An At-Home Spa Night for Two,
Start to Finish

By Friday there's nothing left in either of you. She was up early most of the week, you got home late most of it, and the two of you have been handing off children and errands like a relay team that never gets to sit down. You want to do something for her. Every idea you come up with asks her to get dressed, get in the car, or be good company for three hours, which is the one thing she does not have.

Lani C. wrote in after a massage idea I sent out in my weekly email:

This massage date idea inspired a spa night date that was perfect for us after a long day of work. Foot rubs and warm soaks in the tub….Ahhh. My husband and I been dating more, thanks to you.

Nothing in that needed a reservation, a sitter, or a single thing she doesn't already own.

Rest Counts as a Date

Most date night advice assumes energy you don't have. It hands you an activity and takes for granted that both of you will show up to it with something in the tank. On a week like this one, that advice is for somebody else.

Chip and Dan Heath put an order of operations on experiences in The Power of Moments: fill the pits first, then build the peaks. They're writing about companies and customers, so take the shape of it. The shape holds anyway. A week that emptied you both is a pit, and an ambitious evening stacked on top of an unfilled pit doesn't get to be the good night you were hoping for. Take the week off her first.

That's most of what I write about here, one way or another: a different way to spend an ordinary evening in your own house. Date Nights Dancing is my version of it, easy swing taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time. Your hand is on her back for a quarter of an hour and the reason it's there is the dance. A spa night runs on the same idea from the restful end: contact that has an obvious reason attached to it, and no question sitting underneath.

Contact With Nothing Attached to It

In a lot of houses touch has narrowed down to one meaning. Nobody decided that. It's just what survives a busy decade. The functional touch stays, the hand on her hip to get past her at the sink, and the deliberate touch mostly turns into an opening bid. Once that's the pattern, a hand on her shoulder at the end of the night is a question, and she's answering the question before she's worked out whether she wants the hand there. She braces. You feel her brace. After that happens enough times you stop reaching, because being turned down for something you weren't even asking for is a strange way to end a Tuesday.

When I ask people what they want more of between them and their spouse, touch is one of the answers that comes back most, and a lot of what they describe under it is smaller than you'd guess. One person answered it this way:

All of it. Small touches, deeper connection. And it's not non-existent. It's just slowed way down.

Another put it like this:

How we used to always snuggle, hold hands, arms around one another ...

Matthew Kelly draws the same line in The Seven Levels of Intimacy. He argues that intimacy is two people revealing themselves to each other until each one is known, and that sex is the shadow of that rather than the thing itself. He also points out that of the four channels a couple has (physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual), the physical one is the only one with a ceiling on it, and it's the one most couples spend on exclusively. That's his position, and I'd hold it loosely. It's still a useful thing to hold on a night like this one.

So tell her what the night is before anything starts. If you want to try it, you might say something like this:

"Tonight's just this. I'm not angling for anything. I want you off duty for an hour."

Then hold to it for the rest of the night. None of this means you can't want more than that. It means tonight isn't where you ask. If you say that sentence and then push anyway, you've spent the only thing the evening was going to buy you, which is her being able to relax with your hands on her.

The Run Sheet

Setup is ten minutes. The night itself runs somewhere between an hour and ninety minutes, and it's fine if it runs shorter.

1. Do the setup while she's occupied elsewhere. Empty the sink, or at least get the counter clear, so there's nothing sitting there waiting for her at the end. Put two towels in the dryer for ten minutes. Turn on one lamp and turn off the overhead light. Put your phone in another room, and if you want music, use something that isn't a phone either of you will pick up.
2. Tell her what's happening and give her the first fifteen minutes alone if she wants them. A bath, a shower, the door shut. She might want the company and she might want the fifteen minutes, and you'll find out by asking rather than by guessing.
3. Warm towels when she comes out. The senses are the cheapest of the Heaths' three levers to pull. Warm instead of room temperature, one lamp instead of the ceiling light. That's most of what a spa is selling you.
4. Twenty minutes, her pick, on a timer. Feet or shoulders or back, she chooses. Set an actual timer, so that if she starts doing arithmetic about whether she's taken too long, the answer is already sitting on the counter.
5. Then swap, if she wants to. She might not, and that's allowed. Offer once and leave it there.
6. Something warm to drink, and the lamp stays the only light on.

You don't need to know anything technical to do step four. Slow, firm and boring beats clever. Use whatever's already in the bathroom, lotion or oil or nothing at all. If she says that hurts, believe her the first time and move somewhere else.

If getting even this much space is the problem, a small apartment doesn't rule it out, and if tonight is a night you can't get up off the couch at all, there are smaller formats than this one.

Let Her Go First

One of the ideas I've sent out in The Spark is asking your significant other to show you one place they like being touched that you wouldn't have picked. Her hand on your hand, moving it. You might find out you had something wrong for a decade.

She goes first for two practical reasons. If you go first, she spends the whole time waiting for her turn to start, and whoever goes second is the one who has to stay awake.

If you're reading this thinking you're the one who reaches first every time and has been for years, that's a real thing and it wears men down. I've written about being the one who always initiates separately. It doesn't change what to do this Friday.

How It Ends

Don't finish the night with the two of you on separate phones on opposite ends of the couch. My guess is that the last twenty minutes are what carries into tomorrow, more than the sixty before it, and there's a version of this evening that does everything right and then gets erased at the end by a scroll through the news.

Leave the phones where you put them during setup. Go to bed at the same time. If you both fall asleep at nine thirty, the night worked exactly as intended.

And if the harder part in your house is the stretch right after work rather than the whole week, that's its own problem with its own fix, and I've written about the first twenty minutes after you walk in. For weeks with a little more in them, there are plenty of other at-home date night ideas to pull from.

For what it's worth, a lot of men finishing a week like the one you just finished would go to bed and write it off, and nobody would blame them. You went looking for something to give her on a night when you've got nothing left yourself, which is a harder thing to do than it looks from the outside. Put the towels in the dryer. The rest of it is easy.