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When I was single..

When I was single I was always confused when a married friend with children told me they no longer went on dates. Surely they just didn’t realize that there are so many affordable and fun date ideas that this shouldn’t happen. In my head, even when you were married and had children, you’d still have dates.  There would still be the regular night out just the two of you.  I vowed that would never happen to me.  Well, that worked out about the same way it did before I had a child and said “When I am a parent I’ll never…”.  I quickly learned that continuing to date and connect with your partner took work, and that there were a plethora of affordable and fun date ideas.

Affordable & Fun Date Ideas

What I thought would be so simple before I was a parent wasn’t so simple once I was one myself.  Life takes over.  Kids sports, activities, and homework rule the roost. It’s especially hard when you don’t live near either set of parents.  We didn’t have a built in babysitter like many of our friends had.  If we wanted to go out we had to plan WAY in advance in order to make it happen.  We did, and occasionally we found our way to dinner or a movie, but more often than not, it took a little more creativity than that to get our time in together to connect, so when we did, we wanted to make them count. What we didn’t want was for them to cost tons of money!

• Pack a picnic and head out!

  •  Pack a picnic basket and enjoy a simple dinner at a picnic table at a local park next to a waterfall or a beach. Keep it simple.  Take a walk when you’ve finished, or just sit and talk.  Uninterrupted.  When’s the last time that happened? 

• Volunteer

  • The feeling you get from helping others is so refreshing to the sole.  It doesn’t always have to be a grand gesture – or even a big one.  Go visit the elderly  who are in a nursing home.  Bring flowers to hand them together.  Listen to their stories.  Acts of kindness are ones that tend to connect us at a deeper level.  And the bonus is – you might just make someone’s day.

• Attend a local cultural fair.

• Go to a local museum.

• Go out for ice cream.

  • Seriously – wasn’t that one of your first dates, too?  Doing something you used to take for granted before kids can be incredibly sweet.

• Stroll through some tag sales or the flea market.

• Act like a tourist in your own town.

  • Have you checked out your town like a tourist?  If you haven’t, you should!  Go visit Becki over at A Book Lover’s Adventures. Becki’s HomeTown Tourist Project gives you a peek at the towns people live in all over.  Yours just might be there!

• Check out your community theatre.

• Visit a spot in town hosting a musician and listen to music.

  • There is always good music out there – always.  Go find it.  Share a cup or coffee or a pint a beer and be taken to another place by someone with stories to tell.

• Take a cooking class together through your community education program.

• Ride your bikes.

• Visit a local park and go for a long walk.

  • Hold hands and meander down the trails at the local park.  There’s nothing better than uninterrupted time together.

Enjoy your time together.

Even if you can’t get out very often, It’s important to schedule time away – just the two of you to regularly give yourselves a chance to reconnect – to actually HEAR each other without distractions.  The rest of the world will go on without you for just a little bit.

xoxo –

JJ