Date Night is Dead. Long Live Date Night!

Our Date Night kit: cocoa with a generous smidge of Bailey's 

(or the generic equivalent). 

It's time you ditch date night.

"Have a weekly date night" is a standard bit of marriage mantra you probably had drilled into you by friends and family from the first time you hinted you might take a long walk down a short aisle.

It's a good concept, really: a weekly date night gives you time to be a couple, rather than the daily default of two business partners operating a small but intense organization. But here's the problem: weekly date nights are nearly impossible to achieve, and the pressure to have them doesn't exactly help your marriage.

First ... have you thought about the price of babysitters lately? In Chicago, the going rate for a reasonably responsible adult is $10 an hour. So unless Grandma and Grandpa are next door, or you're not especially concerned with the safety of your children, you can be priced out of a date night before you and your partner even get out the door.

Second ... most of us live over-scheduled lives. We work until six, rush home for dinner with the family, do baths and homework, get the kids in bed, pay the bills, finish up some email, and watch a half hour of TV before falling asleep on the couch. While none of that may be thrilling stuff, most of it is stuff that has to get done: and leaving home for the evening puts all that stuff off for later.

I think it's time we cut ourselves some slack on the goal of having a weekly date night, and look for some viable alternatives that gives us focused couple-time in the middle of our busy weeks. Because really, jobs change, kids leave home, but at the end of it you still have each other, and you better invest some effort now in making sure you still know how to hang out happily together.

So what does an alternative look like? I have family members who put their daughter in a 6 p.m. dance class, then dashed out together to grab a quick meal and chat while her class took place. Other people I know leave their children in their church's Sunday School and go for a cup of coffee.

In good weather, Cliff and I often end our evenings by taking a drink out to the back porch and chatting for a half hour. (This sounds idyllic, but remember that our back porch shares an alley with a car wash.) In winter, we both look forward to Wednesday nights when our favorite show is on, and we crash together on the couch with hot cocoa.

You don't have to have the same solution for every week. Cliff and I once played hooky from an afternoon of work to catch a movie, leaving our son at daycare until the last possible minute. We can't do that every week, but as an occasional treat it fills the Date Night gap.

So here's the moral of the story: you need time to be a couple. It's hard to find, so don't pressure yourself into a routine that doesn't fit your budget or your schedule. Traditional date night is dead. Long live modified date night!