Exploring Old Stomping Grounds

Date Night Idea

When you first met your future partner you spent hours talking about your likes, dislikes, your point of view on many different subjects and your personal history, as well as your hopes and goals for the future.  While men are generally presented as the gender that doesn’t do a lot of talking, it is extremely common to hear newly smitten women describe an early date with, “We got on so well. He is so easy to talk to. We just talked and talked all night long!”   New couples are fascinated with learning about the other person and intrigued by their similarities and differences.

The Gottman Institute calls this concept of learning about your spouse - “Enhancing Your Love Map”.  “A "love map" is that part of your brain where you store all the relevant information about your spouse's life, such as their worries, hopes, and goals; their history; and the facts and feelings of their world.”   The act and desire to regularly enhance your Love Map is said to be one of the seven common characteristics present in happy, thriving marriages.  

While you may have talked until you were blue in the face at the start of your relationship, there is no way that 20, 30 or even 50 years down the track you have learnt and know everything about your spouse.  We are constantly growing, changing our opinions, and we see things through our own unique worldview. It’s one of the things that makes marriage interesting and, if we choose to be students of our spouse, it can also continue to grow our love for them even deeper.

Exploring Your Old Stomping Grounds

If you’re like the vast majority, you would have lived a sizeable amount of life before you and your spouse got together.  But even for those who were childhood sweethearts and spent a lot of your formative years together, you will still have different memories of those times and unique places that stand out to you to that of your spouse.

An extremely enjoyable, and cheap, date night idea that will give you the opportunity to grow your Love Maps about each other is to take your spouse on a tour of your old stomping grounds and share important or special memories from your times there.  Even for men who don’t talk much this can still be a good exercise, as the focused topics can help to prompt them with things to talk about.

Mike & I are both from the same city but didn’t meet each other until we were in our 30’s.  By that time we had attended numerous different schools and lived in many different houses. So one cold but fine evening, after a yummy dinner out, we decided to take a drive around the different places we had lived.  On the way between each property, we shared memories about the house, our friends or different people we had lived with at the time.

We both found this evening a lot of fun as we shared our pasts with each other.  Afterward, we had not only learned more about the other person, but we also felt a new level of connection and depth of intimacy.

Do you have any fun and cheap date night ideas?  We would love to hear them!   Send us an email or leave a comment below.  Or if you would like some more ideas make sure you check out some of our other date night ideas.