One side benefit of my journey to becoming a less-terrible husband is that I'm starting to find more opportunities to engage with my wife that I used to ignorantly overlook.

Take date night dinners for example.

Since we're on our way out of town we have both upped our efforts at “getting out more.”

Enter: Dinner at the Cheesecake Factory.

I hate the Cheesecake Factory.  Well, I don't really hate it.  I hate the menu.  I know I shouldn't hate anything.  But the menu is too big.  Too many choices.  Who needs that many choices!?!

So I refuse to read it.  Instead, I hand it to the server and say “I don't like tomatoes or avocados.  Surprise me.”

Side note:  I actually do this a lot at restaurants.  It's fun.

My wife loves the choices.  She'll hold the pages open using different fingers as bookmarks.

Then she'll narrow it down to three finalists and asks which one I think she should get.

Seriously.  She'd ask:

What do you think?  The [item one].  The [item two].  Or the [item three].

Every time.

I never understood why it would be a difficult decision if she had three that she liked.

She'd obviously like any of the three at that point, right?  Just pick one.  Problem solved.

So for years I'd respond by saying something stupid like:

If they're that close, just pick the cheapest one.  Why pay more for something you like the same?

Apparently that was the wrong answer….

Logical?  I thought so.

But wrong.

Because it told her I didn't care.

It told her:

It doesn't matter to me.  What matters to me more is that $1.00 difference in price.

It sucked the life out of that meal.

And it missed an opportunity to engage with her.

So I stopped the “whatever's cheaper” response.

And started embracing the moment and engaging with her on the process of how she came up with those three and why she was struggling to pick one.

That simple act of not getting frustrated by something that I didn't understand but mattered to her made the whole night better.

It also was an opportunity to engage with her about something simple, stress-free, and not about diapers, dishes or bedtime drama.

An opportunity to embrace the small, seemingly insignificant moments that fall in between the large life events that we focus so much of our energy on – an “in-between” moment, as Jeff Goins might say.  (If you haven't read the book yet, you should.  Yes, this post was partially inspired by me having read that book.)

There have been way too many opportunities like this that I used to let slip by.

Now, I'm hunting for more.

To embrace them.

Because we spend most of our time “in between” big events.

It would be a shame to waste “most of our time,” wouldn't it?

What are you doing to engage more with your spouse?  

What in-between moments can you start to embrace?