Summer Date Ideas For Couples
Who Are Done Watching Other People Dance

The town square books a band on Thursday nights. The county fair puts a floor down in front of the grandstand. Somebody's daughter is getting married in July and the reception has a live band instead of a laptop. Between June and September there are three or four nights like that within driving distance, and it's easy to spend every one of them in a folding chair at the edge.

Somebody tagged five friends under one of my ads and left this:

"We should get this for the barn this summer and surprise our better halves with a date night... WHOS IN?"

Most summer date ideas are activities. That one already has a place in it and a season on it: the barn, this summer.

Summer Puts A Dance Floor Within Walking Distance

Most of the year, dancing anywhere but your own house means a wedding reception, a bar, or a studio with a sign-up sheet. All three come with an audience you didn't pick and a night you can't leave early without it being a whole thing.

In summer the list is different. Outdoor concert series on a town square or in a park. County and state fairs. Barn dances. Street festivals. Wedding season itself, which puts a live band in front of you a couple of times a summer whether you planned for it or not.

Those nights have three features you won't find again until next year. They are free or close to it. They are outdoors, where half the crowd is chasing a toddler or in line for food and nobody is studying the floor. And you can go back to your chairs after one song without anybody noticing, which means you can leave whenever you want.

That's the lowest-stakes public floor available all year, and it's open for about twelve weeks. If the idea of being seen dancing is the part that stops you, the couples who dance in the grocery aisle are worth reading first.

Pick The Night Before You Practice For It

The usual order is practice until we're good, then go. That order fails on its own, because being good has no date on it and September arrives on schedule regardless.

Flip it. Open whatever calendar your town publishes for its summer concerts, or look at the wedding invitation already on your refrigerator, and pick one night. Then tell your wife: the band on the square, the second Thursday in August, we're going, and we're dancing to one song.

In The Power of Moments, Chip Heath and Dan Heath write about a handful of ways to build a moment people remember, and one of them is raising the stakes, which they describe as adding productive pressure: a competition, a game, a performance, a deadline, a public commitment. A Thursday in August with a band on it is a deadline and a public commitment at the same time, and neither one costs anything.

Then you have something to practice for. That's the reason Date Nights Dancing is built the way it is: easy swing taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, the two of you starting from the first video together. No dance experience required.

The Heaths also point to research on fresh starts, where students' gym visits went up at the start of a new week, a new month, and a new semester. The biggest jump was the new semester, up 47 percent. That study was about going to the gym, not about marriages, so treat it as what it is: evidence that a date on the calendar gets people moving, and that picking the date is real work rather than a way of putting off the practice.

Five Summer Dates That Build Toward The Concert

None of these are the concert itself. They are the weeks in between, and each one gets you a little closer to using that floor.

1. The Summer Someday List

Set a timer for four minutes. You each write down every summer thing you haven't done together, no editing, no ranking. Trade lists when the timer goes. Circle anything that appears on both, and put the first one on the calendar for this month. The overlap is usually shorter than you expect.

2. Two Cones And A Sealed Guess

Before you leave the house, text each other your guess at what the other one is going to order. No peeking, no hints. Whoever guesses wrong pays for both cones. Then eat them on a bench somewhere instead of in the car, which is the part that turns it into a date instead of an errand.

3. The Walk Where You Share One Pair Of Earbuds

Plan an evening walk, and before you go out the door, grab a single pair of earbuds, one bud for each of you. Play the song she had on repeat when she was seventeen, then the one you did. You could keep going through both of your high school years if the walk goes long enough.

4. Scout The Floor Before You Use It

Go to the concert on the square with no plan to dance at all. Skipping the dancing is deliberate this time. You're there to see where the band sets up, how big the floor is, what time people start using it, and where you'd put your chairs. Deciding all that in advance takes most of the friction out of the night you do go to dance, and it's a good evening on its own.

5. The Back Porch As A Practice Floor

Move practice outside once the sun is down. Concrete patio, deck boards, driveway, whatever you have. It's a different surface and a bigger space, and there's a whole list of backyard date night ideas that work on the same square of concrete. Put on the kind of music the band on the square plays, so you're not practicing to something you'll never hear again.

Show Up Early, Dance One Song, Sit Back Down

Three parts, in order.

1. Get there before the band starts. Walk the empty floor while there's nothing on it. Pick your spot, get drinks, and put your chairs somewhere you can get up from without climbing over four people. Everything that goes wrong on a night like this goes wrong in the logistics, not in the dancing.

2. Dance one song you've both practiced. Not the fastest one they play. The one you've run the most times in the living room, so your feet have somewhere to go while the rest of you catches up.

3. Sit back down after it. One song is a complete debut. Going back to your chairs grinning, having done the thing you came to do, beats grinding through six songs to prove something nobody asked you to prove. If you want a second one later, it's right there.

Everything before it is practice.

You Can Have A Great Night At Home And Still Not Be Ready

One comment under my ads opens with three words: "I despise dancing." Then this:

"Well I ordered these videos yesterday and gave them as an early Mother’s Day present so we can dance at a vacation that is right after Mother’s Day and a concert this summer. We did the first 8 videos in about 60-90 minutes and we both had a great time. Tons of laughs and fun. I’m still far from hitting a dance floor in public but we had a fantastic evening dancing behind our ping pong table."

A vacation and a concert on the calendar were the reason they started at all. One evening in, they had a great time and were honest that a public floor was still a way off. A good night and no illusions about the floor, in the same message.

The Heaths make the case elsewhere in that same book that putting yourself somewhere you might not succeed is how you find out what you can do. Fair enough. A date on the calendar can also be pushed to the next concert without anybody having to vote on it. If August is too soon, the fair is in September.

The evening behind the ping pong table counted on its own. If you never make it to the square this year, you still had that.

One Couple Practiced For A Week And Danced Four Times In A Weekend

Somebody whose husband had bought the DVDs left this under one of my ads:

"We have a place in our small town that puts on concerts and has huge dance floor that we can walk to, we've been going alot and after practicing for 1 week we were on the dance floor 4 times last weekend it was Amazing!"

Their whole payoff sits inside a normal weekend: a place in their own small town, concerts, a floor they can walk to. No destination, no studio, no lesson schedule. And the practice that got them there was one week long.

That couple walked to their concerts. Date Nights Dancing is the at-home half of that: the two of you on your own living room floor, on whatever night you're both home.

You already know how to plan a night out, and you've been doing it for years. This is that same skill aimed one notch higher than usual, and the only new part is telling her the plan in June instead of deciding it in the car in August. If trying something new together in front of other people is the sticking point, there's more on getting your confidence up for it, and the rest of the year gets its own treatment in the spring date ideas and the full ideas library.

Open your town's summer schedule tonight. Find the nights with a band on them, and ask her which one she wants. Put both your names on that square, and every practice night between now and then has a point.