8 Dates
Rating: 5 / 5 stars
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High-Level Thoughts
A book that makes you deepen your relationships substantially with friends, family, and especially your significant other. This book has lots of golden nuggets spread throughout. The stories weren’t too long and it was straightforward. Would recommend reading with someone to talk further about these concepts.
“The fact that he was willing to take the time—that he wanted to take the time—to share all these stories about trust and money and dreams and family meant the world to me. I feel like we created in months what some people take years to create. A foundation. A sense of really being on each other’s side and supporting each other through everything that’s to come that we have no idea about.”
Summary Notes
The Conversations that Matter
“It takes vulnerability and effort. The reward is that you love your partner more on your fiftieth anniversary than you did on your wedding night. You can stay in love forever.”
“Make dedicated, non-negotiable time for each other a priority, and never stop being curious about your partner.”
“We all get it wrong sometimes. We miscommunicate, and when we do we need to make repairs.”
“The main event of a date night is just time to be together and to reconnect, to fall back in love, and remind yourselves that there is more to your relationship than sharing a home or co-parenting children.”
“Children feed off of the love in a marriage. Remember they are constantly modeling you and you want them to see how you sustain a loving marriage.”
The Art of Listening
“Listening doesn’t always come easy for us, but without listening, intimate conversation is impossible.”
Date 1: Lean On Me — Trust & Commitment
“Start confiding in another person about their relationship, they are opening up a window to this outside person.”
“In a committed relationship, you will both stop the world to try to understand and ease each other’s pain.”
“Choosing commitment means accepting your partner exactly as he or she is, despite the flaws.”
“If things aren’t going well in their relationship, they voice their concerns to their partner instead of complaining about their partner to someone else.”
“As relationships progress, each person gets more real, more transparent, and therefore more vulnerable.”
Date 2: Agree to Disagree – Addressing Conflict
“When you get married, it’s not just two people who are joining together, it’s also your different habits, personalities, belief systems, and quirks joining together.”
“Our research has shown that 69 percent of the time when couples talk about that one thing that they always argue about, it’s what we call a perpetual problem. It’s not going to be resolved.”
“Perpetual problems: when you accept what you can’t change, you accept each other. Accept your partner for who they are, and they’ll do the same. Celebrate and learn from your differences.”
Date 3: Let’s Get It On – Sex & Intimacy
“What’s most important is not to let sex become the last item on a very long to-do list, the final obligation you turn to when you’re both exhausted.”
“Stopping things in the middle of the action to offer constructive criticism is not going to go over well, for either of you.”
“Men in general like to have sex to feel emotionally connected, and women need to feel emotionally connected to have sex.”
“For those 6 seconds when you leave each other and when you return to each other, you are disconnecting from the world outside and reconnecting with your partner and the world you are creating together.”
Date 4: The Cost of Love – Work & Money
“When you’re on your deathbed, you’re never going to regret the memories you’ve created with the people you love. You’re only going to regret what you didn’t do.”
“Research study in 2007 showed that after faithfulness and a good sex life, sharing household chores was listed as the most important element of a successful marriage.”
“It’s important to explore what your family legacy is about money, generosity, power, and wealth.”
Date 5: Room to Grow – Family
“It was crazy. I want to pursue my career, but I think it’s possible to give your kids lots of time and attention and also do work you love. You just need one of those giant wall calendars.”
“Statistics show that for a child born in the United States in 2015, it costs an average of $233,610 to raise that child through age 17.”
“For us, I find, we put our marriage first, and our child second, because the best thing we can do for him is having a strong marriage.”
“Marital satisfaction began plummeting after the wedding and then took a big downward dive when the first child arrived–taking bigger nosedives with every subsequent child.”
“To maintain intimacy you need to talk to each other about your stresses, make time to connect (date nights!) and avoid defensiveness, criticism, contempt, and shutting down or withdrawing from each other.”
Date 6: Play with Me — Fun & Adventure
“The more you invest in fun and friendship and being there for your partner, the happier the relationship will get over time.”
“Scientists know that the part of the brain where we experience fear–the right amygdala–is linked to the part of the brain where we experience sexual arousal.”
“There is no correlation between couples having common interests and relationship happiness”
“The opposite of play is not work — it’s depression”
Date 7: Something to Believe In – Growth & Spirituality
“But in relationships, conflict is the way that we grow, and we need to welcome conflict as a way of learning how to love each other better and how to understand this person with a very different mind than our own.”
“When individuals grow, relationships grow. When individuals transform, relationships transform.”
Date 8: A Lifetime of Love
“Well, no one is going to pay me to get in shape or play soccer. But let’s find a way to spend some time pursuing our dreams. It’s kind of exciting to think about.”
“When each partner honors and supports the other’s dreams, everything else in the relationship gets easier because each person feels supported in being and becoming who they need and want to be.”
“You can be in a relationship and each person can make all his or her dreams come true. But you can’t do it all at the same time. We’ve learned to take turns and we’ve learned to support each other no matter what.”
“They decide what the bare minimum was they could live on while they each pursued their dreams, because they knew that fulfilling their dreams was more important than having a big house or an impressive car.”
“A dream is something you long for, and if you don’t share that longing or even allow your partner to know about that longing, conflict will happen. The dream doesn’t go away when we supress it. It is within us,a dn it will rear its head as conflict, often difficult — what we call gridlocked — conflict.”
“In our dreams we find our greatest joy and discover the unique gifts we have to share with the world.”
“When dreams are honored, everything else in the relationship gets easier”
Cherish Each Other
“Your relationship is a great adventure. Treat it as such. Be curious. Be vulnerable. Be willing to venture outside your comfort zone. Learn to listen. Be brave enough to talk.”
