I’ve been married to my wife, Amy, for nearly four years. Like most married couples, it’s been awhile since I took her out on a “date.” So, last night, I took her out on a date.
Someone once said that, at a restaurant, it’s easy to tell the married couples from the dating couples; the couples who are dating are the ones who are talking to each other.
I’m not nearly that cynical, but I also know that the reason things like that are funny is that there’s a certain amount of sad reality to them. So avoiding such a fate is as good an argument as any for continuing to date your wife.
Now, by date, I don’t mean stopping at Wendy’s on the way home from work; you can turn little things like that into a nice moment (nobody has to cook, do dishes, etc), but if that’s all the dating you do, a “date” will quickly grow to be a term of less meaning, less romance, and little interest.
So every once in a while, I figure it’s a good idea to pull out a date like the first one I took my wife on (which I’ll maybe talk about some other time).
So for the date-planning challenge, here’s a few pointers.
For starters, you need to decide if you’re going to eat first, or later. This needs to be gauged on the level of hunger which the two of you (especially your wife) will be experiencing at the time. We were going out directly after work, so we went to eat first.
To eat, we went to a place called “erté” on 13th Ave and University in Minneapolis. erté is a steak and seafood restaurant that I noticed three years ago while working in that area, and have wanted to take Amy to ever since… but never have, until last night. It’s in really old building, definitely from some time in the first half of the 20th century, and we spent a good part of dinner speculating on what it could have contained, originally. Was it an apartment building? A hotel? Could it have been a cinema? There was a lot to look at.
Dinner was fantastic. (I had the House sirloin, Amy had Halibut).
After dinner, while a couple jazz musicians had started to play live music in the corner (I told you this place was cool), we asked the waitress what the building used to contain, originally.
She seemed quite thrilled to be able to answer this question. “This used to be a two level furniture store, on this side, and a funeral home viewing parlor over there;” she pointed, indicating the kitchen.
“That’s odd,” I said, thinking that it was.
“Actually that was apparently a common pairing at that time,” she said earnestly. “Furniture stores and funeral homes.”
After dinner, we went to the Walker Art Center, a large musuem on the edge of uptown. Like most larger museums, it has a large collection, and a lot of really cool stuff, and then a lot of stuff that makes you ask “This is art?” But that’s what makes it interesting, and we had quite a bit of conversation about what we liked and what we didn’t, and which artists we had heard of, and the many we hadn’t.
Conversation is good; remember, this is a date.
The museum closed at nine. We looked at art for almost two hours. Art ranging from paintings, sculptures, mixed media, to the increasingly uncategorizable. There were quite a few “film” art projects, like one which was a feature length presentation of the color blue to the accompanyment of music and some commentary, or another which was black and white, and consisted of footage of children and teenagers beating each other up in a wrestling ring in a backyard to the music of the Melvins.
Art’s like that.
The last few projects we saw were a lot of strange sculptures; slabs of stainless steel protruding from the wall. A raw steel “sidewalk” emerging from a wall at an acute angle. A pile of rocks sitting on an arrangement of mirrors.
I’ve never liked that sort of art too much, but as we left the galleries and walked back through the streets to the car, I think I might have seen what they were trying to do, for the first time. Everything I passed, whether a lightpole, or a fire hydrant, or a corner of a building, could just as easily have been in that strange gallery. It was like the whole urban center, the whole world, consisted of nothing but art, and we hadn’t left the gallery at all.
So we talked about that for a bit. Amy’s an art student, and was familiar with many of the artists, so she enjoyed the gallery and the talk.
After this, we drove to a coffee shop in uptown Minneapolis; we drank coffee, talked some more, and eventually went home.
It was a great night.
So if you’re married, and you’ve bothered to read all this, take your wife on a date. It doesn’t need to include a museum, but I think most of the point is, our wives would like us to plan something. They want to be swept away on an evening of activity that we planned just for them.
And continuing to date, like you once did, is a good way to avoid becoming that couple in Denny’s who never talk to each other.
