Staying home with your other half sounds like the perfect way to indulge in romance and quality time together. But if you’ve been hunkered down together for more than a few days, it can be difficult to find things to do. All of that quality time can stress your relationship – but it’s important to continue to connect with each other and have fun. You can use your time at home to strengthen your relationship and love.
Just because you’re stuck at home doesn’t mean you should give up on date nights. In fact, having at-home date nights can help relieve stress, bring joy into your life, and help you and your partner connect.
Daxiao Productions / ShutterstockHere are a few date night ideas you can enjoy without leaving the house (or even changing out of your sweatpants).
1. Have a Picnic Dinner
Dining together can become pretty boring when you’re staying home night after night. So, why not make dinner more romantic by setting up a picnic?
Picnics are fun and don’t require much cooking. You can prepare a selection of your favorite picnic-friendly foods, like a charcuterie board, sandwiches, or salads, grab a bottle of wine, and lay down a blanket. Together, you and your partner can enjoy a bit of fresh air, sunshine, and a slight change of scenery. If you want to make it even more romantic, you can light some candles, turn on music, and schedule your picnic for sunset.
You can use your backyard, your balcony, your fire escape, your porch, or even your living room floor if you don’t have any outdoor space. Set up your picnic anywhere you have space – and anywhere other than your dining table!
2. Ask and Answer Romantic Questions
Asking your partner deep questions is a great way to get to know them better and instill romance. You can connect with each other, strengthen your bond, and even make plans for the future. And a night in is the perfect opportunity to get deep and ask plenty of questions.
Spend a night together asking and answering The New York Times’ “Questions That Lead to Love.”¹ These romantic, intriguing, and intimate questions will spark conversation between you two, helping you to form a deeper connection. Each of these questions is based on psychological research, and they’re meant to help create intimacy between two strangers².
Even if you and your partner have been together for years, the “Questions That Lead to Love” can open new avenues of conversation, bring you closer together, and help you see your love in new ways.
3. Take a Virtual Dance Class
Dancing is a great way to express yourself – and it can also be a form of stress relief. But when you dance with someone else, you can laugh, learn something new, and even inspire a little romance.
Plan an at-home date night around dancing by taking a virtual dance class. You can find dance lessons available online for free on YouTube, or you can choose a paid tutorial through online dance studios³. You can try a variety of different dance styles, lessons for dancers of all levels, and even dances for different types of music. Pick something new and give it a try!
As long as you have space to move in your home, you can take a dance class of any kind. You can start with classics, like a waltz, or try quicker and more complicated moves in an online salsa class. If you have fun, you might even discover a new date idea that you both want to try again and again.
4. Cook or Bake a Complicated Recipe Together
Cooking dinner every night can get frustrating if you’ve been staying in for weeks. But you can make cooking exciting, or even romantic, by changing things up in the kitchen. Instead of cooking a recipe you’re already familiar with or cooking just to get dinner on the table, try planning a date night in which you and your partner cook together.
You can do a cooking date night in a few different ways. Together, you two can cook an elaborate, fancy dinner together and prepare a multi-course meal. You can try something new together and learn a new skill, like making pasta from scratch or testing out a different BBQ technique. Or, you can turn it into a competition, throwing your own at-home edition of the TV show Chopped, where you and your partner have to throw together a meal using only what’s in the house⁴.
You can also set up an at-home baking date night. Whether you and your partner are experienced bakers or first-timers, you two can try a new recipe, learn how to perfect a certain baked good, and have some fun along the way.
When you’re stuck at home, trying something more complicated can bring you and your love together. Even if the recipe doesn’t quite turn out perfect, you’ll have learned something new and will feel accomplished.
5. Throw Your Own Paint and Wine Night
Paint and wine nights have become one of the newest ways to celebrate date night. Typically, this requires visiting a local paint studio, where you’ll have supplies and an instructor present. And you’ll be served wine along the way.
But you can actually do this very same date night right at home. And you don’t even need your own supplies!
Paint and wine night companies like Painting With a Twist⁵ and Pinot’s Palette⁶ have started offering at-home kits, instructions, and virtual classes to allow anyone to enjoy this kind of date night. Some even sell and deliver wine so you can enjoy the full studio experience right at home. It’s the perfect solution for those who want to stay home but still have fun.
At the end of the virtual painting class, you and your partner will have two masterpieces you can display at home. Even if you aren’t an experienced artist, you can still create something special!
6. Spend a Night at the Opera
If you’re missing the date nights you used to enjoy outside of the house, why not try to recreate them virtually? Thanks to video streaming and recordings, you can now enjoy a night at the opera right in your living room. And you don’t even have to get dressed up.
Institutions like PBS and New York’s Metropolitan Opera are offering free viewings of some of their most beloved shows online⁷. You can watch performances of operas like “Carmen” and “La Boheme” from your computer. The scheduled opera changes each night, meaning you can plan an opera date night any day of the week.
If you prefer Broadway shows to the opera, you’re also in luck. You can set up an at-home Broadway night – shows like “Rent”, “Cats”, and “Billy Elliott the Musical” are available via Amazon Prime, BroadwayHD, and even YouTube⁸. It’s the perfect way to bring a bit of art into your home. And you and your partner can enjoy something a little more unique than your basic weekend movie night.
