8 Tips for Having a Great Date Night at Home

Since you can’t go out for dinner and a movie, if you want to have a date night in the foreseeable future, you’ve got to stay home to do it. To this end, quarantined Medium writer Drew Magary has come up with a handy list of eight ways to have a successful date night at home:

1. Find a date. They have to be living with you presently. Could be your spouse. Could be your roommate. Could be your dog. Could be an old Teddy Ruxpin doll. Anything with two eyes or more will suffice.
2. Pick literally any night. My wife and I originally scheduled our date for Saturday, but that didn’t work for reasons I can’t remember because every day in quarantine is identical to the last. Then it was gonna be Sunday, but that didn’t work because we only had leftovers to eat. Ah, but Tuesday was free on the calendar. Tuesday would be the night. Even if a meteor hit that day (god willing), we were still gonna go “out.” We were gonna pretend we were literally anywhere else on Earth for, like, 30 minutes.
3. Pretend you’re on Chopped. If I can win that show (which I did, though I rarely mention it), then you also have such culinary wherewithal somewhere deep inside you. Your pantry is your lab. Your stove, a Bunsen burner. We had frozen chicken (too long to thaw), frozen shrimp, pasta (we’ve eaten so much pasta during quarantine I can’t even look at it anymore), and Doritos (right food, wrong occasion). We also had a can of black beans, some eggs, and a stack of corn tortillas atrophying in the fridge. A-HA! I could make chilaquiles out of all that — strips of fried corn tortillas in a sauce.
4. Be alone. Even if you don’t have kids to send outside like we do (miracle of miracles, they stayed out there. No one even came in bleeding!), be “alone.” No screens.
5. Dress up(grade). I put on some jeans. Jeans count as formal clothing for me.
6. Use a candle. You can transform any space into a romantic getaway with a candle. Once I lit the candle, why it was as if we were overlooking Parque Chapultepec, it was! If this was as close as we got to returning to Mexico, now we were closer than we had been an hour beforehand, weren’t we?
7. Only talk about things that make you happy. My wife and I talked about the virus before remembering that we hated talking about the virus. We summarily cut off the topic, same as we have during any other recent dinnertime conversation. Only this time, we had more room to play with on the backend. So we talked about the kids, our friends, our respective careers, and my wife’s painting.
8. Or don’t talk at all. We also spent a good amount of time simply not talking. This was glorious silence. Everything is quiet right now by force, but you can still seek out intentional moments of quiet that are of your design and not the world’s.