What defined your marriage pre children?

I definitely recommend traveling together before kids!

Traveling several times and enjoying yourself. It gets harder to do after kids.

My husband and I had my son before we got married and I wouldn't change anything about it. We're not religious people so we don't care about the whole "wait until after marriage thing". But what I will say is after having our son, my husband and I became closer than we've EVER been. We still take vacations a few times a year (probably 3/4 getaways a year) and we still have date night etc. Your life doesn't have to stop because you have children, especially if you have a great support system & we do. We get to go away for a weekend, a few days, a week, whatever and our son gets to spend time with his grandparents or his cousins (my sisters house). It's a win win for us.

This is long but I hope it helps:


I agree with previous people. Find things that you like to do together. (Fine dining, traveling, theater, sports) The list could go on. Like someone else said, that doesn’t have to stop when you have kids. I just got married a month ago and I came into the relationship with 2 kids so I didn’t have the freedom that you have right now. We had our date nights, we went away for weekends but it was much more difficult working around school schedules and what not. For the first 4 years of our dating relationship the kids were with us non stop because they didn’t have visitation with their dad. For the last 3 years they have had every other weekend and it is during that time that we have our date night. I was in the military so I have traveled a lot when I was younger and my now husband does not like to travel (for personal reasons).
So For example: We love finding new restaurants that the kids are too young for or wouldn’t like and going out one night.
We also love just spending quiet time at home in bed watching movies (non Disney lol)
Also, the other thing that I did not do enough of before I became a parent and my ex also never encouraged was doing things for myself. I was an avid golfer, and I have now been able to take that up again even though my current husband doesn’t Golf. He encourages me to go out and just have some “me” time. He does the same thing but with guitars. He loves to rebuild them and play so we each have our own separate hobbies that we do as well as the things we do together which is also very important before and especially after kids.
It sounds crazy but sometimes it’s the small stuff that you don’t even realize that you will miss. Like going out with friends and having adult conversations not centered around kids. Or spending time with your parents while they are not in their “grandparent mode”
My Husband and I love going to see our parents without the kids because we can talk about stuff that you may not want the kids to hear. Right now for us, these visits have been even better for us due to COVID and the kids being home distance learning so the break we normally have while they are at school is not there.

We don't have kids yet, but I was reading a book recently called "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work," by John Gottman, PhD who is a relationship and marriage researcher. In the book, he talked about the research that shows couples who are friends and connect with their partner's life find that their marriage improves with the addition of children, as they don't lose their sense of individuality and being a couple, like what Yasmine and Katie described above. That's something that really resonated when I was reading it because I think it emphasizes the importance of both connecting with each other on a level of shared interests but also of maintaining their identity as a person outside the couple is important. The book also talked about ways to make sure the husband feels involved as things like nursing and other activities typically create a strong bond with mother and child, and dad is often left out of that world. I definitely recommend that book to read if you have time! I also like that it's backed by decades of research on relationships and it has some good tips for keeping a marriage strong, even when you feel that everything is going well.

So agree with everyone. Travel! After you have kids, still make time for each other. We both have kids from previous relationships & couldn’t really travel when they were younger. Now they are out of the house & we have a lot more time for us & to travel. We love cruising! We’re spending 7 days in Jamaica for our honeymoon that we’re super excited about! His mom told me she never thought he would do these adventures!

View Quoted Comment Travelling is such a tricky one because FH is deathly scared of flying (literally flying one hour to visit his brother is very, very difficult) and although I’ve travelled before and still love it, I’m also quite scared. We do love our cruising though! Where we live we don’t have many choices where to go but we do try to go every 1-1.5 years our honeymoon will be a cruise!

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I absolutely hate flying, so my husband and I do road trips! We've done weekend getaways an hour drive or so away, up to 14-hour/2 day drives to places like Maine and South Carolina (we're in Ohio).

We've only been married a month but have been dating/living together for five years, and the things I'm looking forward to most before having kids are 1) buying a house and 2) adopting cats/dogs.

We already have a good date night schedule, frequently get take out, hike, etc. However, with the whirlwind of this year we both have been bad about maintaining personal hobbies, like reading and painting, which I'm hoping to squeeze more of in.

Two of my friends have kids, jobs, and run a blog together. Seeing them live life so fully and normally even with young children really helped quell my fears that I'm going to lose my sense of self or parts of our relationship after we have kids.

View Quoted Comment I absolutely HATE flying so I feel your FH’s pain! I definitely have my Valium or Xanax in my bag- I don’t fly without it!

The best thing to do is to grow closer to your spouse. I had kids 9 months later. Honestly I can barely remember what it was like. To tell you the truth, the best advice I have to offer is no matter what you do, DATE your spouse always. Make it a priority. The best thing you can do for your kids is show their parent how much you love and cherish them despite all their flaws.

My FH and I have 2 kids, I have a son from a previous marriage and we have a daughter together. For us we were an instant family( I got pregnant very early into the relationship) but my FH was told he probably couldn't have children, so she is our miracle baby. Those 2 are it for us due to complications during both. Our daughter is 2 and even though we run on a schedule, we spend as much time as possible together. Having kids has brought us closer and we are still totally in a honeymoon phase that has lasted 3 years.

View Quoted Comment This makes me sad lol. We’ve traveled places together but our big ones for our honeymoon was either Italy or Japan but then Covid happened. I really don’t want to wait any longer for kids so it looks like I may have to forefeit this dream