The Link Between Dating and Marital Stability: What Couples Should Know
TL;DR:
Spending time in the same place isn't the same as spending time together — and research backs that up. A nationwide survey found that couples who date regularly are significantly more likely to report being very happy in their marriages, committed to the relationship, and unlikely to see divorce in their future. But date night isn't a fix-all. It works best as one part of a larger picture that includes commitment, intimacy, communication, and how partners navigate challenges together. What counts as intentional time can also change with your season of life — it doesn't need to be elaborate to matter. If you're making time for each other but still feeling disconnected, something deeper may need attention. Couples therapy in St. Louis, MO can help you figure out what's getting in the way and build the kind of connection that holds through every stage of marriage.
You probably spend a lot of time with your spouse. You make dinner in the same kitchen, sit next to each other at your kid’s soccer game, watch a show after work, and run errands together on the weekend. But spending time in the same place isn’t always the same thing as spending time together. In couples therapy, this distinction can become pretty important. Couples can share a home, a family, and an entire life while realizing they haven’t intentionally made time for their relationship in months.
Research has found an association between regularly dating your spouse and higher levels of marital happiness, commitment, sexual satisfaction, and perceived stability. That doesn’t mean adding “date night” to the calendar twice a month guarantees a happy marriage. It does give us something useful to think about, though. Long-term relationships need opportunities for partners to continue interacting as a couple, not only as the two people responsible for keeping everything running.
Does Dating Your Spouse Actually Make a Marriage More Stable?
There is some evidence that couples who continue dating after marriage report stronger relationships. A nationwide survey of 2,000 married adults found that 52% of husbands and wives rarely or never went on dates with their spouse. The other 48% reported going on dates at least once or twice per month. Couples who reported frequent date nights were 14 to 15 percentage points more likely to describe themselves as very happy in their marriages. They were also about 14 percentage points more likely to say divorce was not at all likely. Differences also appeared in commitment, communication, and sexual satisfaction.
Those findings are interesting, but they need to be interpreted carefully. The research shows an association between dating and positive marital outcomes. It cannot prove that going on dates caused those marriages to become happier or more stable. Happier couples may also be more motivated to spend intentional time together. That doesn't make the findings meaningless. It changes the question we should ask about them.
What Happens When Couples Make Time for Each Other?
The useful part of date night probably isn't the reservation. Intentional time gives partners an opportunity to pay attention to parts of their relationship that easily get buried under ordinary life. You can be curious about each other again. You can laugh, flirt, try something different, or talk about something that has absolutely nothing to do with tomorrow's schedule. It's the kind of shift a St. Louis couples therapist often points to — not the activity itself, but what the space around it makes possible.
It also creates a little room between your relationship and everything your relationship is responsible for. That distinction matters because long-term partners tend to accumulate roles. You're spouses, but you might also be parents, homeowners, caregivers, financial partners, and the two people responsible for figuring out why the dishwasher suddenly sounds like that.
What Does Dating Have to Do With Long-Term Marital Stability?
Long-term marital stability is much more complicated than any one habit. A systematic review of factors associated with long-term marital stability identified several protective factors across the studies examined, including commitment, intimacy, love and attachment, mutual respect, sexual relationships, support, constructive approaches to conflict, and spending quality time together.
Date night isn't a substitute for those things. It can provide a setting where some of them continue to happen.
Quality Time Is One Piece of a Much Bigger Picture
A couple can go on a date every Saturday and still have serious problems in their marriage. Likewise, a couple going through an exhausting season may rarely manage a traditional date and still have a deeply committed relationship. Frequency alone doesn't tell us enough. Quality time matters alongside other parts of a healthy relationship, including commitment, intimacy, mutual respect, support, and how partners navigate challenges together.
This is why dating is better understood as one way of supporting a relationship rather than a strategy for guaranteeing marital stability. Making time for each other can create opportunities for closeness and enjoyment, but what happens within that time and throughout the rest of the relationship still matters.
When Your Marriage Becomes Mostly Logistics
As relationships grow, so do the number of things two people have to manage together. There are bills to pay, groceries to buy, appointments to remember, work schedules to coordinate, and maybe children who somehow need to be in three different places at the same time. Being able to handle those responsibilities together is part of building a life with someone, and something you can work on in couples therapy. The problem is when managing that life starts taking up most of the time you spend interacting with each other.
You may realize that you and your spouse talk every day, but most of those conversations are about what needs to happen next. Over time, it can start to feel like you're really good at running a household together but haven't had much opportunity to simply enjoy being married. This doesn't necessarily mean something is wrong with the relationship. It may mean the relationship itself hasn't been getting much dedicated attention.
