What Wives Say About
Date Nights Vs. Gifts

You're about to buy her something again. Jewelry, or flowers, or both, because that's what you bought last time and it went fine.

I sell dance lessons, so my opinion on what you should buy your wife is worth exactly what you'd expect. What I have instead is two piles of writing from the other side of the exchange, and neither pile was written to convince you of anything.

I wish my husband would surprise me with this kind of gift! I’m pretty sure he’s just buying my jewelry.

Nobody Asked These People For A Testimonial

The first pile is public comments underneath Facebook ads I paid to put in front of people. I want to be straight about that, because it cuts against me before it cuts for me. Something was very much being sold in that moment.

What wasn't happening is the part I'd look at. Nobody solicited a single one of these. No one requested a testimonial, nobody was paid or offered anything for typing one, and plenty of these people are replying to each other rather than to me, the way you'd talk across the kitchen table while a commercial runs in the background.

The second pile is gift messages: the little box at checkout where you type what goes on the card. Those come from people who already bought, so they aren't neutral about me either. They also weren't written to me. They were written to a spouse who would read them on the morning of a birthday, and I have no way of telling you who typed most of them, husband or wife.

Some of the people writing those comments say who they are right inside the comment: my husband, my hubby. Plenty of the others say nothing about themselves at all, and I'm not going to guess at those, so you'll see me write somebody where the record doesn't say.

Neither pile is a survey and I won't dress either one up as one. What I can tell you about frequency is that the same sentiment comes in again and again underneath these videos, in near-identical words, from people who have no connection to each other.

The Comments Keep Asking For The Evening, Not The Box

Somebody tagged a friend under one of these videos and wrote:

scratch the jewelry box off his list

That one is a joke. These are not:

I would melt if my husband bought this for us

Now that would be my dream gift from my husband!

If my husband bought this and did this with me.That would be a perfect valentine's day present.

Not one of them says the jewelry was bad, or cheap, or unwanted. Nobody here is complaining about a necklace.

What I read in them is a complaint about a different thing entirely, which is that a necklace doesn't require him to be anywhere. It arrives, she puts it on, she says thank you, and his Friday is unchanged. An evening costs him the Friday. That is the difference between the two kinds of gift, and it's the reason Date Nights Dancing exists in the shape it does: easy swing taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, both of you in front of the same video from the first one on.

Some Replies Said Stick With Flowers And A Card

It isn't unanimous and I'd rather not pretend it is. Under the same kind of video, one reply to a friend read:

stick with a card and some flowers

And another, ribbing somebody about the whole premise:

they want jewelry,chocolates, a new automobile. A cruise ect

Both of those are jokes, and a joke like that only works if the preference underneath it is real. Wanting the wrapped object is a fair thing to want, and opening a login instead can be a genuine letdown.

So the honest version of the argument isn't that objects lose. It's that your default is doing all the work, year after year, and she can tell the difference between a choice and a habit.

Memory Keeps The Peak And The Ending, Not The Average

In The Power of Moments, Chip Heath and Dan Heath explain that when people judge an experience they don't average its minutes. They rate it on two things: the best or worst moment in it, and how it ended. Duration neglect and the peak-end rule are the names they use for that.

That's a claim about how experiences get scored in memory, not a study about gift categories, so don't let me stretch it further than it goes. An object can be a peak on its own. If she has an engagement ring, that was one.

The Heaths also write that the most memorable periods of our lives are the times when we break the script. The fourteenth bunch of flowers doesn't break anything. She knows the script, she can see the whole evening from the doorway, and a night neither of you could get wrong is a hard one to remember a year later.

Buy The Flowers Anyway, Then Add The Evening

The comments that read the warmest aren't from people who got an experience instead of a gift. They're from people who got both.

My hubby just got this for us for V-Day and of course all the flowers .. Can’t wait to dance with him..

My amazing hubby bought this for us for Valentines! He really is a pretty good dancer!!! Having lots of fun can’t wait to practice a few more moves!!!

The flowers are still in that first one. They get half a line on the way to the part the writer is waiting for. That's the shape I'd copy: something small she can hold while you tell her what the two of you are doing on Friday.

On the buying side of the counter, this is how people put it in the gift box at checkout:

I could hold a jewelry box this year but I would rather learn to hold you hand and move.

Instead of flowers for Valentines Day I thought this might be fun for us to do. Go out to dinner some night then learn how to dance at home. I love you.

Happy Birthday and Happy Valentine's Day! Now I have no money left for flowers or chocolate, but I think you will like this more!

None of them is trying to be poetic about it. They're telling their person what the plan is, which is most of what a card has to do. If you want the longer version of that argument with more formats in it, experience gifts for your wife covers the ones that aren't dancing.

An Experience Gift Can Sit Unopened For Five Years

It doesn't always work, and I'd rather you heard that version from her than from me:

I gave this to my husband for a gift about 5 years ago … I think we’ve used it two or three times. He’s just not interested.

That's the risk with anything that requires two people to show up. A necklace doesn't need a calendar. An evening does, and if nobody puts it on one, you're left holding a login and an unopened email.

The fix is small and it belongs to whoever gives it. Pick the night before you hand it over. Not "sometime soon", not "when things settle down". A day of the week, a start time you'll both be home for, and the first night inside the same week she opens it. A gift that already has a date on it is a plan.

Put A Date On The Calendar Before You Wrap It

So keep the object small and put the evening at the middle of it.

Buy the flowers. Buy the small thing she'll wear. Then pick a night, tell her which night while she's still holding the box, and be the one who moves the coffee table out of the way when it comes around.

That's what the Date Nights Dancing program is built for: the two of you in your own front room, the same video, nobody watching while you get it wrong.

If a surprise is what you're after and dancing isn't it, how to surprise your wife has ideas that have nothing to do with music, and the ideas and inspiration library has the rest of them.

One more thing worth saying. If you got this far into an article about what your wife would rather have, you're already doing the part all of this comes down to, which is checking instead of assuming. What women say about a man who can dance is the same set of comments pointed at a different question, and it's kinder to husbands than you'd expect.

Nobody who wrote one of those comments was asking for a better object. They were asking for an evening with their husband in it, and that's the one you can give her this week.