Six formats that fit the room you have, plus the honest answer to how much floor a living room dance takes.
Someone left this under one of my ads:
We have a 7'X7' space due to a small apartment. Is this enough space for these videos?
Yes, with room left over. It's a hard answer to believe in a small place until somebody puts a number on it.
If you're reading this, my guess is you haven't run out of ideas. Every at-home date idea you've seen assumes a living room with a rug you can push aside and a couch that isn't three feet from the television, so at some point you filed the whole category under not for us. Another comment on the same ad put it as a question:
Do they have a “tiny apartment with little open space” version?
About six feet by six feet. Two people standing an arm's length apart, each with room to move in any direction without catching a lamp. That's the number I give people for Date Nights Dancing, which is easy swing taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, you and her working from the same video. No studio and no experience needed.
The swing I teach is a spot dance. You turn, you trade places, you come back to where you started. It doesn't travel down a floor the way a waltz does, and that's the reason the number is as small as it is.
So a 7 by 7 clears it. A living room with 7 by 11 of open floor clears it twice over, which is what one woman wanted to know when she wrote in about asking her husband for the program for Christmas:
The available space in our living room is only about 7’x11’ and I’m wondering if that’s too small.
An RV clears it, which I know because somebody measured theirs and asked:
I’m very interested, but live in an RV with about 6x8 space. Is that enough space, or should I find another location?
Go measure yours before you decide anything. Measure the open part of the room. It's easy to guess low on that, because furniture reads as wall until you put a tape on it.
In The Power of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath sort what makes a moment worth keeping into three: what it does to the senses, what it puts at stake, and whether it departs from the script. Most of the memorable ones use at least two. That's their read across a pile of cases rather than a controlled finding.
None of the three is square footage.
They make a related observation at the end of the book, that the moments people tell stories about later were mostly free and unproduced. Nobody built them. Somebody just did something out of order.
Your evening has a script and both of you know it by heart, and a small apartment makes the script tighter. Dinner, dishes, couch, phones, bed. Breaking that costs nothing and takes up no floor.
The things that need real square footage are the things you were sold as a date. A restaurant needs room between tables. A theater needs a screen far enough away. A rink needs a rink. Entertainment is what requires space. Talking, eating, music, hands, her face six inches from yours: all of that happens inside a four-foot circle, and you have a four-foot circle.
Each one comes with what it takes up. If a format doesn't fit, skip it and take the next.
1. The backwards dinner. Footprint: your table, whatever size it is. Dessert first. Then the main. Then the appetizer. Then the drink you would normally have started with. It's the same meal you were going to eat, served in reverse, and it's funnier than it sounds by the third course. Cooking it together in a galley kitchen is half the night on its own, and there's more to pull from in cooking together as the date.
2. A tasting flight of five things. Footprint: a coffee table and two seats. Five small things from the grocery store in one category. Five chocolates, five cheeses, five hot sauces if that's more your speed. One of you sets them out, the other closes their eyes and guesses. Then swap. It costs a few dollars and it's all taste and smell, which is about as far from the usual evening as you can get without leaving the couch.
3. Dress up and stay home. Footprint: your closet. The clothes you only wear to weddings, the good glasses if you have them, one playlist. Pick a country and cook something from it badly. If you want a frame to hang it on, there's a whole run of themed date nights that work in one room.
4. One pair of earbuds. Footprint: one couch cushion each. One earbud for you, one for her, and you take turns playing the song you each had on repeat at seventeen. You have to sit close enough to share the pair, which is the only requirement in the whole idea.
5. Living room dancing. Footprint: 6 by 6. You put on one video and give it fifteen minutes, both of you starting from nothing on the same night. This is the one that needs the coffee table moved, and the room feels different for a while afterward.
6. The parked car. Footprint: a car. In an apartment the car is the extra room nobody counts. Sit in it in the lot for twenty minutes before you come up, radio on, nothing to do in there but talk.
That's six. If you want more of them, the at-home date night ideas list and the indoor date ideas page both run long, and a good share of what's on them fits a small room without any adjustment. So does an at-home spa night, which needs a bathroom and a towel and nothing else.
Someone asked this under one of my videos:
interested but we have cramped quarters in our house to practice. How much space is required so we’re not knocking lamps over or tripping on furniture?
The reset is coffee table against the couch, the two chairs turned to face the wall, anything breakable off the low shelf. Two minutes out, two minutes back. Put a song on while you do it and the reset becomes part of the night.
If every idea on your list needs the furniture moved, you'll do it twice and then stop, and by March the whole thing will have died of logistics. So keep the mix: most of your formats should need nothing but the table you already eat at, and one of them can be worth the two minutes.
These come in all the time.
We use to dance to Frank Sinatra in our small apartment’s living room.
We listened to our records while dancing in our small apartment lol!
We dance at home all the time... home is a camper...lol! We're mastering dancing in 2 square feet first, then on to the fancy stuff! Lol
Two square feet is not enough and they know it. They were doing it anyway.
You went looking for a way to make a date night work in an apartment you've probably apologized for at some point. That's not a small thing to have done on a Tuesday, and it puts you ahead of most guys who look at the same living room and conclude there's nothing to be done about it. There is. The Date Nights Dancing program was built for exactly this room, and so was every other idea up there.
Worth measuring the floor, if only to have the number for yourself. Six feet by six, and it was never the thing standing between the two of you.
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