go out on "date nights" with my partner on a regular basis

And it’s been really nice. We both have busy schedules, and it’s nice to know that we always have Saturday night reserved for each other.

I still want to be sure to spend quality one-on-one time with my partner going out and having new adventures and shared experiences. But I also want to spend quality time together in groups, in our community. And quality time at home. Time working side-by-side on shared goals. Time supporting each other in our individual goals. Time giving service to the community and the world. There are so many different aspects of our relationship, so many different needs to attend to, that I can’t list each one as a separate goal!

I think this was important to me as I contemplated moving in together and feared that once my sweetie had access to me 24-7, he would never want to leave home. But things have worked out in a less rigid way than having formal date nights every few weeks. And if things start to feel unbalanced, I ask for them to change.

So bye-bye for now, date nights. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is something we revisit in the future. But for now it doesn’t seem necessary. I feel satisfied with how we’re doing on this without making rules about it.

...either we go out, we have friends over, we are busy with projects, or we’re having a little time apart.

Sweetie suggested we make sure to include regular “at home snuggling on the couch movie-watching dates” in our repertoire. Saturday we did this without incident, aside from the excitement when the cat started running around chasing a twist-tie and the dog got agitated and it took a while to calm everyone down.

We watched “In America,” which we both thought was great and would highly recommend. It felt great to relax together. We fell asleep on the couch and didn’t actually get in bed until around 3 a.m.

Baby planned a dinner date for last night—but then we got home late from our afternoon meeting, got wrapped up in things at home, and next thing you know they couldn’t get a table for us at the restaurant until really late, and I was already swooning from hunger. So we ended up eating dinner at home and just going out for dessert. (Mmmm! I had the coconut cake, he had the turtle cake.)

I’m glad he insisted we go anyway, just to reinforce the habit.

Yay, a free date! I am moving in to “our place” today, and our first “date night” will be Sunday night. Perfect timing!

My thought starting out is: we’ll each plan something once a month, for a total of at least one fun night out every two weeks.

[He sometimes reads my entries on this site, so I won’t risk spoiling the surprise by revealing the nature of our date!]

but you get the idea. Now that we are moving in together, we will be spending lots more unstructured time together. We want to be sure to have some special time for us, too.

Some dates I have been longing for: dancing, dancing, dancing! Maybe even dancing classes. Oh, and going to the climbing wall, and going for an overnight out of town. And I’d like to make sure some of our dates are “double dates,” so it’s not just the two of us all the time.