Marriage puzzle missing piece

Rita Daniels and Eric Williams have made a lot of dinner reservations in the 2½ years they’ve been dating.

The couple is now hoping the reservation they made with Date Night Plus will better prepare them for the next phase of their relationship: marriage.

Daniels, a legal secretary, is the busy mother of two teenage boys. On weekends, she flies “one-day turns” as a flight attendant for Alaska Airlines. Sometimes, her trips take her away overnight. “It’s a lot of juggling,” she says.

Because of her busy schedule, she registered with DateNightPlus.com in an effort to delegate at least part of her relationship responsibilities.

The website, based in Huntington Beach, organizes group dates for busy couples like Daniels and Williams, who both live in Huntington Beach. Their first outing with the service on July 26 will be shared by more than a dozen other couples also registered. It will include dinner at Baci’s Italian Restaurant in Huntington Beach, replete with romantic music.

The date’s denouement will be a 45-minute marriage workshop that encourages couples to refocus their attention on each other, according to Date Night Plus host Brett Williams (no relation to Daniels’ fiance, Eric).

“I want to do everything I can to make this relationship as strong and stable a relationship as I can for myself and my sons,” Daniels says. All the more important since she sometimes leaves her boys, ages 13 and 14, in the care of Eric Williams, who works out of his home as a sales rep. “You can always glean something from the knowledge of others.”

Brett Williams says he’s geared Date Night Plus to help couples redirect their attention away from everything else in their busy lives back to their marriages. The author of the book “You Can be Right, or You Can be Married,” he asserts, “You’ve got to pick; you can’t do both.”

Looking at Date Night Plus as a precursor to marriage, Daniels says she’s seeking information to build upon within the union year after year.

Brett Williams himself admits he struggled with his marriage 10 years ago, prompting he and his wife, Lynda, to seek marriage counseling.

Once a week, they hired a baby-sitter, gassed up the Ford Explorer and buckled each other in for an hour-long trek from Huntington Beach to Santa Monica. On the advice of a professional, they hit pillows with a tennis racquet to release tensions that had mounted between them.

At the time, “I thought it was ineffective,” Williams said. He even uses the word “ridiculous” to describe the long-ago experience.

But Williams said his relationship flourished not because he and his wife discovered resolutions to their marital quandaries by thumping a pillow, but because their weekly jaunts included dinner afterward. They spent five hours every week “hanging out” together and, says Williams, “that’s what made the difference.”

The outings provided the couple with time to focus their attention on each other and their marriage, and that’s where Williams’ theories regarding counseling were born. His inspiration for the workshop came from his frustration with traditional marriage therapy geared toward communication, and not toward love. “That’s where they miss the piece [of the marriage puzzle]” Williams says.

“The majority of marriages starve to death because marriages live off love, and love is the giving of attention,” Williams said. “The key to marriage is love. The key to love is attention.”

Couples can register by going to www.datenightplus.com.