The Friendship Factor: A Date Night to Deepen Your Connection

What creates a great date night for The Friend Role in your relationship?

The Lover makes life fun. The Partner helps you with the details of adulting. Now let’s talk about The Friend who flavors the moments that become your shared life.

The Friend cultivates understanding between you and your partner. You understand each other’s motivations, needs, and desires. This Friendship is where you build trust that becomes the foundation of your love.

Sometimes The Partner gets demanding about the house that needs to be cleaned, and The Lover responds, “We never do anything fun anymore,” and what your relationship needs is The Friend who understands life’s complexities and has a boatload of compassion for both The Lover AND The Partner.

And this understanding is what helps you and your spouse to intertwine your lives together.

 

What fosters the Friend Role in your relationship?

Have you ever had that moment of aha with your spouse when you’ve been fighting about the same old thing and suddenly your spouse’s pace slows, their eyes drop down to study the hangnail on their finger, and they say something you’ve never heard before.

It might sound like this:

“In my house, growing up, we never ate dinner together. Everyone sort of fended for ourselves. So, this meal planning thing with you sort of stresses me out. I don’t know what you expect of me. And I’m so tired of disappointing you.”

And, suddenly, you understand your spouse in a way you never have before. You get it. And the tangle between you is instantly loosened. Instead of frustration at your spouse, you’re washed with compassion.

How do we create an environment in which The Friend is able to reveal those harder and deeper truths? Or even, more simply, how do we stay up-to-date with how our spouse’s goals, dreams, and struggles are changing?

This is the motivation for a date night dedicated to fostering The Friendship in your relationship.

 

Listening and revealing is the core of the Friend Role

The Friend has two potent skills it brings to your relationship: the ability to listen and the ability to reveal. These skills, in balance, bring strength and resilience to your relationship as they build trust and vulnerability.

Each time you listen to a story your spouse tells you, you strengthen a shared container of trust. Your spouse feels validated when you receive their words with love and appreciation. Not only does this increase trust, it de-escalates conflict, because you have a deep understanding of one another.

When you reveal your own stories, you’re letting your spouse know you trust them. “You’re my person. I want you to know me,” and this vulnerability is contagious. Suddenly, your quiet spouse is revealing their own stories.

Shared stories like this ward off assumptions you or your spouse might make. Assumptions that can poison your relationship.

 

The tapestry of shared life

Talking and listening are a big part of what unites you as Friends in your relationship. But there is a much bigger layer to this role: it is the tapestry of a shared life that the two of you are weaving together one thread at a time.

Friendship comes from the zillions of overlapping moments in your daily life. Sometimes those are huge moments, like when someone dear to you dies. And your spouse is the one to wrap their arms around you.

Your spouse knows they cannot take the pain of this horrible grief away, but they can Be. There. Beside you.

Sometimes the moments of Friendship are small like the rhythm you have in the kitchen when the coffee is brewing and the bread is toasting and you butter your spouse’s toast, and they add cream to your coffee.

There you are beside each other, sharing your lives.

 

Shared moments are essential to your friendship with your partner

It is this next-to-each-other-ness that forms the basis for your Friendship. Yes, listening to each other and revealing your thoughts and feelings will deepen your Friendship, but nothing can compare to the shared moments.

And this is why you can’t rush The Friend in your relationship, but you can nurture it.

You can ask yourself how you want to flavor this lifetime of next-to-each-other-ness. Do you want your interactions to be tender? Or maybe your style is more about laughter and teasing.

Do you want a friend who helps you to buck up when you’re struggling? Or do you want your spouse to welcome you with comforting arms to hold you until you feel like running again?

My guess is you want all of that.

Me too.

 

How to build true companionship

I love the song by Marc Cohn, True Companion.

This song tells the story of a lifetime: falling in love, sharing a life, and what happens when your true companion leaves this earth.

So how do you develop that true companionship? How do you learn which moments beg for tenderness? And which are the moments to laugh off? When is the hug the right move? When do you need A Friend who helps you to dig deep?

You’re gonna get it wrong sometimes. And that’s good because when you get it wrong, you learn what you or your spouse needs. Those threads in the tapestry inform how you weave your life together in the future.

This clarity—of revelation and deep listening, together with zillions of tiny shared moments—creates a pool of clear understanding where each of you find a place of belonging in the other.

 

The power of feeling known in your relationship

I’ve witnessed this true companionship several times. I’ve sat with the widows and the widowers whose partner died. You can hear it in the interview with my sister, Katie, when she talks about her husband’s underwear.

