Date Night and The Other Man

Now that Future Husband - and Seventh Grader and Fifth Grader - and I are cohabitating, I felt it enormously important to insist upon a regularly scheduled weekly "date night". Just me and Future Husband. Alone. Doing whatever. Initially, I had a whole bunch of creative ideas for what might constitute the "whatever" of these specially set aside two hours. But the effort of thinking up all those ideas was so exhausting that I'm pretty sure we'll end up simply agreeing upon the Restaurant of the Week, throwing back a few watered down drinks and a nice piece of fish, and hastily making out in the car before one of us reluctantly volunteers to pick up the Tornadoes at gymnastics practice.

The non-picker-upper will be faced with going home for a little "alone time", (which is code for "Relax, but not too much or you'll fall asleep, for crying out loud DON'T FALL ASLEEP! Date's not over! Must! Stay! Awake! ...Maybe I'll just...rest my eyes for a few minutes...*cue pillow-drooling*...). The picker-upper will have to resign him or herself to the fact that whatever mild aphrodisiac buzz may have been earlier set alight will now, most likely, be killed by the extended break in events. And will have to be conjured up all over again from scratch if called upon. Which it won't be. Because the non-picker-upper is unconscious.

At least that's how it went last night.

We haven't actually managed to pull off too many of these "date nights". In fact, when I think about it, last night was only the second in the roughly eight weeks we've been in cohabitation mode. This has been a point of frustration for me, one I have made known to Future Husband. Points to be made with Future Husband - I have learned the hard way - must be cushioned in a nest of the softest possible introduction, using a minimum number of sentences that begin with the word "You." Figuring out how to express dissatisfaction to him has become a bit of an art form for me. A creative outlet, if you will. Not that I find myself dissatisfied with a lot of things. Just a few. Date night is not the ideal place to practice this form of personal expression, but last night I found the opportunity to outline this handful of items (gently, in hushed tones, while wearing my new sweater) positively irresistible. They were as follows:


1. What's with the lack of date nights? As I said, we are eight or so weeks into this new living arrangement. The monotony is absolutely killing me. It turns out that, while not killing him, the monotony has been at least noticeable to Future Husband and has caused him at least a moderate degree of discomfort as well. That made me happy. We were able to revisit the way we'd like our life together to be - which is NOT monotonous - as we have dreamily talked about together on many occasions leading up to cohabitation. And while I may find the very concept of "date night" to be about as glaringly symptomatic of monotony as is possible, I was able to voice my insistence that we must carve out this time to, if nothing else, continue to talk dreamily about all the ways we will not become monotonous. Point made.

1. What's with your boyfriend? Future Husband has a male friend with whom he is particularly close. I'm talking to you, CB. Future Husband and CB speak by phone two to five times per day. It's weird.

True, he lives several hours away in an entirely different state. True also, I consider him and his wife to be friends of mine as well. We've vacationed with them. CB's wife was highly instrumental in the design of my engagement ring. They're good people. But seriously. Two to five times. Per day. Very frequently these calls take place when Future Husband and I are in a car together. And they consist of approximately this:

FH: Hey.
CB: Hey.
FH: Heading to the office.
CB: No s**t. Me too.
FH: Talk to you later.
CB: Yuh.

One or two of their daily conversations are longer than this. CB is particularly fond of ending all sentences with the words "and s**t", so it might sound something like this:

FH: Got much going on today?
CB: Yeah, I have some appointments and s**t. Thinking about knocking off early, go drink some beers and s**t.
FH: Yeah, that's cool. Talk to you later.
CB: Yuh.

Really, this is their relationship. And the thing is, I'm jealous. What I'm jealous of is the fact that Future Husband has someone, other than me, that he can reach out and talk to every day. Even if, technically, I wouldn't really call that talking. Women cannot have conversations like that. There must be substance. Substance is time-consuming, and all the women with whom I am friends are very busy people. As am I. So I don't have any daily calls. I don't even have any weekly calls. And so I am a little jealous of the man-love between CB and Future Husband. No need to curb it, or do anything differently. Just voicing a little frustration and s**t.

3. When are we GETTING MARRIED???? ...Actually, this didn't come up last night. Nor do I think it ever will, at least not in that manner. I'm kind of digging being engaged. Not that I want to be just engaged forever and ever. I'm sure there is a limit, somewhere out there. But I haven't given it a lot of thought yet. In fact, I thought for sure that if there was even one point of dissatisfaction that Future Husband would reciprocate with last night, it would be "What's with not remembering to tell people the good news?" Because I do forget a lot, when we see people whom we haven't seen in a while, to tell them about the engagement. If it were him forgetting, I might be bothered by that. But he didn't bring it up. So either he was ruminating on what I had said, or it isn't an issue. Why isn't it an issue? Doesn't he think I should be shouting it from the rafters? Is there a problem I don't know about?

We'll have to discuss this on our next date.