There are a million and one websites that offer fun date night ideas. They can be categorized another million and one ways: free dates, $20 dates, location based dates, adventure dates, red-hot dates, indoor dates, outdoor dates… the list goes on and on. What they don’t say is how important it is to have these date nights.
Of course most parents don’t need to be told the importance of date nights when they are awake with a sick child at 3 a.m. or exchanging notes on the kitchen counter to pass for a discussion. Childless couples too know the importance of date night, after you’re hanging in your sweatpants for the 3rd straight weekend or passing in the hallway; one going to an early meeting and the other running late for an appointment.
Don’t get me wrong, there is something to be said for a quiet weekend in sweatpants, kids or no kids. Still, I don’t know if we forget to make the effort or if it just seems too great to be made but I fear that it soon turns into forgetting why we wanted to make the effort in the first place.
I was listening to my husband on the phone describing some insignificant work event to a friend and I started to get a little jealous. I hadn’t heard that story. Then I wondered if I had even asked about his work lately. Had he asked me about mine? It’s so easy to get mired down in who is picking up from daycare and who is making dinner and where we need to be on Saturday that we forget the details like, “How was your day?” Sometimes, even when we do ask, we forget to listen to the answer.
Now it’s not that we had lost each other, nothing that dramatic. There is as much love there as ever. It’s just that the details get fuzzy. So when he asked me a few weeks ago to spend a Saturday in the woods hunting morel mushrooms with him, I said yes. The look of surprise on his face was funny and I was just as surprised when he broke out in a genuinely big grin.
We dropped the little one off with my parents on our way up north and as we got on the road he said, “I’m so glad you decided to come, I’m really looking forward to spending the day with you!” I hadn’t even realized how much I was looking forward to it too. I felt giddy like a first date. I was happy he wanted to spend the day with just me, and so was he. We held hands in the car. We sang our favorite songs from the iPod. We stopped to eat a meal together (hold your hats) WITHOUT interruption. Then we laced up our hiking boots and spent four hours in the woods walking about 10 feet apart and talking. About everything! Not once did we talk about schedules or the grocery list. No talk of runny noses or tantrums. We laughed, a lot. I forgot for a minute how funny he can be. We bickered when I didn’t do it “his way” and then fell right back into our rhythm of talking. It was, by any definition, a great day. Not fancy, not expensive, but great.
A week after our date day, we had another. We laughed, we took pictures, we watched the sun set over Lake Michigan, we gambled and won a little at the casino and celebrated with frosty mugged root beers because they just sounded really good. Then a funny thing happened this week. He called me on my way home to tell me a story about work. It was insignificant and it was everything.
I know we won’t be able to have a date every weekend. I know we will have days where the details get fuzzy and lost in the shuffle of all we have to do. I also know that the cost of not having a date once in a while can be too high and the benefit of walking through the woods looking for silly little fungus is immeasurable.
