We’re leaving the kids at home and heading into town. Just don’t call it ‘date night’

Be deliberate about spending time as a couple, says Will Gore, but please avoid stupid labels

Planning and labelling are a sure-fire way to destroy mystery and spontaneity (Getty)

My wife and I are going out on the town.

This weekend, perhaps even as you are reading this, we will be eating tapas, drinking over-priced wine, and watching agog as Nicole Scherzinger stars as Norma Desmond in the West End revival of Sunset Boulevard.

The children, we hope, will be safely at home with their granny, watching Strictly without tearing the place up, before trotting up to their bedrooms to sleep like lambs till the morning. (At the time of writing, I am trying not to pay heed to the voice in my head that suggests they will almost certainly still be awake when we roll in at midnight.)

It’s still a relatively rare thing to be out just as a couple. Any mention of the word restaurant and the kids appear as if from nowhere and ask if they can come too. And to be fair, we’ve had two or three lovely family trips to see London shows or a panto in the last year.

However, with our older one approaching 14, and the younger one now at the grand age of eight and a half, we feel more or less content to leave them home alone for an hour while we take a stroll along the canal. So absorbed are they in tablets, laptops and the TV, that I’m not even sure they realise we’ve gone.

An evening out a deux – and certainly a night away – takes more thought, even now. When the kids were small, we occasionally booked a babysitter or asked a favour from a grandparent. But there was always an element of anxiety about whether the children would get to sleep, or would otherwise cause a fuss. We didn’t, therefore, make a habit of it.

All in all, that never particularly bothered me. If the kids are in bed by a decent hour, I take as much joy in spending an hour, as a couple, in front of the box or chit-chatting, as I would do having a meal out together. This isn’t to say I don’t like hitting the bright lights of the city (or Berkhamsted high street); ringing the changes is generally a good thing to do, and being deliberate about how you spend time as a twosome feels important.

But I hate deliberateness if it becomes simply another form of routine or structure. “Date night” is a classic example of the marketing industry’s need to infantilise concepts that do not need to be labelled, yet which must be objectified to meet the commercial imperatives of the 21st century.

By giving a name to something that was once just a nice thing to do, ad men on Madison Avenue (or wherever they now plot their evil) have managed to create a kind of cult.

On the one hand, the idea both invalidates the non-“date nights” as something inadequate and unromantic. And on the other, it heaps pressure on the occasions when it’s just the two of you, going “out” out, somehow to rekindle something you didn’t think you’d lost until you read a feature about date nights in Marie Claire.

I feel similarly about the concept of a “play date”. Thirty or 40 years ago, you just went round to your mate’s house for tea and did whatever. Now, it’s a thing that has expectations; an event that must be planned and managed. Don’t get me started on “sleepovers”.

Planning and labelling are a sure-fire way to destroy mystery and spontaneity. And even if organising a night out minus the children can be a bit of a logistical nightmare, surely you don’t want to be reminded of the prep by virtue of your experience being given a name.

You might think all this sounds a bit unreasonable. But better to get it off my chest now, than to spend our impending “date night” moaning about how much I hate the concept of “date night”.