Dating and romance: Why married couples should go on dates

Rowan


The irony of married life is that you live together but rarely have time to talk. Perhaps I should qualify that: married life with children. You bark shopping lists at each other, discuss who's picking up from ballet, argue over the washing up and accuse each other of losing the gas bill. But you very rarely indulge in the kind of rambling, inconsequential, flirtatious nonsense that makes you delight in each other's company: the long conversations that put the world to rights and make you realise why you got together in the first place.

Recently, a social dating network called the Asian Dinner Club introduced a new service, setting up "surprise dream dates" for married couples (with each other, I hasten to add - not some kind of wife-swapping experiment).

Founder Salima Manji says: ''A date night brings you back to when you first started dating - the excitement, the butterflies. It's about getting the spark back.''

I like the idea of butterflies. Home is, of course, wonderful but it's more about tea and The Archers than a fluttering kaleidoscope of colour. So I started to wonder what it would be like to have a date with my own husband. We've been married for 20 years, have three teenage children and very rarely go out on our own.

This is quite baffling, because we don't even need babysitters anymore. We could be watching experimental theatre, laughing at stand?up comics, playing badminton together.

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Instead, we spend our evenings cooking vast amounts of food (I still can't believe how much our sons eat) or acting as an anxious taxi service. In fact, I think the social highlight of recent months was the parents' evening at our sons' school - and we didn't even stay for coffee and biscuits. So the idea of an evening à deux was quite exciting. Would it be champagne and caviar? Sweet nothings over a candlelit dinner?

Almost immediately I started worrying about what to wear. When we first met - all those years ago when Matt was living in New York - I used to waft about in Nicole Farhi. But now, because I work from home, it's old jeans and a T-shirt. Matt doesn't need a work wardrobe either: he's an osteopath, so wears one of those clinical white coats. Reassuring for patients, but not a good look for a date.

OK, so nowhere too posh. I thought about going to the cinema, but skulking in the back row deafened by surround sound seemed like cheating: the idea of a romantic date is that you talk to each other.

I did briefly consider something active, like going to a dance class - I'm pretty sure they do salsa in the local church hall - but I mentioned this to Matt and he gave me one of his dark looks. I backtracked quickly. You don't want a romantic evening that involves your other half wishing he was somewhere else. So we settled on our local restaurant, Franklins, much?loved by the residents of East Dulwich in London. This had the advantage of being within walking distance, so neither of us could start moaning at the last minute about all the effort involved or saying, as people often do, "I've had such a hard day, why don't we just stay in? We could have a takeaway and watch University Challenge…"

So there I was at 7pm putting on mascara in the bathroom mirror. They may have been small cabbage whites, rather than huge wing-beating swallowtails, but I did have butterflies in my stomach. Watching me was Alice, our 15-year-old daughter. She said sternly: ''And when will you be back?''

''We're only going down the road,'' I said.

''What time?'' she said.

I suppose she learnt it from me.

They had given us a table for two. I had worried that we might look at each other, away from the pandemonium of family life, and be unable to think of a word to say. Parents get so used to conversations being interrupted, or even drowned out, that they can lose the knack of talking altogether. Or perhaps, I thought, if we do talk, we'll end up discussing humdrum domestic detail, like defrosting the freezer or filling the crack in the kitchen ceiling.

But none of this happened. Maybe it was the candlelight; maybe it was the wine; maybe it was the food which, unlike our normal slapdash productions, was just perfect. Whatever the reason, we talked non-stop and not one word of DIY passed our lips.

OK, so we're not Bogart and Bacall. But as we walked home hand in hand on that cold March evening, it felt like marriage was still pretty romantic.

Go on a date. Have an affair. Just do it with your husband or wife.

BUT I'M TIRED...

"Darling, shall we go out tonight?" Married couples' top 10 excuses:

  • "I can't find a babysitter"

  • ''There's that nice bottle of wine we bought at Waitrose''

  • ''It's Top Gear''

  • ''I'm so tired, I just want to have a bath and go to bed''

  • ''I've got a big day tomorrow''

  • ''Wouldn't it be cheaper to stay in?''

  • ''But we're going out on Friday''

  • ''We've left it too late to book''

  • ''They're forecasting torrential rain''

  • ''There's always next week''