Date Night: Rare, Precious, Strange, Necessary

Going out without the baby every once in awhile is an exercise in sanity preservation

I used to think a “date night” was something couples who were having problems did by order of their marriage counselors. This was before I understood how precious and rare they are for people with kids, especially people who don’t have live-in childcare or relatives who love to babysit living close by.

Before we were married (October 2020, pandemic micro-wedding, natch), my husband and I used to go to shows together. Sometimes we’d plan a few days or weeks in advance, sometimes we’d just decide to catch a friend of a friend’s band hours before the show started. I would pick out an outfit that signified that I cared, but not too much. I'd wear the kind of lipstick that was designed to withstand adverse conditions without budging-- salads, sweat, a sip of another person's cocktail. He would wear a tee shirt that was old enough to vote and yet look effortlessly cooler than me.

We would have a drink around the dining room table or walk to our favorite bar nearby, the one with the mezcal drinks. We would call a reasonably-priced Uber and run around the venue like a couple of teenagers whose parents weren't picking them up until the venue closed. We would stay out very late and wake up very early with pounding hangovers and set an alarm for 11 am, which is the earliest our favorite pizza place would accept phone orders, and then perhaps take an edible and put an episode of Homeland on until it was time to eat carbs and cheese and then spend the rest of the day waiting for our bodies to finish making payments with interest on the fun from the previous day.

COVID put an end to all that, and then I got pregnant, which really put an end to all that.

Now that we have a baby, not only are we not going to “shows” together anymore (once you become a parent you are legally required to call them “concerts”; I don’t make the rules) but we are not able to do anything spontaneously anymore. I work from home, which means that even with childcare, I’m barely away from Juniper. I cherish every opportunity I have to leave the house alone to buy lightbulbs at Target and speak to nobody. I eagerly look forward to precious hours that Juniper is down for a nap some days so that I can use that “me time” for self-care in the form of cleaning the kitchen.

Before this weekend, we had only hung out together outside of the house without Juniper twice since she was born. It just takes too much planning. It’s easier for Josh to go meet a friend out while I stay home and watch Love Is Blind on Netflix. We have part-time childcare, but that’s only a couple of days during the week and the time she’s here we use to work.

We’re not alone. This survey from 2018 found that parents of school-aged children get an average of 12 “date nights” per year, and that almost a third of those couples get less than one date night per month. It found an unsurprising correlation between parents who take time to hang out with each other away from their kids experience relationship benefits long-term.

In the thick of figuring out how to raise a baby, sometimes it feels a little like my husband and I are coworkers rather than romantic partners, two assistants working for the same emotionally unstable little celebrity. It might be easier for me to stay home and watch my scam shows (The Ultimatum or Tinder Swindler or The Dropout) in comfortable pants while Josh meets a friend out in the world, but a side effect of that choice, repeated over and over again over months, is that I’m allowing my anti-social tendencies to calcify. Which isn’t great. The last thing my daughter needs as she gets older is a mom who is so passionate about only leaving the house to garden that the other kids in the neighborhood think she's a witch.

So this weekend, with a lot of planning and some hand-wringing on my part, finally, for the second time since Juniper was born, we went out for the evening.

Los Angeles is still rattled by COVID. In every bar is a mix of people who fancy themselves survivors, escapees, people who are in denial that there was ever anything to survive or escape in the first place, and, perhaps the biggest category– people who believe that even if there was anything to survive or escape, the danger would not apply to them personally. The vibe is sweet-rotten, like a fruit salad that will be stinking up the fridge soon. Everything feels vaguely haunted.

We took a much-more-expensive-than-I-remember Uber to a bar in our old neighborhood. We had, at one time, planned on having our wedding weekend welcome drinks at this bar. We had befriended the manager. We had sampled the food and picked out a menu of snacks for our guests. But then, like the other doomed weddings of COVID, we had to scrap the whole thing. The manager wasn’t there anymore; he’d moved back to the East Coast, and all of the bartenders were different, and they had a new menu. I felt like a Twilight Zone astronaut who had been unfrozen after a mission to Mars.

We began by talking about the baby. Unnecessary! One of the best features of babies is that they don’t understand English and so you can talk shit about them right in front of them and they don’t know or care. Using date night time to talk about the baby is a waste of a perfectly good opportunity to talk about something else.

But by the time we made it to the Animal Collective show at the Greek Theater, we had moved past baby talk. Everybody else at the concert looked a little like analogs of us, aging New York transplants who probably attended at least one Pitchfork Music Festival during the Obama administration. There was no running around or rushing the stage. Maybe a good number of these millennial hipsters, too, were enjoying a night away from their kids where they could enjoy the smell of other people smoking pot in peace. Where they could sit down and not be asked for anything.

We got silly-drunk. By the time we made it back to the old neighborhood at the modest hour of midnight and I’d had my first experience paying the babysitter while trying to act as sober as possible. The baby was asleep. There was nothing to worry about except drinking enough water and shoving enough bread in my mouth to prevent the worst of the Saturday-leveling hangover I feared I’d earned. It was perfect.

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