Choose Your Own Adventure Date Night

Did you ever read the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books as kids?  I did, and I always had fun seeing what was the most unusual story I could come up with for the adventure.  When I made the “Year ‘O’ Dates” present a few years ago, I included a Choose Your Own Adventure Date Night as one of the options.  It was a huge hit, and I thought with Valentine’s Day coming up, you might be want to give it a try.

Getting started on your Choose Your Own Adventure Date Night

This is going to take some prep-work ahead of time (hence why I’m sharing this Valentine’s Day idea in January, so you have time to plan).  First set a budget, because this limits what you offer as choices.  I was working on a budget to be able to eat out once, grab a coffee or dessert, and maybe grab a small snack later.

Now list out some ideas of things you might do on a date.  Here’s some suggestions to get you started on your list.

• go out to eat
• eat in and cook together
• go for a walk
• watch movies
• sit and read at the book store
• go get ice cream
• go mini-golfing
• Dating Divas has a whole list of Date Night Ideas that I regularly raid if you want more inspiration.

Now comes the fun part, start writing your story.  It really doesn’t have to be much, just a short paragraph, but each page has to end with a decision.  Ours started with a decision of where to eat lunch: Mexican or somewhere quiet and romantic (in my head, I had picked out what those two choices meant).

 

The hows and whys to get it to all work together

When I wrote our choose your own adventure date night I would write the scenario and then make up page numbers to turn to for the story and it was lots of back and forth turning, but you could just as easily have it be your choices are on page 2 or 3, and that would be less confusing.

Look at the amount of time you are trying to fill for your date night, in our case I’d convinced Mom to keep the kids overnight, and so I had most of a day to fill including two meals, so I came up with about 8 different possible activities.  After about the first 2-3 choices they all went to the same choice of get dinner.  Of course after dinner the choices diverged again, but it was a really fun date night for the two of us.

One more thing I’d suggest, I saved mine as a PDF, and then printed it in booklet form, so it took less paper, and then it actually looked like a cool book.

It was quite high on the cheesiness factor, but we had quite a blast, so I’d say it was an unqualified success.

Looking for more great date night and marriage ideas?

 

• Year ‘O’ Dates (mentioned earlier)
• Scavenger Hunt Date Night
• Mini Golf Date Night
• Treasure Hunt Date night
• Keeping Your Marriage Alive while Homeschooling