married now, and my wife and I built date night into our relationship early on. For the first stretch of our relationship, which happened to overlap heavily with the early COVID years, it barely felt necessary. We were together constantly, for better and worse.

Wednesday nights became our usual marker, commonly anchored around food: going out, cooking something together, or ordering in something a little more special than usual. Then life did what life does.

Work demands, a long-distance move, wedding planning, major surgery, pregnancy, losing loved ones, losing jobs, our son Aiden being born, parenting demands, more regional moves, etc.

Through all of it, we tried to hold onto our earlier date night routine. But the reality of life had shifted dramatically over the course of those years.

In six years, we went from relatively easygoing early-to-mid-30-somethings with date night concepts in droves to increasingly worn-down parents trying to figure out what the hell was happening, how the time was going so fast, and why we were waking up sore from simply sleeping incorrectly. (This getting older and parenting thing be kicking ass and ain’t for the weak).

The bigger reality check, though, has been accepting that our time has become increasingly concentrated and compressed, particularly in the evenings. By the time all the duties and responsibilities of the day are done, what’s left in the tank is often just enough for basic rest and decompression, not really deep connection.

And we know it’ll only continue to evolve because life doesn’t necessarily get easier. We just get stronger, more adaptable, and hopefully a little wiser about how we use the time and energy we have.

Enter the Lunch Date Era

Like my couple friends from Thailand alluded to through their own life journey, you have to become more flexible and adaptive as life changes. So we actively pivoted.

Instead of forcing a date night that our evenings can no longer reliably support in this season of life, we’ve shifted the same idea to the middle of the day.

Once a week, currently Wednesdays, though the day moves depending on the circumstances or travel, we meet for lunch. Doesn’t matter where either of us is working from. We find each other and eat together.

If one of us is traveling, we move it, maybe to a weekend or if the trip is long, to a video call where we block out an hour just to eat and talk, no real agenda beyond that.

One rule we’re trying to stick to: phones stay away. Disconnect to connect.

At most, one phone comes out briefly to check a menu or something similar, then it goes back in a pocket. In fact, I usually leave mine in the car or at home the entire time. The whole point for us is undivided attention.

Why Boring Wins

None of this is dramatic or revolutionary. A weekly lunch is deliberately simple, and that’s exactly why it can be sustainable, especially for us in our current phase of life.

The couple in Thailand didn’t protect their relationship for over 30 years because every day was extravagant. Rather, they deliberately kept making room for each other even as life changed around them. I think that’s the real lesson underneath all of this, consistency beats intensity.

Cheesy rom-coms, and I’m a sucker for the cheese, and childhood Disney flicks would make you think otherwise. But I don’t believe it’s the grand gestures or purchases that carry a relationship through years and decades of life, especially when life gets really real.

It’s often the boring, repeatable, unglamorous habits that say: no matter what else is happening, we’re still intentionally and regularly showing up for each other.

And consistency also doesn’t mean doing the exact same thing forever. It just means continuously protecting the things that matter, while allowing the systems around it to change and evolve as needed.

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Epilogue

To the couple who shared this simple, recurring ritual with a then stranger on an adventure trip halfway around the world: Thank You.

I want to especially remember the husband, who passed away a couple of years ago. When I met up with his widow for lunch in New York a few months after his passing, she told me that from his pancreatic cancer diagnosis the previous fall, and throughout the 11-month battle that followed, they still held their weekly date night. Even in the hospital as he grew weaker every day.

I told her that my then-girlfriend, now wife, and I had actively been using the example they shared with me years earlier in our own relationship.

About a year later, the woman reached out to let me know she was planning to remarry, with the blessing of her sons and in keeping with one of her late husband’s final wishes: that she continue to love fully and not let his cancer diminish her light, and that when the time came where she was ready to find someone again, she continue the tradition with them and give them that same type of commitment.

I think there’s something meaningful in that continuation. A practice they had developed as teens and protected through marriage, illness, and ultimately death, was not meant to end with him. It was something worth carrying forward.

And that carrying forward outstretched either one of them too. I took something they casually shared with me while riding around Bangkok in a tuk-tuk years ago, carried it into my own relationship, and eventually into my marriage and growing family.

Who knew that a such simple idea passed along in general conversations would be shaping families over a decade later. But then again, maybe that’s the beauty of it all. Simple ideas and stories passed from one person to another, then another, quietly yet powerfully shaping relationships, friendships and families long after the people who first shared them could ever imagine.

– Keith