This past weekend, my husband and I got away for an hours-long date. As we were driving home sometime after midnight, I gazed at the stars over the Blue Ridge Mountains. We talked about spiders.

It was wonderful.

We’d driven two hours, eaten Indian together, enjoyed a two-hour show by my favorite indie band (all hail Carbon Leaf), and were on our way back home. We’d discussed his work, my writing, kids, school stuff, plans for holidays, church obligations, an article I read about teaching boys about sexual consent, the 24-disc Eisenhower biography he just finished listening to, the food we ate, the parts of the show we liked, and the boy named Wayne who was generous enough to ask gawky me to slow dance at my last middle school dance.

We still had an hour of driving time to go. So DJ told me about the radio program he’d listened to about some highly-developed spiders. It was interesting—part of the reason I fell in love with DJ was that he knows something about everything—and while he talked, I looked out the window at Orion and thought how happy I was.

If you’re married with little kids, you might be trying to smile and say how great that is that we could get away for all that time. Meanwhile, you’re lucky to get a couple of hours out every three months or so. Assuming the babysitter plans don’t fall through.

Yeah, don’t bother to be nice. Go ahead and bare your teeth. I know the feeling. We had our first child nine months after we got married, and have never lived close enough to family to have any of them pick up babysitting for us. Our dates for years consisted of hiring a teenage girl, eating out, then driving up and down Rt. 11 until after bedtime so we at least didn’t have to put kids to bed. Weekend getaway? Never done it. A week away? Unheard of.

But now I can see something we did right.

During those closed-in years when we had little kids, we could hardly even finish three sentences without interruption. We kept trying anyway. In among kids and work and spiritual meltdowns, we talked about books we read, thoughts we had, opinions we were chewing on. We’d lie in bed at night, sleepy, and talk about theology. While driving up and down Rt. 11, we’d play each other songs we’d discovered, or relate a funny conversation with a distant friend. We didn’t have time for long, leisurely conversations, but we filled what time we had.

And one day, we didn’t have such little kids anymore. This Friday, we left the house at 4 in the afternoon and didn’t get back till 1 in the morning.* We didn’t have to spend any of that time getting reacquainted. The connection we’d shared before life got so intense—that connection was still alive.

So my point isn’t that to keep your love alive, you need to get away without kids, because that’s not really an option for some of us. My point is to fill up the spaces of busy life with conversation, staying connected, never losing sight of each other.

And maybe some night, you’ll be driving together with your love. Maybe you too will gaze out the window as he talks, and see a shooting star trail down the sky. Meanwhile, he’ll tell you about highly-developed spiders.

And you too will be happy.

*Plan assumes you have generous friends who will pick up pizza for your kids’ supper, and neighbors who are always willing to be on call if necessary.