Date Night: A Parent’s ‘how not to’ Guide
Once a pleasant but innocuous daily past time for you and your partner, having dinner together used to be a fairly straightforward matter of having nice food out, having nice food in, grabbing a takeaway, or tucking into yesterday’s leftovers on your lap in front of Masterchef. A bit of sustenance and a bit of a chin-wag. Normal, healthy human behaviour.
Once you become a parent, however, all this changes. Having dinner a deux assumes the significance of a mysterious ritual in a religious sex cult; something strangely exciting in which you rarely participate, but which is worthy of an entry with two exclamation marks on your calendar. Followed by a crap shag.
Maybe you don’t actually eat together much these days. Perhaps one of you gets to luck out on the burnt fishfinger and unsalted broccoli duty with the kids, whilst the other has an appointment with the microwave every evening at 8pm. Maybe you all dine together in a family tableau that nods more towards the Adams than the Waltons. Whatever your usual scramming arrangements now, though, they seem to foster the feeling that, as a parent, dinner alone with your partner is no longer just dinner. Dinner is now Sacred. Dinner is Freedom and Independence. It is Fun and Intimacy. It is a Right Royal Rogering on a very full stomach. Forget the youthful fripperies of sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll. Dinner is how you get your parental rocks off. Yeah, that’s 8.30, Thursday, window seat, Donatello’s. BRING IT ON!!!!
Conferring such elevated meaning and status onto the act of scoffing down a bit of grub without your children at 8.30pm on a week night can cause a few problems, of course. First there is the tedious strategic planning of it all. Never forget, this is a SPECIAL OCCASION! Dinner for two may now be many things to you, but spontaneous it is not. Do yourself a spreadsheet. There are babysitters to court, tables to be booked, taxis to be ordered and fancy pants to be purchased. Then there’s the crushing weight of expectation. It’s your first time out together for six months, it’s your 40th, his 41st, you’ve got a new kitten, Andy Murray’s just won Wimbledon and you’ve managed at last to book a table in that restaurant that appeared on Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares. Oh yes, this is special. As special as it gets.
But with all that pressure to have fun, intimacy and romance, a £120 bill, and a 10.30pm curfew to boot, the odds of you having a memorably great evening are well and truly stacked against you. You’d have been better off going to the pub and getting some chips on the way home. No more pan-frizzled halloumi gribbles and tense conversation. Just a bit of sustenance and a bit of a chin-wag. And a bit of a shag. If you’re lucky.