This is Kendrick trying to show me something called a “Heisman Pose” prior to us leaving for our Sunday-afternoon HowAboutWe date to see the Jets play the Saints at MetLife Stadium. (Upon review of this photo, I see that the point is to actually pretend that you are holding a football and not doing the can-can. I’m sure you’re shocked to discover that I am not particularly well-versed in such topics.)
My feelings about football games are similar to my feelings about Homeland. It looks like people really enjoy it and I’m sure I’d like it if I got into it, but I can’t really get past the fact that it seems like it’d kind of be…not my thing, exactly.
But I do enjoy hot dogs and beer, and I do have fond memories of the five minutes in my life that I previously spent at a football game (a brief foray away from the tailgate area during a Harvard-Yale game back in 2002), and so when I saw the Jets game in the HowAboutWe DateBook I thought: oh, sure. Let’s give a day at the stadium a shot.
Alright, alright, I get it. It was so fun.
Granted, I had no idea what was going on about 99% of the time, but it didn’t matter, because there were Bud Lights and pretzels (and Italian sausages and hot dogs and hot chocolate and cheese fries) involved, and Kendrick was happy to explain the game to me, and besides: all I had to do was watch the mohawked man in the green-and-white jersey who was sitting next to me to determine whether I should be screaming in joy or rage.
We booked tickets for the game through HowAboutWe for Couples, which we’ve been using for a few months now, and halfway through our date I turned to Kendrick and said, “This is so nice! We never do anything like this.” And then we both realized: wait. Lately, we do stuff like this all the time. Since I’ve been using the service I’ve been browsing the site weekly – at a minimum – just because it’s fun, and because it gets me thinking about cool stuff we can do together and then inspires me to actually make it happen. Singing karaoke, taking a city cruise, going biking, playing ping-pong – what we’re doing honestly doesn’t matter as much as the fact that we’re actually doing it. Together.
It’s very, very cool. And very, very good for us.
In sharp contrast to pretty much every outdoor activity I’ve ever done in my life, I actually dressed appropriately for this excursion – mostly because my mom was babysitting and yelled at me to put on an extra sweater before I left the house – so I was cozy in addition to being pretty thrilled about the aforementioned multi-course menu. I wore heels just to make sure I wasn’t too appropriately dressed; I didn’t want Kendrick to wonder whether his wife had suddenly been replaced with a practical person. (The high-heels thing was fine while sitting in the stands, and then maybe a little less fine when we realized that we had no idea where our car was parked and had to spend forty-five minutes hiking through the general parking area while repeatedly pressing the panic button on our car keys.)
I keep saying this over and over – how important it is to keep making the time to go on dates, try new things, and just be together – because it keeps hitting home to me over and over how true it is. I couldn’t follow the action on the field the last time I went to a football game over a decade ago and I still can’t tell you the difference between a running back and a wide receiver to save my life, but that’s not the point at all: the point is to make those special days that you spend together special not because they’re infrequent…but because they’re wonderful.
Remember, Ramshackle Glam readers get $50 off of their first date using this link.
P.S. Not in a relationship? Sign up for HowAboutWe’s dating service here.
On me: Talbots sweater (available Jan 2014); Hat Attack Soft & Slouchy hat.
This post was written as part of a collaboration between Ramshackle Glam and HowAboutWe for Couples.
