Five things that count as a date on a night when you have nothing left, including two you can start without standing up.
The kids are down, the kitchen is mostly handled, and you have maybe an hour before you fall asleep sitting up. You know you and your wife should do something together. You also know that a real date night means planning it, proposing it, and being decent company all the way through it, and you've got none of that in you. So the two of you put something on the TV and go to bed, and the night joins the pile of nights that didn't count.
One reader, Nick S., wrote back to an email of mine about date nights:
We have six kids, ranging from 9 to 18 and it is just so hard to carve out the time. We're exhausted.
Six kids, nine to eighteen. Nobody in that house is short a system.
Someone else left this under one of my ads:
instead of date night dancing how about date night napping. Lol. I'm always exhausted ...
Fair. On a night like that, napping is the only idea that sounds good.
Five formats, ordered by what they take out of you. None of them need planning, shopping, or enthusiasm, and the first two can be started from right where you're already sitting.
When I ask husbands and wives what's getting in the way of feeling close, tired comes back more than anything else. More than money, more than the kids, more than phones. One person answered it this way:
Feeling too tired to know what to do or how to connect meaningfully when we are together
That's a different problem from being busy. Busy means the hour isn't there. This is the hour being there and having nothing to spend in it.
Matthew Kelly names the same thing in The Seven Levels of Intimacy. "Energy is our most valuable resource, not time." His observation is that two people can hold the same twenty-four hours and get wildly different amounts of life out of them, because the resource that runs out first is energy. Most date night advice budgets the other one.
If the harder part for you is walking in the door already spent, that first stretch after work is its own problem and I've written about reconnecting after work separately.
It's also why the thing I teach comes in fifteen minute pieces. Date Nights Dancing is easy swing taught at home, no studio and no experience needed. Fifteen minutes is a length a tired person can say yes to without lying about what he has left.
Most men in this spot are deferring connection. There's a version of the weekend where the kids are at your parents' place, you both slept, and you can do the whole thing properly, so the small version tonight feels like a sad substitute for it and gets skipped in its favor.
That weekend does arrive sometimes. It doesn't arrive weekly, and the months in between are the actual marriage.
Chip and Dan Heath describe in The Power of Moments how an evening gets filed after the fact: by whatever was best in it, and by however it finished. The Heaths are candid that the research underneath that isn't fully settled, so take the direction rather than treating it as a law. The direction still helps on a night like this one: twelve minutes with something real in it is its own thing, and it's the one on the table.
Kelly would push back on that, and it's fair to say so. His prescription is two hours a week, a day a month, a weekend a quarter, all of it with no agenda, and he's explicit that five or ten minutes doesn't qualify. That's his position, and I think he's right about what real depth costs. I'd put the two hours on the calendar for a week you have them. On a night you don't, ten minutes is still ten minutes, against a zero.
Most of these have gone out in The Spark, the weekly email I write, so they're not new inventions. None of them need a sitter, though if that's the standing obstacle in your house, date nights with no babysitter covers it properly.
Energy: none. Works lying down.
Scroll back through your photos or your texts until you find the thing the two of you thought was hilarious two years ago and haven't mentioned since. Send it to her with nothing attached to it. She's in the same house, ten feet away, which is what makes it funny.
Nothing got built and nothing got scheduled. You reached for her at the end of a day that took everything.
Energy: almost none. Three or four minutes.
Ask her what she had on repeat when she was seventeen. Then find it, hand her one earbud, and sit through the whole song without talking over it.
Almost everything you two say to each other after the kids go down is administrative. This is a few minutes of her at seventeen, a subject neither of you has been anywhere near in a long time.
Energy: low. You have to stand up once.
The couch has a script attached to it, and the script is the TV. The porch step doesn't have one. Neither does the tailgate, or the car in the driveway before either of you goes inside.
Of the three levers the Heaths name, breaking the script is the one that costs nothing. Same two people, same ten minutes, different chairs, and the conversation goes somewhere other than the calendar. Take two drinks out with you if you want a reason to be out there.
Energy: low, but it's twenty minutes of you doing something with your hands.
This is about as close to the floor as you can get and still have it feel like a date rather than a chore. Twenty minutes, one of you at each end of the couch, thumbs working the arch of the foot, phones in the other room. If you have slightly more in the tank than that, an at-home spa night for two is worth setting up on purpose.
Energy: real, but bounded. You'll be standing.
This one sits at the top of the range and it sounds the most wrong when you're flat, because it involves getting off the couch. It earns its place anyway: there's nothing to decide. The next fifteen minutes are already picked, and on an empty night the deciding is most of the cost.
Fifteen minutes, one move, both of you equally bad at it in your own living room. That's the shape of the Date Nights Dancing program, and it's also the shape of any short thing you already know how to start together. You might both end up slightly out of breath and laughing at each other.
Sometimes you're the one with a little left and she isn't. A woman wrote to me about a free week of dancing I had sent her:
I am so sorry. We had no chance to try this free chance at dancing. We were too tired on Wednesday night to try. Please give us another week to try? I am soo sorry but we didnot manage it.
Two apologies in four sentences, for the crime of being tired. I'd never asked her for one.
Kelly makes the plain observation that it's hard to be kind, thoughtful or generous when you're worn out. That's a fact about human bodies, and it's worth holding onto on the night she says no.
If she's the one running on empty, the answer is usually to take something off her plate first. You might ask her what has been sitting on her all week that she hasn't gotten to, and go do that instead, with no date attached to it and no mention of one. Some other night the answer will be different.
And if you ask and she says she's too tired, that's a no about tonight, and no reason to stop asking.
One thing. Four minutes of a song, or ten minutes on the porch step, or a photo from 2023 sent across the living room. If one minute of tonight was different from the rest of the day, the night did its job and you can go to bed.
What wears a couple down over a year is a run of nothing while you both wait to feel better. Once the small ones are holding and you want more to pull from, there are plenty of at-home date night ideas here, and a separate piece on keeping date night fresh when the weekly one starts to go stale.
For what it's worth, you're reading this at the end of a day that took everything you had, which is the hardest possible moment to go looking for a way to be a better husband. Plenty of men in that state go straight to bed and let the week decide for them. You went and looked instead. Pick the smallest thing on that list and do that one.
The Thursday reminder over 100,000 couples love: ideas and conversation starters that deepen love, laughter, and intimacy.
