Putting Some CAKE Into Date Night – Encore | LQ048

Crystal Clark: 00:00:00

Welcome to our love space. Today, I really just wanted to re share this episode. One of my first is the short one and a sweet one, but it's about putting some cake into our date nights, or rather, our mega moments of love, and with giving you all the Spring Fling challenge last week, I really wanted to just repop this one into the rotation and remind you of how you can fit in some more communication, affection, kindfulness and energy in to your Mega moments of love for this Spring Fling.

Crystal Clark: 00:00:36

Enjoy. Welcome to love quirks. I am crystal your love social connections and relationship person. I hope you're doing well in the space you're listening to from today. So let's think about the big picture of love. I know, right? You're gonna hear me. You're gonna hear me say those words a lot big picture, because that's really, I think, what makes the work that we're going to do here different than the relationship counseling and coaching that is happening in other places is we're going to start here by taking a step back and looking at some big foundational pieces that you can then decide in your relationship how you're going to fill those in, or how they are working for you. Which ones are need more filling up, right? Which ones like, maybe, you know, some of us are superstars in some parts of our relationship and not in other parts. And I think by stepping back and looking at the big picture and seeing where those parts fit in, that helps us figure those things out. And if we can see, like, ah, you know, we do super well at this but not really in this part, then we know where to focus our energy, right? Not our work. We're not about relationship work here. We're about putting energy into our relationships. That's what we're doing. So, you know, I had one couple come in, and the detail in their relationship that they were super stuck on was that they have been going for date nights like they were told, and they're not working, and that date nights are stupid and useless, and, you know, they don't, they just don't know how they're going to get back to where they want to be. Okay? So first of all, a date night is, like a small detail thing, right? Like, a date night. It's like, same as saying, like, you know, it would be something you could check off. Like, oh, we have breakfast together, right? Check, you know, we go grocery shopping together. I don't know, we go, we exercise together, whatever. It's like an activity, okay? It's, it's not a fundamental piece of a relationship, but it often does get suggested. So what we did in that session is we actually stepped back and looked at the date night, but in a framework, in the big picture framework, and we will get more of of this, because at you know, I think date nights. Date nights deserve like a whole series. I think of episodes, because I think they're actually something that can really energize a relationship, but they have to be done in the right way. So here we go. So we looked at their date night, and the first big foundational thing as we thought about is we thought about communication and and let's not get that communication that word, huh, right? That word doesn't make us all want to roll our eyes, and that's because it gets thrown around so much. But when I say communication, what I just mean is so basic, and this is what you know I got from my years in working with kids and teens, is that communication is really just sending and receiving a message, and did you send it, and did you send it, and was it received? And was it received? You know, in the way you wanted it to be received, really, that's just, that's all communication is, is the back and forth of messages. Okay, so let's pull it out to that. Let's not think of good communication, bad communication. What words you're supposed to use? Not use, because we're all so different, those details are going to be different. The big picture idea here is it's about sending and receiving a message from one human being to another little human being, perfect. Okay, so we looked at that communication, and one of the things that we sussed out was, you know, that a lot of their sending and receiving messages about the date night that they were planning was that it was very laborious, right there, like, a lot of like, uh, should I make. A reservation. I don't know the place is always the big, like, there's a there was a lot of, like, blah messages going back and forth. Okay, so does that set the scene for for hanging out and spending time together? No, okay, but that's like a small communication detail mistake, but this is what they wanted to work on. Okay, so the other piece is affection, okay? So you know what's in big building blocks through all of our relationship as communication, how we're sending and receiving messages to the love of our life from us the love of their life, okay? Second one is affection. How are we sharing and showing and growing our affection together, and they could not point out how they were doing this on their date night. So even if we take it back to I'll give an example of everyone knows about the five languages of love. That's kind of a framework that can explain different ways that we might share or or give affection to our other little human beings in our life. Okay? So if we think of it in that way, like they could not think of how they like to receive affection. So what their love language is, what they preferred for their own personal love languages, nor did they really know what how they were showing their affection to the other person, right? And for some of us, you know, like, say, like, on my date nights, oh my gosh, I love to, you know, I'm a very touchy feely person, so like, the hand holding and the little kisses like some, PDA, love it. That's just for me. You'll get you guys might be like, gross, yeah. That's not for everyone, but that's for me, and in my relationship with the love of my life, my LOL, as he likes us to call each other that that is really, you know, an integral part for our date night, whatever our date night is going to be. And everyone always thinks of date night as going out to dinner. It doesn't have to be that, but anywho that will be for our series on date nights. Okay, so they had no idea about how they were showing affection or receiving affection while they went out to dinner, because they're doing standard run of the mill. We go out for dinner to date night sort of setup. What? Wow. You don't know how you're going to show each other affection. You don't even know if the other person has shown affection on day night. Wow. Well, that that seems like a great place to start. So for them, that's where we started. The other two pieces that I'll just run you through quickly, is the next piece would be kindfulness, and that actually did play into their date night a lot. And kindfulness is a word I made up. I made it up, and I'm keeping it and so what kindfulness is really putting together the idea of being kind to each other, so viewing each other with kind intentions, and, you know, treating the other person kindly, but also being mindful. The fullness comes from the word mindful, and that means to really be in the moment with the other person. So those are kind of the two pieces that Kindle this part. And that was another thing. Is like they were often not really in the moment on their date nights, they and they could often view the what the other person was doing as not necessarily, like kindly intended, right? Like you're just here because we have to be on a date night. Okay? Well, if, if we're going to start from that place, we're not going to grow from that place, that's for sure. And the other piece, the last piece, was that energy piece. So now for this couple, they did. They did have good energy management, and they did, you know, have enough energy to go on a date night. Because there are some couples that I run into where, you know, one and or both people just are like, have bled their energy out to every other priority in their life, and have saved none for the love of their life, and can just not pull themselves together to go out for dinner, for a date night, or to be mindfully, kind and in the moment with the love of their life, even if they did go out for dinner, or even if they're just sitting on the couch together for their date night, right? So that energy piece this couple in particular were, you know, actually great at that, and had energy to feed into their affection and their mindfulness with each other. But that's where we really had to start. And the fun thing, the interesting thing, is that when we pulled it back and we looked at those big picture pieces, okay, they still decided that, yes, the detail that we want to try to do is a date night, but now they could color in that affection piece with what they wanted,

