Scrap Date Night: The Surprising Way to Improve Your Relationship
What the Research Says About the Right Way to Plan 'Couple Time'
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February is the month of love. You can tell by the aisles of chocolate in your convenience stores, the bouquets of flower ads in your social media feeds, the sparkle of jewelry commercials on your television screens.
That means February is the season of date night.
If there’s one aspect of modern romance that’s become the symbol of love in the time of busyness, it’s date night. A search at Google Ngram shows that the phrase began to surge in usage in the 1990s to its stratospheric heights today.
These days, celebrity media is full of gushing accounts of romantic “date nights.” One recent list included 28 examples (!), among them Adele and Rich Paul, Ciara and Russell Wilson, Hailey and Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus and Kaitlyn Carter. Even the Super Bowl now counts as date night. People Magazine tweeted on Sunday night that JLo and Ben were on “date night” at SoFi. Really?
The only couple who appear skeptical of all the hype is Prince William and Kate Middleton.
"We're both actually quite keen on box sets," William said of their date nights. Since food “doesn’t usually get ordered to the palace,” he added. “Normally, someone goes and picks it up." He just lounges around in “comfy clothes.”
On the surface, William and Kate can feel confident that even their paired-down date nights will be good for their relationship. A study of 1,600 married heterosexual couples from the National Marriage Project conducted by W. Bradford Wilcox and Jeffrey Dew found that couples who set aside “couple time” at least once a week are 3.5 times more likely to be happy, including sexually happy. For women, the number is 3.63 times and men 3.49 times. The survey found that couple time was equally important for cohabitating couples.
Parents can especially benefit from “couple time.” The National Marriage Project study found that new mothers and new fathers spent half as much time in these one-on-one situations with their partners.
The advantages of date night, the authors declare, include better communications, deeper commitment, and what the authors called “more eros—the romantic love that is linked to passion, excitement, and an overwhelming sense of attraction to one’s beloved.”
With these benefits, who could complain about more date nights!
Art Aron, that’s who.
Arthur Aron is a professor of social psychology at Stony Brook University who studies love. His 36 Questions That Can Lead to Love was a viral hit a few years ago. Aron is particularly interested in maintaining romantic love among couples who have been together for a long time.
His biggest tip: scrap date night.
In a seminal study of 53 middle-aged couples, Aron and three colleagues instructed one group of couples to spend 90 minutes a week doing familiar activities like dining out or going to a movie. Couples in another group were instructed to spend the same amount of time doing “exciting” or “novel” activities that appealed to both partners. Those couples attended concerts, went to plays, skied, hiked, or danced. Couples in a third group were given no instruction.
After ten weeks, Aron and company assessed the couples. Those who had done the exciting activity were found to be significantly happier in their relationship than those in the other two groups.
Aron’s conclusion: Doing the same old date night with the same old dinner at the same old local hangout will have little positive impact on your relationship. By contrast, when you do spend couple time together, the report says, you should do “novel and arousing activities.”
If you want to go out, head to a new neighborhood or take a class together; if you’d prefer to stay in, cook a new recipe or learn a new language. These novel activities put both parties on the same team, so to speak, and flood your bodies with the same chemical compounds that were flowing when you first met.
So put away your boxed sets, William and Kate. Cancel your reservation at your regular dive, Ciara and Rusell. If you want your couple time to be rejuvenating, try something where both of you feel uncomfortable and have to team to up together to triumph.
As Patty LuPone sings in the delightful new production of Company on Broadway:
It's not so hard to be married
When two maneuver as one
It's not so hard to be married
And Jesus Christ, is it fun.
☀
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Or these books: Life Is in the Transitions, The Secrets of Happy Families, and Council of Dads.
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