Date like a Blogger (Part 2)

With Valentine's day just around the corner I thought it would be fun to ask a few of my favorite bloggers how they celebrate date night with the guy in their life! If you didn't see yesterday's post, you can see those five date ideas here. Here's what these creative ladies had to say...


justin & i love movies, so when we are in the mood for a little week-day date, we will often head out to get some red box movies. this is a great way to re-watch some of our favorite movies that came out in theaters a few months previous. we love calling dinner in, picking it up, & heading home to relax on the couch & enjoy our red box selections. on the weekends, we'll often find ourselves at our local movie theater, which serves the most delicious caramel popcorn. we always break our diets & get a large, complete with a cherry coke to sip on. i think movies are the best date idea - & with the red box option, you can have a date night without breaking the bank [movie theater tickets are pretty expensive these days]. plus, if you stay in, you can wear pajamas - bonus!

My boyfriend Rob and I have been together for almost four years, and Valentine's Day was actually one of our first real dates. We were both undergraduate students at the time, and his fraternity had a Valentine's Date Party. While I was in class one afternoon, he had one of my roommates let him into our apartment and into my bedroom and he left me a sweet little card with an old man on the front of it. "Maybe it's the soda talkin'," the card read, "but I'm plumb goofy over you!"
I should mention that, because our anniversary is in early March, we aren't really Valentine's Day People (he brings me flowers and I dip some strawberries in chocolate; we move on). For our anniversary every year, we've taken a fun trip. Once we went to see Wicked in New York, and last year we spent a few days in Las Vegas together. The exciting and romantic weekend getaways are always fun, but ever since we moved out of our shared apartment and especially now that we're long distance, my favorite dates are the nights spent on the couch with Netflix and Thai takeout for dinner. This Valentine's Day weekend, I'll be visiting Rob in his new home in Minnesota, and I intend to celebrate with Pad Thai and some episodes of The Office.

I moved away from London, where I'd been living for the past few years, at the end of May - only three weeks after Jon proposed.  Now I'm living in Washington, DC, so we're separated by 3500 miles and five time zones, which means that we have to put a lot of thought into communicating. Technology definitely helps, and we use WhatsApp, FaceTime, and Skype constantly to keep in touch.  However, it's important for us to put technology away when we are able to be together!  When we visit each other, we make a point to spend quality time without our phones and computers - while we're long distance we won't have too many opportunities to connect both physically and emotionally, so our idea of a perfect date is one during which everything is turned off and unplugged so that we can focus on each other!

Robert and I love to go on dates during the week (usually on Wednesdays). Any free moment gives us an excuse to spend time together, and while we love complicated dates that involve a lot of pre-planning (like wine tasting and fancy dinners), one of our favorite things is to just go to happy hour together. Our town has a lot of amazing little restaurants that have great happy hour deals, so we'll go and each get a drink (cocktail for him, wine for me), and split an appetizer. It's inexpensive and doesn't need to be a long date, but it's a great way to spend a little time together during the week.

We enjoy coming up with slightly more creative dates sometimes, like instead of just going to dinner and a movie, going to dinner and then the oldest theater in town and seeing an old movie they're replaying. Just changes things up a little!

Thomas + I are going to have a low key Valentine's day this year, but I'm excited to get back in the swing of regular date nights and try some of these ideas for ourselves. If you're looking for more ideas you should check out the comments on yesterday's post! If you didn't join the conversation yesterday, tell me - what's your favorite date?
xoxo! Eliza