Intentional Time Gives Your Relationship Somewhere to Exist
This is one reason continuing to date each other can matter. Intentional time gives you an opportunity to temporarily set aside the roles and responsibilities you've accumulated and spend time together as partners. You can talk about what you're interested in, try something different, laugh together, or simply have a conversation that doesn't end with someone adding another item to the grocery list.
Those moments aren't separate from maintaining a long-term relationship. They help preserve a part of your connection that can easily get crowded out by everything you're responsible for together. Making time for each other gives you opportunities to remember that you're not only building and managing a life together. You're also still in a relationship with the person you chose to build that life with.
Why Does Dating Get Harder After Marriage?
Dating often becomes more difficult for reasons that have very little to do with how much two people care about each other. Marital satisfaction is influenced by multiple parts of a person's life, including motivation, communication, life stage, and professional or academic circumstances. In this particular study, having young children or teenagers was negatively associated with marital satisfaction in the researchers' model.
That makes sense when you consider how much a couple's available time can change throughout a marriage. The relationship hasn't necessarily become less important. There may simply be more competing for your attention than there used to be.
Some Seasons Leave Very Little Room
A baby can completely reorganize your sleep, schedule, and energy. Young children need near-constant supervision. Teenagers somehow manage to need you and want nothing to do with you at exactly the same time. Then there are careers, financial pressure, illness, caregiving for parents, household responsibilities, and everything else that doesn't conveniently disappear because you want more time with your spouse.
This is why telling couples to "prioritize date night" isn't always particularly helpful. A priority doesn't create childcare. It doesn't make dinner cheaper or put another three hours into Saturday. What can help is adjusting your definition of intentional time to the life you actually have.
Your Dates Can Change With Your Marriage
Dating after fifteen years together doesn't need to look like dating at the beginning of the relationship. Maybe you don't have the energy for dinner and a movie right now, but you do have time to sit outside together for half an hour after bedtime. A date could be breakfast while the kids are at practice, a walk somewhere new, or getting takeout and spending an hour together without talking about everything that still needs to get done.
What counts as intentional time can change along with your circumstances. Instead of trying to maintain the same dating routine through every stage of marriage, look for opportunities that actually fit the life you have now. The goal is to continue making room for the relationship even when that room looks different than it did five or ten years ago.
What Should Married Couples Actually Do on Dates?
There isn't a particular kind of date that makes a relationship stronger. Novelty can be useful because doing something new gives couples a shared experience and often changes the conversations they have. Familiar rituals can be valuable for a different reason. They become something the couple recognizes as theirs. The better question is what you want your time together to make room for.
Not Every Date Needs to Become a Relationship Meeting
When you finally have uninterrupted time together, it can be tempting to use it to discuss everything you haven't had time to address. The budget needs attention. There’s a parenting decision you still need to make. Maybe something happened with your in-laws, or one of you has been meaning to bring up a problem at home. Those conversations are important, but they don't have to take over every opportunity you have to spend time together.
Part of what makes intentional time valuable is that it creates room for experiences that everyday responsibilities don't always leave much space for. You can have a conversation without watching the clock, do something new together, be affectionate, laugh, or simply enjoy being around each other. Date nights can also provide a temporary break from the stressors you're normally managing side by side.
If every date becomes a household planning meeting or a chance to work through another problem, you lose some of that space.
Your Date Doesn't Need to Be Elaborate to Count
Date night can quickly become another thing you feel like you need to do well. But it doesn't need an expensive dinner or hours of planning to give you meaningful time together. In St. Louis, you could browse for books at The Novel Neighbor, visit a farmers market, grab breakfast at Uncle Bill's Pancake & Dinner Restaurant, or revisit somewhere you enjoyed earlier in your relationship.
There will also be times when going out isn't realistic. Making dinner together, having coffee before the rest of the house wakes up, or watching a movie you both actually want to see can still create intentional time. The point isn't how impressive the date is. It's having time to enjoy each other without every conversation revolving around what needs to get done next.
How Dating Supports the Relationship Outside of Date Night
Spending intentional time together can allow couples to strengthen parts of their relationship that may receive less attention during the week. The Gottman Institute’s work with couples has looked extensively at friendship, emotional connection, conflict, and the everyday interactions that contribute to relationship satisfaction over time. This helps put date nights into perspective. They can create more opportunities for connection, but they are still one part of how couples maintain a relationship.
What happens during the rest of the week matters, too. You may notice that you still seek each other out to share something funny, ask about an important meeting, or talk about something that happened during the day. These interactions can be easy to overlook because they aren't planned or particularly romantic, but they help partners remain involved in each other's lives.
