Couples Date Night Ideas for your 20s, 30s and 40s

Good morning Dinks.  Last night my boyfriend Nick and I met up after work to hang out and have a date night.  Do you want to know what we did?  We went to look at apartments.  Yes that is our new romantic thing to do, walk the streets of our city and visit potential apartments for our upcoming move on October 1st.

Don’t get me wrong, we had a lot of fun exploring new cities and grabbing a bite to eat at restaurants we’ve never heard of.  But walking around for three hours after you’ve worked from nine to five all day is absolutely exhausting.   When I was in my 20s I thought our relationship would get more exciting as we grew older together.  Never in a million years would I have thought that date night in our 30s meant being home (and exhausted) by 8 pm.  Yet here we are.

Money and dating in our 20s

Isn’t it funny that in our 20s we didn’t have any money to spend on extravagant dates so we had to settle for coffee dates or a nice afternoon walk in the park.  Now that we’re in our 30s, have two full time incomes (knock on wood) and properly manage our money we don’t actually spend any money on date nights.  Instead we spend our evenings planning the next phase of our life together.  And you know what?  That’s 100% OK with me.

Of course I would love to spend our weekends taking road tips and our evenings at the theatre, but that’s just not where we are.  I was talking about this with my sister and she said “I completely know what you mean.”  My sister has a single friend who always asks her to go on vacation and my sister – who is also in a long term relationship and lives with her boyfriend – always politely declines.  My sister – who is also in her 30s – would rather spend money on her home and make an extra payment on her mortgage than spend money on a vacation.

This is 30

In our 20s we date to search and find the perfect mate and in our 30s we go house hunting on dates.  Is this it?  Is this where life has taken us?  Maybe it is, maybe in our 30s romance means planning our lives together whereas in our 20s romance is about having fun and feeling butterflies in our stomach.

I don’t expect my boyfriend to come to our apartment door with flowers every Saturday night to pick me up to go out on a date.  I’m not even sure if you can say we’re dating after all these years.

What are date nights like in your 40s?

A woman at my office is in her late 40s and has been married for 25 years.  To celebrate their quarter of a century wedding anniversary her husband planned a night out on the town with tickets to a drag queen show.  How awesome is that?  I think the way we date says a lot about our lives.

In our 20s we are broke and don’t care because we just want to have fun.  In our 30s we settle down and start planning our future.  In our 40s we are comfortable in our ways and spend our days enjoying the life we’ve created with our spouse.

Can’t the same thing be said about the evolution of our money.  We go from having no money in our 20s, to accumulating it in our 30s and then to enjoying it during our 50s into retirement.

Photo from Flickr

P.S. as a bit of a follow up on this, date nights are one thing, but you also need to have a solid basis for communicating as a couple.   The writers over at Debt Free Guys have a nice solid write up about how to approach communication when you don’t want to talk about money.

Kristina Tahnyak

Tahnya is a Certified Financial Planner and former Investment Advisor turned marketing and communications professional She holds a degree from Concordia University, is debt free and currently works in the field of digital marketing.