Date Night

This month Date Night found Kat and I embossing leather journals that we will be keeping as a new way to communicate and share ideas. After several months of success with a date night subscription service, we decided to change things up and try a new model, the Adventure Challenge Book: Couple’s edition. The book comes with dozens of mystery dates that we can select at random. Here’s how it works: We open a page that has four date ideas hidden behind a scratch-off window — something similar to lotto scratchers. Before deciding on which date to pursue, we are given a little snippet of information: A title for the date, a cost estimate, a time commitment and a timeframe for the date. For example, a date may take between two and three hours, but if it will have us making stops at local retailers, the book will tell us we must do the date before 9 p.m. The book also comes with an option for a date box that will send the supplies you need for random dates once a month, cutting down on the prep time and eliminating the necessary shopping trip that is indicated on many of the dates. Our first box arrived for a date that can be found on page 17 of the book. “Penny for your Thoughts.” The cost estimate was between $5 and $40 (in line with the cost of the subscription box), it could be done at home at any time and would take between one and two hours. We scratched the window to see what we would be doing with our evening. “Go to a store and each of you pick up a journal or notebook of your liking. Use cutouts from magazine, patches, decals, stickers, stamps, pins etc. on the exterior of your notebook to make it your own. Everything you write in this journal is intended for your partner to read any time they want. So fill it weekly with love notes, encouraging messages, date ideas, things you’re learning about them, etc.” Sounds fun. But we don’t have to make the trip to the store, because all our materials were shipped to us in a date box. We open it up to find two leather journals and an embossing set, glue sticks, a couple stock magazines, scissors and a scrap piece of leather to practice our nonexistent embossing skills. An additional set of instructions explains how to emboss our new journals and suggests we use the provided magazines (and anything else we want) to collage the inside cover. Kat is over the moon. She mentioned a couple weeks earlier that she wanted to get a leather embossing set to see what she could make. I’m smug and excited — I know a guy who’s been chronicling his date night adventures in a local magazine for the past few months, so I know I can get my hands on some sappy, sincere and personalized collage material for my journal.

Part of our task was to create a collage inside our journals that will personalize them and serve as inspiration when we open them up to write to one another. We were fortunate to have copies of our past Date Night articles, which added a personal touch to our collages.

By Mike Gervais

This month’s date box included an embossing kit that had us stamping passages onto the cover of leather journals. The idea is that our journals are available for the other to read at any time, providing a new way to communicate and share with each other.

Our next step was to go to work gathering the many keepsakes and photos we’ve collected from our various adventures. I collected past editions of the Connection Magazine for my collage and promised Kat I can replace any magazines I cannibalize for my journal. We find boarding passes from Kat’s trips to Missouri; a play-bill from a trip we took to see three different Shakespeare plays in three days long before we started dating; photos; concert ticket stubs and much more. For me, this trip down memory lane was one of the best parts of the evening. It gave us an opportunity to reminisce about all the adventures we’ve had. As I smiled over the pile of collage material we’d conjured from our closets and desk drawers, I couldn’t help but laugh as Kat started, one by one, putting them all away because she couldn’t bear to see them mutilated and glued into a journal. From there, I began the painstaking process of deciding what to emboss on the cover of my journal while she started selecting what she wanted to use in her collage. I decided to go with a passage from Shakespeare’s 18th Sonnet: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s Day.” Our first Christmas together, I had purchased Kat a copy of a collection of the Bard’s sonnets, highlighting that entry for her. (Kat and I share a love of Shakespeare: our dogs are named Cordelia and Captain Shakespeare.) Kat selected a passage from the first Date Night article I wrote for Connection Magazine, and again made me promise I would replace the magazine if she cut a piece out of it. We worked side-by-side as she cut, shaped and glued her collage and I used a small hammer and letter stamps to emboss by journal. Once we finished, we switched tools. The passage she selected for her journal’s cover is a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” that reads: “The love that consists in this that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.” I found a photo of the two of us and various phrases, quotes and headlines from our Connection articles to use on the inside cover of my journal. As I reached for the scissors, Kat made me promise that I would replace the Connection Magazines I was preparing to desecrate. Because Kat selected a longer passage, I had finished my collage be-

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fore she completed her embossing, so I had an opportunity to make my first journal entry.

Our plan is to keep our journals on our respective night stands, in plain sight, for the other to pick up whenever they feel the urge. In addition to the instructions on how to emboss the journals, our date box included a challenge, to put pen to paper each day for the first week, following a set of writing prompts to make sure we develop a habit of writing in the journals. The prompts include describing our partner as a three course meal, describing the time we laughed hardest together and describing the first time we met. We feel like we’ve done enough of these mail-order activities to know when we’ve found a winner and this one hit the mark. We had a fun activity to work on together, we were guided into a sentimental moment that didn’t feel heavy-handed or forced as we poured over our old keepsakes looking for collage materials, and we have an ongoing project to continue writing in our journals, finding a new way to communicate and create memories and mementos that we will have with us for the rest of our lives. n