When Spending More Time Together Isn't Solving the Problem
Some couples make an effort to date regularly and still feel disconnected. You might have plenty of opportunities to spend time together but find that conversations feel strained, unresolved resentment follows you into those moments, or you don't feel as emotionally or physically close as you once did. In that situation, adding another date to the calendar may not address what is making connection difficult.
This is an opportunity to look more closely at what has changed. Maybe intimacy has shifted, a stressful period has affected one or both of you, or there is something in the relationship that hasn't been fully addressed. A couples counselor in St. Louis, MO can provide a place to explore those concerns when you've been trying to reconnect but aren't sure what continues to get in the way.
Dating Gives You a Chance to Keep Learning About Your Spouse
Long-term relationships involve a lot of familiarity, but familiarity doesn't mean you know everything there is to know about your partner. Both of you continue to have new experiences, develop different interests, change your priorities, and form new ideas about what you want from life. The person you're married to today has been shaped by everything that has happened since you first met, just as you have.
Continuing to date gives couples opportunities to stay interested in those changes. This doesn't require turning dinner into an interview or constantly having deep conversations. It can be as simple as hearing what your partner has been thinking about lately, finding a new activity you both enjoy, or talking about what each of you wants the next few years to look like.
Staying Curious Can Keep Familiarity From Becoming Assumption
The longer you've been together, the easier it is to assume you already know how your spouse feels, what they'll say, or what they want. Sometimes you're right. Other times, those assumptions are based on a version of your partner from several years ago. Making space for conversation gives both of you opportunities to update what you know about each other.
This is part of why dating can remain useful well beyond the beginning of a relationship. You're not trying to recreate who you were when you first met. You're giving yourselves opportunities to stay involved in who each of you is becoming, which can help the relationship continue to change along with you.
Ready to Make More Room for Each Other? Couples Therapy in St. Louis Can Help.
If you and your spouse have realized that most of your time together revolves around schedules, responsibilities, and getting through the week, it may be worth looking at what your relationship needs now. At SEO and Wellness, our St Louis couples therapists help couples make sense of how their relationship has changed over time and find realistic ways to strengthen their connection within the life they're actually living.
Make intentional time for the relationship you're still building together
Other Services Offered at SEO and Wellness in St. Louis, MO
At SEO and Wellness, we understand that relationships don't operate separately from the rest of your life. Your physical health, mental health, stress, work, family responsibilities, and major life changes can all affect how much time and energy you have available for your relationship. Our collaborative approach makes it easier to address those concerns without treating each part of your well-being as an entirely separate issue.
Along with couples therapy our team provides individual therapy, family therapy, psychiatry, functional medicine, chiropractic care, acupuncture, speech therapy, and occupational therapy. Our providers share a commitment to inclusive, connected care that considers the full picture of what's happening in your life. Whether one concern is affecting several areas of your well-being or you simply want providers who communicate with each other, you can find that support in one place.
About the Author
Dr. Maya Johnson, PsyD, has worked with couples at many different stages of their relationships and understands how easily connection can get crowded out by the life two people build together. As the Founder and Clinical Director of SEO and Wellness and a licensed couples counselor in St. Louis, MO, she helps couples recognize when responsibilities have started taking up most of the relationship and find ways to make room for each other again.
Dr. Johnson is a Licensed Psychologist in Missouri with a PsyD in Clinical Psychology. Her approach is warm, evidence-informed, relational, and grounded in what couples can realistically carry into their lives outside of therapy. She specializes in couples counseling and trauma recovery and brings a culturally responsive, HAES-aligned, and LGBTQIA+ affirming perspective to her work.
When she's not in session, you'll find her cooking family recipes with her teenage daughter or hiking one of Missouri's many trails.
Sources
Wilcox, W. B., & Dew, J. (2012). Date your spouse and stay happily married. Institute for Family Studies. https://ifstudies.org/blog/date-your-spouse-and-stay-happily-married
Norgren, M. B. P., Souza, R. M. de, Kaslow, F., Hammerschmidt, H., & Sharlin, S. A. (2004). Satisfaction with marital relationship in long-standing marriages. Psico-USF, 9(1), 83–91. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6702121/
Tavakol, Z., Nasrabadi, A. N., Moghadam, Z. B., Salehiniya, H., & Rezaei, E. (2022). A review of the factors associated with marital satisfaction. BMC Psychology. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9136471/
The Gottman Institute. Research on couples. https://www.gottman.com/about/research/couples/
