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Gosh, I can't even tell you the last time we had a date night. We can't set a certain day of the week because my hubby's schedule i different since he's a firefighter. So, he might be home on a Friday one week, but not the next. May I ask, besides dinner, what do you both usually do that is starting to get stale? I really like the guidelines and can't wait for some suggestions on here!
My guy and I have been together for nearly six years now and we love date nights. Ours are usually every other week. We switch it up constantly - we go down to DC and wander or stay closer to home and window shop downtown. Then there are the dinner dates - going to a favorite restaurant, staying home and cooking together, or even grabbing fast food and doing a picnic in the park. Our town has both a modern movie theater and a grand old theatre with a Wurlitzer organ that hosts live perfomances and classic movies - we love both! We're also glad it's spring again because we love poking around at flea markets, tag sales, estate auctions and farmer's markets together too. Other days there's nothing in the world that's better than staying home and playing board games (even though my guy cheats!).
My absolute favorites though are our "scavenger hunt" dates. We switch off planning these. He set up our last one - it started off when I woke up in the morning with a note in the fridge sending me to where we met and 6 clues (and places!) later wound up that night back at home where he had made dinner for us and rented a movie we had missed in the theatre. It was great!
I can't wait to see everyone's ideas! My FI is military and lives far away, so our dates are far and few between and consist of TV/movie nights and a lot of couch snuggles. I'm already wondering what we're going to do because couch nights get old
Ours is pretty simple, but we like to plan to go to shows together...no matter where you live there is probably inexpensive community theater, even if it's just @ the HS...also concerts when possible, such as Green Day in August, woot & ACL fest in Oct...these can be more of the expensive side, so it's not every week, but we'd rather do something we enjoy sooo much.
We also love to grab Sunday brunch after church at a local tea house...I can't wait to be done w/ grad school, so we'll have more sane schedules and "just" both be working full time! :-D
My husband and I love double dating! Though we always love each others' company, we also love others and switching that up can get some great conversation going!
In the summers, we also love going to the batting cages, playing mini golf, and spontaneous trips to Atlantic City (we're in the Philly area).
My FH and I get date night every other weekend (that's when the kids are at other parent's house) We mix it up a lot. Sometimes it's just dinner. Sometimes we watch movies. Sometimes we hang out at a bar and watch sports. Sometimes we grab take out and rental movies and stay in. There's also the Shriner events we go to. Or we golf. There's a lot of ways to mix it up.
My fiance and I loooove eating - living in NYC, one of our favorite things to do is to hop from place to place eating! We might share a slice of pizza, go for cupcakes, get frozen yogurt and get 5-dumplings-for-$1, all in a night. I'd like to think all the walking we do works off some of the food, but I'm pretty sure that's not that case. 
A few things we do to keep it interesting:
- Go exploring! Start somewhere familiar and then just see where we end up. Once we made it our goal to hunt down a working photo-boothso we could take oldschool photo-booth photos. So fun!
- Games. We are working on building a really great collection of games. Nothing like a brandnew game to make for an interesting evening. 'specially since we can both be... rather competetive!
- Cook night! Once or twice a month we find a mouth-watering new recipe. We make a night of it-- go to Whole Foods and buy all the best ingredients, take pictures of each other cooking, set the table, put on music...
- Occasionally Mr. Rain has kidnapped me! He blindfolds me and we drive all over town to some secret location. Last time he took me to the bridge downtown where he asked me to be his girlfriend. Very sweet! Also quite the exercise in trust... ;)
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FI and I love date night. We instituted it after we both got busy with work and school. We love to eat, go listen to live music, movies, and have double-dates with other couples. Living in NYC, there's always something to do--and now that summer is coming there will be tons of free concerts--Central Park Summerstage is a big one for us.
I read this really interesting article in the NYTimes a couple of months ago that got us both thinking about date night--we'll still do our favorite things but since reading this article we decided that we'd do something new together--our first new thing is that we're going to take a drawing class together (his idea). i want to do a wine class next.
here's the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/health/12well.html
One way to keep date night from getting stale is to involve friends! Every month or so we have a poker night with a group of five to six friends, and it's always a great evening. When it's just the two of us, we like to meet at a museum after work, go for a walk, try out a new restaurant, do a project together (like making a complicated recipe, diy projects, etc.), go to the symphony or local theatre, and whatever else we can dig up. Checking out what's going on locally in terms of cultural events can be a lot of fun - we recently went to a large church festival that had lots of delicious, inexpensive food and it was a nice change of pace. We also try to go on little weekend trips every now and then when money and time allows, and we've found these to be some of our most favorite memories together since being away from everything allows us to really just focus on each other.
We always make time for each other, and date nights have been around since about year two of our relationship (that's when we had our first bout of busy-schedule-no-time kind of dating!). Our biggest priority with date night is to relax and just visit. Really just talk and focus on each other outside of our regular enviroment. Rituals build intimacy is what they say!
We can only afford to go out for a date night once every month, if that, so we've taken to doing Friday night happy hour together instead. My husband stops and grabs a bottle of wine on his way home, and I stop and grab a little nibbler, and we have happy hour together on our balcony. We catch up on how our work week has been, we talk about what we want to do for the weekend, and it maintains that ritual at a lower cost.
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Finally! Some of my friends look at me weird when they hear we have date nights. I am sorry you still need to date your spouse, it keeps things fresh and as a couple you need that time! We have recently made a date night a must at least once a month in the last year because of our opposite work schedules, we sometimes hardly see each other for a few days and we even live in the same house! I cant help it that we really like each and enjoy each others time! We try to do it at least once a month, we would do more things but finances are tight. We are snugglers and crave nights at home, with our Netflix subscription, we get excited getting a new movie or 2 every week. We get annoyed when our schedules are filled with outings with friends etc because sometimes we really just need and prefer that one on one time. We at least try and do dinner whether out or one cooks so that we can sit down and talk and unload whats going on. We dive into each others interest too, he is an avid gun collector and I must say I have rather enjoyed learning to shoot and we will go out to his familys land and shoot, its fun and lets off so much steam! Plus he appreciates me taking interest in his stuff. He will go book shopping with me and actually go get coffee with me which he hates but enjoys at the same time. I could spend hours in a Barnes and Noble. Lately we have been enjoying going to the dog park with our love, Bear and going to pick out stuff for the house. So while we dont have a set date night, or even activity, we strive to set out a day or night if we can where we just do stuff togethor, alone. It has made us so much more happy!
Thanks for these ideas! My new husband and I just had our first date night. Simple dinner and a movie, which was wonderful because we are still basking in the newlywed glow (and needed to get away from STILL unpacking the apartment!). We will probably need fresh ideas in a while, though! ;-)
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Date Night is my favorite night of the week (Fridays). Our Date Nights always include dinner, which is great (I do love me some good eats), but I admit, Fridays are getting a little stale. While I was searching around for some new ideas, I stumbled upon this article: 8 Great Date-Night Guidelines, and I thought I would share it with the Newlywed board.
I need some fresh ideas. What do you do on your date nights?