Crystal Clark: 00:09:51

right? And some of that affection piece like they were both an act of service person or what, yeah. One of them was like an access service person. And so what was and one of them was a quality time person. We found out, just to bring it back to those five languages of love that everyone's pretty familiar with. And so what happened was, is that instead of doing a dinner out, was actually help them to show more affection to each other, just as we're starting to get these building blocks or these foundational pieces back into place, for them, was cooking a nice dinner together. Ah, and they don't even really both have to cook, but they could both be in the kitchen together. They could both be sharing a glass of wine while the person who right, one person is doing an active service by cooking for the other person, right? And it doesn't even have, I mean, they could have even just done this as like an app, you before they went out to like a full dinner, right? Like we would do when we first start dating someone. Oh my gosh. Can you imagine? Can you imagine that the new relationship energy we have for someone and that would make us be like, Oh, I'm just going to make an appy for you while we have, like, this glass of wine and spend some quality time together before we go out for a nice meal, that this can actually translate into our real relationship energy for each other? So crazy. So this is what we're working on here. This is what is going to be different. This is why we're going to get more success. Is because I'm not making you work right? Who wants to work? We already work all day. No. What we want to do is we want to come together. We want to be able to look at the love of our life and figure out what pieces we need to fill up, what cups are running a little dry that we need to re up on. That's the place we want to get to. And I really, really learned this from thinking about, if we look at the big picture of how friends are made, and what we teach like little kids about making relationships. It's it's all the same, it's all the same. And that's the part that we miss out as adults, is we forget about those building blocks. Can you imagine, right? Like, let's pause and think about, can you imagine that couple that came to see me if they hadn't, if they had just kept doing unsuccessful date nights, if they just kept going to couple sessions where all their communication was about all the things that had gone wrong in the last two weeks or three weeks or whatever. If they just kept focusing on how far they had slid down that hill away from each other, you know, they wouldn't be where they are now, living in their real relationship, energy, right? Problem solving and, and I don't love the word problem solving. I really do like collaborating, even though it's, you know, kind of one of those overused words nowadays. But I think, you know, that's where we collaborate. We get that creative problem solving piece. And I think, you know, that is one of the keys to our real relationship energy. And I mean, that will probably be a whole other episode, right? The idea just thinking about teamwork between you and the love of your life, right? Like that's a whole thing in and of itself. Well, let's think about our relationships in those four big picture pieces, right? Let's talk about them. Let's explore them, our communication, our affection, our kindfulness and our energy for each other. If we do that, then we're going to end up being sparked. We're.