Hey, this is Jenny, with 1,000 hours outside, recording our podcast today with my awesome husband

Josh.

She's going to say hey, all right. And we are recording this one together because we are talking about date night or the lack thereof on this podcast today.

Much of the focus. on this

much of the focus of 1,000 hours outside is on children and how spending time in nature benefits children but it also is really strengthening for a marriage. And so that is what we're going to be talking about today and hopefully it gives you some ideas

and some encouragement on how to connect with your spouse when you go outside as a family.

So if you pay attention at all to the news or other blogs or social media or whatever, you'll probably have seen this, what I would

say is a relatively newer cultural phenomenon out there about this whole notion of, you know,

hashtag date your spouse, which is a very worthy cause in and of itself and let us both be clear up front we are certainly

not anti dating your spouse it's a wonderful thing it's important thing, it's a great thing and it's something that we completely understand there's a lot of value attached to and a lot of benefits.

But the simple fact of the matter is,

is first and foremost, as a society,

as the human race, we survived for millennia before having this sort of pressure or this notion or this thing out there in the ether about dating your spouses.

You know, once you got married, you got married, you had a family typically and life marched on.

So this is a relatively newer thing and my wife and I have both seen this sort of of again pressure it almost feels like at times to date

your spouse and it's just something that we feel that for a lot of reasons you you know, it may not be the most attainable thing for all families.

And there's a lot of reasons we'll go through that are possible reasons for that. But we really just want to be here as an encouragement to you.

If you and your spouse find yourself in a position of at all ever, even just a little bit, feeling that pressure like oh man we're we're not

doing that we're not getting one-on-one time and alone time away from our kids and we're

just here to encourage you to not despair over that to not get down about it to not you know

feel like you need to be competing with your friends maybe that are doing their weekly

Thursday night dates or whatever that might be.

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