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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2983 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 3, 2024

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What are your unique date ideas? I keep a repository and am always looking for more. Here are a few of my top ideas:

Fake Sick Day

Call in sick to work and go spend a day on the town. Activities may include (shout out to LA for half of these):

  • Dress undercover and drive by offices for the thrill
  • Nature-y park for reading and charcuterie board
  • Dinner at a nice restaurant
  • Anything from Ferris Bueller's Day Off
  • Anything where it's normally super crowded on a weekend

Long Night Out

Book the cheapest round-trip flight you can find that leaves on Friday night and returns Saturday (or Saturday-Sunday). Go live up the destination city as hard as possible for those 24 hours. No sleep, no accommodations. Better bring a portable phone charger. Good city destinations include Chicago, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Atlanta. And yes, you'll be flying Frontier or Spirit.

Conditions:

  • Only fanny packs (men) or purses (women) allowed
  • You cannot book a hotel
  • Renting a car is fine

Fashion Week

Create your own [city you live in] fashion week outfit. There are three paths:

  • Find inspiration from New York or Paris fashion week outfits, then order online accordingly
  • Head to the nearest thrift store and make do with what they have there
  • Combination (preferred): Get inspiration, then go to the nearest thrift store

Imposing a spending limit is a good idea because it keeps pressure low and forces creativity. You can dress up similarly to your partner or completely different. Double date (or more) recommended.

Blind Dinner

Option 1 is to find a place intentionally serving a blind dinner where all guests are blinded. These generally cost a pretty penny.

Option 2 is to call ahead to a place and explain to them your intention, ask them to choose a few items for you, then show up and put the blindfolds on. This requires significant trust and ability to withstand social judgment.

Option 3 is unilateral: one partner makes the meal while the other is blindfolded.

Scavenger Hunt

  1. Choose a part within or walkable area of the city
  2. Hide a couple of fun things throughout: food (candy), drink (shooters, beers, small bottles of wine), toys (Chinese finger traps, water guns, Nerf guns)
  3. Create a poem, map, or list of hints for where to find the items:
  4. Go hunting!

Adult Prom

  1. Make dinner reservations at a nice restaurant, preferably Italian
  2. Get dressed up in prom attire. Women wear long dresses and men wear suits or tuxedos.
  3. Take pictures at scenic spot
  4. Take an Uber Black to the restaurant
  5. Eat, drink, and be merry
  6. Go dancing (bonus points for dancing in the restaurant)

Food Crawl Trying different offerings of the same dish is fun. Different restaurants offer different takes on the same entree and provide different atmospheres to enjoy them in.

  1. Choose a food that both people like and is easily shareable. Good options include:
  • Burgers
  • Sushi
  • Pizza
  • Tacos
  • Dessert (smaller portions required)
  1. Find a place within the city that is easily walkable
  2. Find multiple (two or three) restaurants that are within the area
  3. Make reservations (as needed and available) at each
  • One hour or slightly less per restaurant is good
  1. Eat at place1, walk to place2, eat at place2, etc.
  • Alternate who chooses the option at each place or agree together

Good picks!

  1. Messing with salesmen. Go to an open house for a mansion, or to a luxury car dealer. Lie your ass off about what you do, your income, etc.

  2. Fake proposal. Get a big fake ring and publicly propose to her, crowded restaurant or public square kind of thing. She rejects you, floridly. Cry. Scream. She fucked your brother and she loves him more. You can't believe she's doing this to you after you paid for all her plastic surgery! But we can't because your dad is actually her uncle but she didn't know how to tell you. Make a scene.

  3. My wife and I didn't really have any parties we wanted to go to for new years for a variety of reasons, so we booked an AirBnB in the woods an hour away, a little cabin with no one around. We brought some edibles, some speakers, and the books we wanted to read, along with a charcuterie board and a bottle of wine. All we did was play jazz, make love, and read. My wife raved about what a good time she had, and has repeatedly said since "Why don't we just do that again?"

I really want to try #2.

I mentioned one the other day. My girlfriend and I play this game where we go into a bookshop and we each pick out a book that we think the other would enjoy. Sometimes we set a time limit and/or budget, or impose other conditions (you can't buy the other person a book that you've read yourself). It's a fun way to kill an hour.

1 and 2 sound like a lot of fun!

A lot of these ideas are good, and Iappreciate you sharing them.

Let me offer an opposite but not opposing perspective here.

Short dates can be really good for the early part of a relationship. A lot of people still default to the dinner date framework; (maybe) drinks, followed by a full dinner with conversation that can range all over the place, and then either more drinks after (danger, Will Robinson!) or maybe some sort of planned not planned stroll. Your median western guy is going to try to get a kiss out of it to solidify physical attraction and setup a next date.

This isn't bad, per se, but it's the dating version of a multi-part SSC post. I can't read that shit on my phone while i'm taking a ... nevermind, you get it.

Short dates give more bang for your buck. One of the best discoveries I stumbled upon back in my gaming days was a lunch date on a weekend. Pressure on both parties is far reduced, you time bound it up front, single location, conversation is generally less deeply personal (you talk more about third part stuff, general observations, etc.) and more flirty-fun. If anything physical does happen, it's also similarly "breezy."

The outcome is a feeling of just pure fun. That's a big win early for a lot of folks, especially women, who are used to prepping for dates like they're depositions, and then doing an after action report with their girlfriends. Furthermore, if it's a totally no-match, you have Friday / Saturday night still open to do whatever you want to get that bad taste out of your mouth, instead of doing the awkward post-bad-date shuffle back to your place and watch shitty netflix while the frozen burrito reheats and rotates.

This reminds me of advice an older guy in my church gave me back in the day. He used to extol the virtues of the "Coke date", where you go do something low key that takes a half hour or less. Coffee, ice cream, whatever (or just getting a Coke I guess, though I think that's probably going to be seen as weird these days). He said basically what you said: by keeping the time and money investment low, it's no big deal even if it goes completely sideways. I think there's a lot of wisdom to this line of thinking.

Wow, thank you for the reminder that there are lots of different kinds of people in the world. Your ideas sound like good TV, but exhausting dates. I'm curious which one of us is more normal in this regard, relative to either themotte or in general.

I'm early 30s, so maybe I'm just older and boring now? My ideal date is doing nothing. Cook a simple meal together, walk around the neighborhood, hang out, and "hang out" - heck, the first two are optional. If we've been together for more than a few months, so is the last one.

Yeah, me and my girlfriend are in our early 30s. We like to go to Big Lots and buy various snacks, and then watch weird DVDs from the thrift store. This weekend we went to the local nature preserve and looked at turtles. I think we have as much fun as anyone does.

Participating in flow arts.

ETA: Some animal shelters have a program where you can borrow a dog for the day. You could do that and go around trying to find someone to adopt it.

Double Date: you get a dollar store notebook. You fill in each page of the notebook with one absurd item that doesn't exist in a store. Each couple then passes their notebook over. You go to a store and walk up to an associate, flip the page, and ask where to find "Daddy Butter" or "Snoop Dogg Goes Jewish Vol. 1", whatever it says. Basically Impractical Jokers style thing.

Taste test - go pick up different types of bottled water, french fries from different fast food places, apples, whatever and try to decide which one is best

Chopped - go get 3 random ingredients from the store for each person and challenge to make a dish. Requires reasonably stocked kitchen.

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