And you can hear it in the interview with Chris and Sarah when Chris describes how he feels seen through Sarah’s “loving lenses.”

You want to foster a deep and abiding Friendship with your spouse because the two of you are sharing your LIFE. When you have a good and trusted friend beside you, you feel brave to meet life’s challenges. You feel known. So, you have courage to go out and learn something new about the larger world.

The Friend relaxes when a date night feels safe. The Friend reveals things in an atmosphere of gentle curiosity. Or giant spaciousness.

Some people find it really challenging to reveal those truths that invite compassion. They might even find it difficult to reveal to themselves. So an ideal date night for The Friend needs to pay attention to comfort.

 

The Friend Role needs comfort and safety

You can create comfort by fostering routine. Routine creates safety because we come to know what to expect. You learn the rhythm of a particular evening, and your subconscious then can relax and find that predictable moment when it’s safe to reveal.

The Friend role in your relationship will deepen based on two key skills: the ability to listen and to reveal. Some people are naturally great listeners. Some people are more natural at revelation.

Both are important.

Is it easier for you to listen to your partner talk about their day or what they’re thinking about? Or is it easier for you to reveal your thoughts and details from the day?

 

When one spouse struggles to reveal

I’ve had clients say to me, “My husband’s not a talker,” and they want to leave it there. But how will you learn about what your husband needs if he never has a chance to articulate it?

“I just know him,” the client says to me. But what my client didn’t know is that this husband has an incredible fear of conflict. Several early conversations in their relationship taught this husband that if he had an opinion that was different than his wife’s it would be troublesome.

So, he swallowed his desires. He kept quiet to keep the peace.

Over the years, the relationship got more and more hollow because he disappeared more and more. The relationship stopped being a relationship and he just became a place to house his wife’s desires.

Then he got resentful. And when a woman at work began showing interest in the doodles he made while on phone calls, he found himself revealing more than the stories of his sketches.

When the Friendship died, and this husband found a co-worker who truly wanted to KNOW him and know what motivated him, he realized there was nothing remaining for him in his marriage and he left.

 

Plan a date night (or day) that will keep this friendship alive

This is how important The Friend is to your relationship. And, just because you know each other when you fall in love doesn’t mean you’ll know each other 15 years later.

The Friend date is a purposeful place to welcome and re-welcome each of you to the relationship. It’s as important that you show up to share who you are as it is that you listen to your spouse.

When you know your specific WHY for a date night—I want to understand my spouse better and I want them to understand me—you’re able to design an environment that gives you the best chance at achieving that WHY.

Imagine the life you’re able to co-create together when you understand the tiny things that motivate your spouse, or how you’ll be able to negotiate the small stumbles because you have shared your fears as well as your dreams.

Let’s take a deeper look:

I want to make a comparison to practicing yoga.

When I first began practicing yoga, my teacher would say, “Rotate your hip bones skyward,” while we were in downward dog. I didn’t know what she meant. So, I asked her about it.

She spent a few minutes with me after class, trying to help me access this feeling of rotation. I couldn’t feel it. My teacher was unphased by my frustration. “Just keep at it,” she encouraged me. “Keep imagining that you CAN feel your sit bones rotating. One day you’ll find it.”

That was really frustrating to me! I’m a diligent student and I don’t like it when I can’t figure something out. But I also—simultaneously—believed her when she said, “Don’t worry. You’ll get it.” As if something DEEP inside me understood that some truths take time to be revealed.

Then, one day, a LONG time later, I was in my downward dog and a new teacher put a block between my shins and invited me to squeeze the block with my shins. When I squeezed my shins together: Viola! I felt my sit bones rotate skyward.

It wasn’t even subtle. I know it wasn’t subtle because my teacher was surprised as well, “Whoa! Rebecca, did you feel that?!” I did.

Now what kind of magic trick is that?

Yes, the block helped me to find those sit bones, but you know what REALLY helped me find those sit bones and rotate them skyward? I’d been imagining it for more than a year. I’d been practicing something in my imagination that I didn’t even know what it really was.

 

This is the practice I’m inviting you to with your Friendship Date Night

I’m inviting you to imagine your True Companion. That person who understands you. The person you trust. The person that invites you to a place of belonging inside your own home.

You won’t always feel it. Just like I didn’t feel my sit bones.

But your date night helps you to practice imagining it. Helps you to hold a space in your heart, in your time, in your imagination for what this relationship could be.

Your imagination is powerful!

And when you pair practice with imagination? Whoa! I predict you’ll have a whole new alignment in your relationship.

