http://www.momadvice.com/blog/2009/07/9-unique-ideas-for-frugal-date-nights.html

However, I’m still pondering that I take on the planning and thinking about us spending time together. Perhaps the next quiet evening, we’ll talk about it.

I also blog very little about my relationship with my husband because that would involve sharing more about our personal lives than I think is fair to him or to me, especially given that our respective families read my blog. If I had the energy, perhaps I would start up a completely anonymous blog and write about it, but I don’t.

I think we instituted the date night concept because apart from anything there had been such powerful competition for my partner’s time in the evenings. I wanted his attention, our daughter wanted it, and I also wanted his son to have it. In the end we felt a special night a week set aside for spending time together after the kids went to bed rather than cleaning the house or withdrawing for some time alone to our various computers was needed.

* the statement that she hadn’t had dinner out with her girlfriends in 10 years. Wow. How on earth does that happen? I mean, not having a date in 10 years I can see, but not getting out yourself?? Is this just my naivete as a new mom speaking?

* the repeated references to “mac-n-cheese” kids being somehow a failure of her mothering, and definition of perfect child-raising as including “fancy schools, tae kwan do lessons, and home-cooked organic food” … now, I am a big fan of lessons/activities and home-cooked food – that’s how I was raised, and I thrived on all of that stuff – but I wonder if part of the problem here is her “keeping-up-with-the-Joneses” obligations multiplying past any hope of being able to fulfill them. Further to the previous point, I wonder if some sort of insistence on things Being Done Right or Must Be Done By Mom Or She’s A Bad Mother is at least partly to blame for her never getting out of the house on her own. And then I wonder if that’s blaming the victim somehow, because how helpful is it to add one more expectation (the expectation of rejecting expectations) on the pile? But still – surely it’s possible to opt out of all that competitive BS? Balancing what makes your kids happy and what makes you happy is hard enough.

I will grant that I am commitment-averse, and so is my partner. So maybe that’s why we wouldn’t want a standing date-night – because we both worry a little about how we would get out of it when it is an obligation.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say – because I was going to talk about the little day-to-day things that I find far more meaningful than any dinner together – but maybe what that amounts to is that we’re doing “date nights” a tenth at a time, on a daily basis. We do make a point of coming together at the end of the day for a beer or a snack or a cup of tea. But I think that if one of us had to say, “let’s codify this into a daily expectation or one big weekly expectation” that would be a warning bell for me, that the requester is not only not getting what they need, but is scared that un-codified efforts for the relationship will not be naturally reciprocated.

The best kind of dates are the “kid asleep in stroller while on a family outing lets take advantage of it and have a date” dates. But my kid doesn’t nap very often anymore.

In keeping with the point of the exercise, we take turns organising date venues and babysitters (we do one each, and then swap next time). The Bloke did recently give me travel Scrabble for my birthday, and when I opened it I managed to refrain from saying “Why??” It’s been nearly a month and we haven’t played yet. I offered one night, but he was tired.

I find the pressure to have a date night annoying. Is my marriage going to fall apart without it? Am I really missing out?