THE DIRTY TRUTH ABOUT DATE NIGHT

Wow, Matt!  You really do an over the top job of wining and dining your wife every week.  Does he?  Really?  If you’ve born witness to the Gilmartin Facebook feed over the last few years, that might be a reasonable takeaway from it all, but…Chee-gow, -from the Japanese phrase Chigau yo provided for you here phonetically in the event you want to take it with you.  For me the Japanese is a more fun way of saying, “That is incorrect”.  That, dear reader, is not what you are witnessing.  If any part of the FB record serves to create a sense of envy of the sort, Why don’t we do that? you should know that I know there are couples out there who would not be okay with the way our date nights are actually lived versus the way they might seem.  In a nutshell, they are SHARED events.

I am not saying we go Dutch or split the bill in any real accounting sense of the term, but Theresa is as much involved in making date nights happen as I am.  For us, date night, is a microcosm of the rest of our life together.  Twenty years ago, we moved into the house we live in now, and over that entire time Theresa and I have always maintained separate bank accounts, a fact that confounds a lot of other married couples when they learn about it.  We split up bills.  I took the cable bill.  She took the cellphone bill, and so on and so forth.  If the bill grew or got bigger over time, either the person who owned the bill unilaterally dealt with it, or there was some ever so brief conversation about re-balancing things.  In truth, that rebalancing discussion has only happened a handful of times, if that.  It means we don’t talk about money a lot, and a lot of arguments have been avoided that way, -I am sure.  Of course, it means each party has to give up a little control, and accept not every dime is going to be spent with the other’s approval, but in the spirit of Chaucer’s Self Same Sovereignty, I am pretty sure all the big and important stuff evens out. 

-So when it comes to date night which usually has at least two phases, dinner and then after dinner drinks somewhere else, one of us grabs one check and one us grabs the other, -simple.  Done.  No doubt some heads just splattered the screen this is being read from as if some immutable physical law was just violated and the earth is about to spin off its orbit.  The thing is though, it has never been about one person providing something to the other rather it is about sharing time, and since the bill is shared in a way that doesn’t need a lot of discussion or feel like an IRS audit, the good shared time gets focused on.

Who pays more?  -Don’t know!  -Don’t care!  Okay, if I had to guess, I probably pay a little more, but really I just threw that line in here to give Theresa a poke.  I am fairly certain it all works out pretty even in the long run, but…THAT’S NOT THE POINT.  I’ll come back to sharpen the point later.

The other noteworthy thing about date night is that we really don’t spend as much money as it might appear.  For starters, I don’t drink.  Yup!  I’ve been sober for almost eighteen years.  With just that little adjustment Matt made almost two decades ago, these outings are now much cheaper than they otherwise might be.  I have a great time helping Theresa pick out cocktails, and if we are being completely truthful here, she is the only one who benefits…well…who am I kidding?  There is enough benefit for both of us with just her drinking, but that’s another article for a later time.  A lot of times we split entrees, which is actually part of the fun, and many other times when we don’t share plates, we are working from the Denver Restaurant Passbook which has a lot of buy-one-get-one deals.  Every year we get a passbook and try to work our way through it.  Dirty look from the waiter?  F*** him.  I still tip off the gross so he shouldn’t care.  Also, we do tend to return to the good restaurants after the passbook has been stamped.  Theresa does the picking from the passbook simply because she knows food better than I do.  I just want to get out and have fun.  -And yes, sometimes…we just…plain…splurge.

I’m not gonna lie, sometimes the evening ends and it is quite obvious the sharing in terms of the bill got a little lopsided.  I mean, you don’t need a masters in finance (which I have harumph harumph) to have a general sense of the disparity.  Bad feelings?  Heightened expectations on the drive home?  Okay, yes I have heightened expectations, but that has nothing to do with what was spent.  -Not a problem, -a follow-up date night is the answer.  Empirically speaking I usually get dinner, and Theresa usually gets after dinner drinks.  Since she is the only one drinking, you might see a moral hazard there, but quite often she wants to go lean because she has a gym appointment the next morning.  When this happens, I usually get taken to the movies Saturday night.  She’ll get the tickets.  I’ll get the concessions, and…look out!  We’re back on this sharing merry-go-round which ain’t half bad if you give it a whirl.  Again, who pays more?  -Don’t know!  -Don’t care!  People!!  The point is if you want to have a good time with someone you love, sometimes it is best to put the nickel and dime thoughts aside.  -And if you are dug in holding onto some antiquated date night notion of who ‘should’ while romance slowly withers and dies like an un-watered houseplant, might I suggest it is sometimes better to be happy than right. 

-And here’s the thing which makes this all ever so easy, -Theresa.  If ever a guy got a clearer statement from his girl, “I’m in it for you and not the stuff,” I haven’t met him.  Theresa and I have joked that we probably would not have gotten together had we known each other in high school, not for any fault of hers, but for the enormous chip on my shoulder.  Theresa wore Jordache jeans.  I got my jeans at Sears on the back-to-school sales.  Theresa’s father paid more in mortgage payments on his investment properties each month than many many people make in a year.  My folks just ‘paid a mortgage’.  When I first asked Theresa out she was still dating a third year medical student, and I was still a few years away from anyone who looked remotely like someone who would one day do the weekly Denver restaurant crawl.  -No doubt about it,  Theresa knew what it was to have stuff, yet stuff did not have her.  For our first few years, it was a case of a tiny apartment bathed in the smells of her frugal gourmet ways, happy hour grad student specials, and Blockbuster movie rentals NOT from the New Release shelf.  The chick was into me for me and not what I had.  -And if you pay REALLY close attention to my Facebook feed, nothing has changed because what was important then is still important today.