• The modern couple already acquires many of the traditional wedding gifts long before they get married - they have the kitchen appliances, tableware, etc.
• Today’s brides and grooms are more stressed and time constrained than ever.
• Give the gift that makes a couple’s relationship stronger - The Dinner Gift - Date Night on You during their first year of marriage.

The best wedding gift is a reflection of your love, care and connection to the couple. Traditional gifts like appliances, tableware and decor are less practical today. Couples meet and marry at an older age than ever before. The median age for a first time groom is 30 years old and for a first time bride is 28.5 years old. On top of that, 70% of couples live together before getting married, and typically have lived on their own for a while before cohabitating.

The takeaway? Brides and grooms have well-established households long before the wedding. They have already acquired the mixers, pots and pans - sometimes doubly so if they have merged their two independent households into one.

Additionally, today’s couples are busy, working harder than ever, with the expectation to be ever present at work even while at home. This means less time and mental bandwidth for communication and fun.

So what do you give the modern married couple? The most meaningful gifts for today’s bride and groom relieve stress and encourage and empower the newlyweds to take time for connection in their first year as a married couple. The best wedding gifts bring joy, relieve stress and make married life better.

The Dinner Gift is date night made possible by you! It’s the wedding gift that takes the stress off of making or paying for dinner and puts the focus on each other. It makes time and space for conversation, laughter and fun for the new couple.

You can choose to gift the happy new couple a single Dinner Date Night good for one meal out or ordered in. Or, you can give a Dinner Subscription Gift that gives the bride and groom dinner once a month for a set length of time - 3 months, 6 months or a whole Year of Dinners.

This is the gift that makes relationships stronger. Date nights are an important investment, a recent study of 10,000 couples married for 11 years showed that those that “had a ‘date night’ about once a month were the least likely to split up, staying together more often than couples who went out less frequently.”

So, start the new couple off on the right foot, making memories and building healthy habits. Here is some of our favorite advice for couples on how to make date nights happen and maximize that time together:

Couples can nurture their relationship with recurring dates planned in advance:

1. Pick one day each month for a date and block it off in your calendars:
   Scheduling time together in advance, rather than assuming date nights will fall into place spontaneously, ensures they happen. Planning ahead allows both partners to keep that time open and look forward to a special night.
2. Decide whether to dine out or organize an at-home date:
   Want to try a new restaurant together? Maybe you’d rather create an extra cozy atmosphere at home with delivery from one of your favorite places.
3. Setting an intention for the time:
   Maybe you want to have a monthly check-in or a time to discuss some shared goals you are excited to plan for. Perhaps the opposite is true and you want to have some topics off-limits so you can just have fun - ie, no talk of work or anything else that’s prickly at the moment.
4. Take turns planning the date:
   What do you want to eat? Whatever you want….and round and round it sometimes goes. Switch it up so that one partner chooses the dining experience each month, while the other takes the lead the following month. This way, surprise and variety become exciting parts of the routine.

Experiences, connections forged through conversations and laughter, the happy memories of a newly married couple - these will last a lifetime. A second toaster will not.

*Marriage Foundation and the University of Lincoln