 

This week talk about the practice of Friendship in your relationship:

• What helps you to trust?
• What fosters your trustworthiness for your partner?

I have noticed over time that I become more trustworthy when I don’t have an agenda. I love efficiency, so having an agenda comes pretty easily to me. I’m not saying that’s bad.

But that mindset doesn’t foster trustworthiness for my husband. I needed to imagine who I was without efficiency. Without an agenda.

I found myself relaxed. Open. Quiet. And I discovered a kindness I didn’t know about. I began to learn about an unconditional love that not only made my husband trust me, but it allowed me to see the whole world differently.

Simply because I asked myself what fosters trustworthiness in me? And then I employed my imagination. And then I showed up to practice.

It wasn’t the WHOA moment of my sit bones, but gradually, gradually I became that Friend to my husband who completely lacked an agenda for his life.

I loved him exactly as he showed up.

And that love inspired him to trust me and tell me more about his dreams, his fears, and his struggles.

Because he felt accepted. Right now. Right here.

How to plan a date night for The Friend Role in your relationship

Find a date night (or day) that suits your shared dispositions. You want something that cultivates easy exchange of conversation. It’s relaxing and comfortable. It’s fun. And it’s easy.

• Do you have a favorite restaurant? Or coffee house where you enjoy hanging out?
• Maybe your Friendship is most easily cultivated by playing a game together?
• Or maybe you talk best when you’re moving your body. Consider taking a regular walk after work.

For your Friend-date, you want to cultivate strong listening and vulnerable revelation. So I recommend:

• Remove distractions. Turn off your phone.
• Find something for the kids to do, or get childcare. My toddlers loved to eat lunch in a wagon, so my husband and I could easily talk as they picnicked and the wagon wheels rolled.
• Make sure each of you feel safe. If one of you is bothered by the hustle and bustle of a bar, that won’t be a spot that cultivates revelation. But… maybe that vibrant pace is exactly what helps you connect. Your Friendship is unique.
• Finally, consider the time frame. Some people open up only when they feel there’s plenty of time, while others get anxious if the evening is too open-ended. Think about logistics: is it easier for you to sink into conversation when you have a long time, or are you better connecting more often, for shorter bursts?

What’s right for your Friendship date?

• Where is the best place?
• What do we need to put in place so there’s no distractions and we can focus on each other
• When is the best time for us?

 

Here’s an example:

Michelle and Andy wanted a regular date night to cultivate their Friendship, but they felt the challenge of two little kiddos.

At first, they traded with another couple and each of them had a dinner date once a month. They loved getting dressed up and going out, but it had been so long since they had time to chat that they spent most of the evening arguing.

They wanted to connect, but each of them had such a laundry list of how the other person had disappointed them, that several dates were ruined because of the baggage that had built up. That baggage revolved around fairness: who does more of the work related to kids and maintaining a house.

When I invited them to switch their Friend-Date-Night model to a 7-minute cup of coffee before the kids got up, they balked. 7 minutes? Instead of an evening out? But I asked them to experiment.

I gave them two questions to frame up the 7 minutes:

• What are you looking forward to today?
• How can I support you today?

7 minutes isn’t a long time. But, surprisingly, it’s plenty, plenty for these two questions.

• I’m looking forward to Monday night football after work
• I’m looking forward to one of my favorite clients who’s coming
• I’m looking forward to hear what happened in our daughter’s life

This cheerful inclusion brought so much change and they were shocked. Just hearing about each other’s state of mind helped them to feel connected and included. The basis for a solid Friendship.

These 7 short minutes also gave them a forum to ask directly for the support they wanted:

• I’d love to eat nachos while watching the game, is that OK with you?
• I might be late coming home. Can you pick our daughter up at daycare?

Life is filled with complexities and so, consequently, it’s also a daily negotiation when you share a life. When you make room for the negotiations and the celebrations, sharing that complexity feels rich and textured rather than bothersome and annoying.

I recommend you find a simple, routine date-night/day/moment that connects you as Friends. Make it a routine that has a top spot in your life when it comes to priorities.

 

Watch as the trust between you and your spouse grows

When you understand each other better, you give each other tons of compassion and grace. That will make your home feel gentle and at ease.

When you take care of the Friend Role in your relationship, conflict is easier because you have natural access to compassion. Plus, you feel connected because you’ve regularly listened to your partner’s dreams and fears.

Likewise, your spouse knows you. And when you feel known, you belong to your life, which gives you confidence to excel in all the other areas of your life.