Between kids, careers, getting a decent dinner on the table and folding the laundry,it’s sometimes hard to squeeze in time to truly connect – one-on-one- with our partners. This NY Times article –Reinventing Date Night for Long-Married Couples – tells us thatamping update night just a tad will not only help us reconnect, but will also flood our brains with withdopamine and norepinephrine – the same chemicals that gave us the butterflies that made us fall in love in the first place.
According to Arthur Aron,theprofessor of social psychologyState University of New York at Stony Brook quoted in the article, it’s all about novelty, i.e. trying out new and exciting activities with your partner – and not the same old same old, i.e. movie and dinner.
Here are seven date night ideas to get you started:
- Take an interesting class together. Chicago is brimming with extracurricular classes – check out your local community or city college. Two schools that have caught my eye: theChicago Mosaic Schoolor theChicago Glassblowing School.
- Take a cooking class together! Learn some new recipes and meet new people.Naveen’s Cuisine in Bucktown offers Indian and Thai cooking classes for couples and small groups.
- My husband and I mixed things up a bit by going onan early a.m. date: We enjoyed brunch atPerennial and then walked over and caught an exhibit at theChicago History Museum.
- Try to squeeze in an afternoon or early evening date at the Art Institute, stopping first atTerzo Piano, located in the Modern Wing, for cocktails.
- Take a beginner’s yoga class (okay, I know most men reading this may be rolling their eyes at this one!) and follow it up with a couples massage (!!!) atExhale Spa.
- Get physical: Rollerblade along the lakefront, take a walk through Lincoln Park, go bowling atTen Pin, catch the El and explore another city neighborhood.
- Laugh together! atChicago’s Second City.
- Get out there and enjoy your partner – limit work and kid talk, and Do Not Feel Guilty parking the kids once every two weeks or month at Grandma and Grandpas or with their favorite sitter. Our kidswant to see us happy, unitedand in love!
What’s your ideal date night? Do you have any other new and interestingsuggestions for a fun datenight?
