Every Friday, once both kids are finally asleep, my partner and I have about 90 minutes before we are too tired to be useful to each other. We have got fiercely protective of that window over the last year or so, more protective than we are about most things in our diary. That means no laptops, no half-watching something whilst scrolling, but just the two of us and whatever takeaway meal we decided on that week.
It sounds like a low bar for a good time, but some weeks it genuinely is the best part of my week.
What Our Friday Night Actually Looks Like
The format barely changes for us. The food arrives, we put something neither of us has to concentrate too hard on on the telly, then we each get one small indulgence that is entirely our own business. His is usually a football podcast that he listens to with one earphone in, whilst mine changes depending on whatever I have got briefly obsessed with that month.
We started doing this properly after a stretch where our evenings had turned into two people in the same room on separate phones, technically together, but not really together together. Ninety minutes of actually choosing each other once a week does more for us than it should, given how small it sounds written down.
The Small Guilty Pleasures We’ve Each Picked Up
A friend of mine got me curious a few months back about an online casino called 1xcasino, more as a five-minute distraction than anything serious. It has become one of those odd little habits that lives entirely inside that Friday window and nowhere else. I am not going to pretend it is a hobby with any depth to it, instead being like a phone game with better graphics.
If that is ever your kind of thing too, it is worth reading GambleAware’s guidance on keeping it that way, operating as a small treat, rather than something that creeps into the rest of the week, because that line moves faster than you would think if you are not paying attention to it.
Why We Keep the Ritual Small
The whole point is that none of it is precious or expensive or particularly interesting to anyone outside the two of us. It is deliberately unambitious. We are not trying to recreate date night from the days before we had kids. We are just trying to end the week as a couple, rather than two exhausted colleagues running the same small business.
Some Fridays, we do not even make it to the end of the episode we’ve put on before one of us is asleep on the sofa, takeaway containers still on the coffee table, where we will find them in the morning. The point is never the film or the podcast or the phone game; it’s about carving out 90 minutes where nobody needs anything from either of us. It’s bliss.