Date Night

By Mike Gervais

LANGUAGE LESSONS

This month, Kat and I embarked on a date that had us plan and prepare for a… different date.

Let’s back up. Our Date Nights come from a book that gives us a vague idea what we’ll be getting into. This month, I narrowed it down to two options, and we flipped a coin to decide what we’d be doing. Tails meant that we would each go online to take a quiz that would tell us our “love language,” a breakdown of how we prefer to express and experience our love for one another. The five love languages are quality time, acts of service, words of affirmation, physical touch and receiving gifts. Once we completed the quiz, Kat and I were tasked with sharing examples of how the other can speak to us in our preferred love language to better express our feelings for each other.

Learning our love language from an online quiz was a new experience for both of us. While I rely on spending quality time with Kat to express my love and feel love, Kat depends more on physical touch, such as holding hands, or a kiss goodnight, to feel and express love.

Our love language test revealed that my preferred method of receiving affection is spending quality time together. Kat’s preferred love language – physical touch – was not a surprise. When it comes to expressing our affection in our partner’s preferred love language, we both felt like we do a decent job of communicating. Kat said simple things like holding hands, or putting my arm around her, makes her happy. For me, I am not sure Kat and I could spend any more quality time together. We do virtually everything, from shopping to relaxing together, and I love it. The next step in our love language date was to plan a date that would focus on our preferred love languages. For a couple that has been enjoying monthly date nights via a subscription box, creating our own evening from scratch was a challenge. Our mission, a date with a focus on spending quality time together (easy) and incorporate physical tough (hmmm?). We can cuddle and watch a movie.

But we do that at least once a week anyway. (See, we’re good at this relationship stuff). We were so stumped on ideas for our big date night that Kat retrieved the calendar we created during our February date night that had us create a schedule for romantic activities. It was gratifying to see that we’ve already done about half the dates that we scheduled, but a little frustrating to find that there weren’t

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341 S. Main Street, Carthage, MO. 64836 many options that would incorporate physical touch. The quality time aspect of our date (my preferred love language) is easy. It’s a date. We’re spending quality time together. C’mon Kat, why do you have to make dating so difficult? Our solution, I think, was elegant. We used our calendar from February, tossed in a little dating tradition and put our own, unique spin on it. My thought is that there isn’t anything more traditional than a night of dancing. Our dilemma is that I’m not much of a dancer, and we aren’t aware of any local discos. So our plan is a simple one. We created a massive playlist as the soundtrack for a cooking contest. We’ll work together to make a main dish, but we’ll each be tasked with cooking our own side, a dessert and a cocktail to go with it. Our date will be dancing the day away as we spend quality time together in the kitchen. Our main dish is going to be a simple one — meat loaf. I’m planning to make bacon bread as a side, a blood orange cheese cake for dessert and a peach Long Island Iced Tea for the cocktail (all three dishes I’ve always wanted to make, but haven’t as of yet had the occasion.) Kat is planning cheesy scalloped potatoes, buttermilk brownies and a Tom Collins cocktail. The past month has been a busy one, with Kat’s parents visiting, so as I am writing this, we haven’t executed our love language date night. It’s one we’re looking forward to, and I like the idea of testing our chops at our own date night activity rather than relying on creative subscription guides – even if we did land on a pretty traditional date idea. n