Why married couples should go on dates
Keeping the romance alive is an important part of marriage.
Break from the norm: Marianne Kavanagh enjoys a rare night out with her husband Photo: JEFF GILBERT
Comment
The irony of married life is that you live together but rarely have time to
talk. Perhaps I should qualify that: married life with children. You bark
shopping lists at each other, discuss who's picking up from ballet, argue
over the washing up and accuse each other of losing the gas bill. But you
very rarely indulge in the kind of rambling, inconsequential, flirtatious
nonsense that makes you delight in each other's company: the long
conversations that put the world to rights and make you realise why you got
together in the first place.
Recently, a social dating network called the Asian Dinner Club introduced a
new service, setting up "surprise dream dates" for married couples
(with each other, I hasten to add – not some kind of wife-swapping
experiment).
Founder Salima Manji says: ''A date night brings you back to when you first
started dating – the excitement, the butterflies. It's about getting the
spark back.''
I like the idea of butterflies. Home is, of course, wonderful but it's more
about tea and The Archers than a fluttering kaleidoscope of colour.
So I started to wonder what it would be like to have a date with my own
husband. We've been married for 20 years, have three teenage children and
very rarely go out on our own.
This is quite baffling, because we don't even need babysitters anymore. We
could be watching experimental theatre, laughing at stand?up comics, playing
badminton together.
