Beyond Sweatpants
Sally and I were out on a date night over the holidays and a local who reads our column came over to us and chatted with us for a while. During the conversation, he asked us “why are you guys so dressed up?” We have been asked this same question many times while out on date nights and thought that today's column would be a good opportunity to not only answer the question but more importantly, to talk about the underlying principle at play here.
Modern relationships today are burdened by a seemingly never ending task list of responsibilities. Most couples have two working breadwinners in the house and share many of the household and child rearing responsibilities that previous generations didn’t. Just as an example, we saw a statistic the other day that millennial fathers spend 3 times as much time with their children than previous generations of fathers. Additionally, the pressures that are put on modern relationships to be everything to each other, best friends, passionate lovers, parents, roommates, business partners, financial partners, each other's confidants, etc., only continues to increase. Don’t get us wrong, this is all a good thing, especially when looked at from a wide angle view. The consequences to this however are that the more hats modern couples choose to wear, the less time there is available for intimacy. And we don’t just mean physical intimacy. We mean everything that pertains to it and surrounds it. The intimacy of being a couple outside of the daily responsibilities that being that couple mandates.
Sally and I are no exception to this. We have little kids, run a coaching practice together and that is in addition to the production and songwriting work that I do in the music business. On top of all of this we both strive to live an active and social life in this incredible valley. Given how much we, and every other working parent we know, have on our plates on a daily basis, it’s easy to get caught up in the relentlessness of the everyday. It’s easy to end up wearing the same sweatpants and move through the same routine without sometimes even taking a moment to look each other in the eyes and ask each other how our respective days have been. Long term relationships in general are plagued by this phenomenon. The mystery and novelty, the longing and anticipation to see one another that was so present in the beginning of the relationship gets replaced with love, safety and security, and with it, predictability, boredom, and monotony can rear their ugly heads. Couples live together, work together, share space together and rub off on one another both literally and figuratively. It’s no wonder why modern couples struggle so much to maintain a spark and why infidelity is at a record high. With the responsibilities of living and loving in the modern world, the actual relationship itself can end up being last on the list to tend to, getting only crumbs and leftovers and slowly starving as a result.
Getting dressed up for date night is one of many tools that Sally and I use to combat the above. A lot of the work that we do with couples is about working with the subconscious mind and teaching our clients how to influence their own subconscious minds to work in harmony with their desired results for their relationships versus against it. These days, people generally only get dressed up for special occasions, weddings, New Years Eve, anniversaries, important business events etc. People also get dressed up in the early stages of dating when they are trying to “bring it” for their new potential special someone. By consciously getting dressed up for a date night, Sally and I are communicating not only to each other, but with our own subconscious minds as well, that being together is still special and worth dressing up for, just like any other special occasion, and just like we did when we first fell in love. That yes, a wednesday date night in town is indeed a special occasion and deserves to be treated as such. That yes, even after being together for 20 years, we still relate to each other - and ourselves - as worth dressing up for.
Additionally, we all have a need for both safety and security and novelty, risk and adventure in our lives. Long term modern relationships really tend to struggle with the latter. Getting dressed up for date night allows us to insert a pattern interrupt into our lives. For those few hours we aren’t just parents who have yogurt pouches spilled on our pants, or roommates unloading the dishwasher again. We get to remember that we are also a husband and a wife and we get to enjoy the novelty of stepping into those roles, even just for a few hours with each other. But the benefits of practicing this principle extend far beyond those few hours a week and end up coloring the rest of the week with the romance and sparkle in our eyes that could so easily be lost in the shuffle without it.
If you are a couple reading this and you don’t like dressing up, that’s fine. This principle isn’t actually about getting dressed up at all. It’s much more about consciously finding ways to practice being a couple outside of your everyday lives, to introduce novelty, adventure and excitement into your relationship, and most importantly, to continue to do things that signify to each other, and your own subconscious minds, that your relationship is special and your partner is special and no matter how long you’ve been together, deserves to be treated as such.
