It’s Friday night. Or maybe it’s Wednesday night. You’ve eaten dinner. The dishes can wait. Nobody particularly wants to go to bed.

“So, what do you want to do?” you ask.

“I don’t know. What do you want to do?” they reply.

A few minutes later, someone picks up the remote. Netflix wins again.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Watching a great series together can be one of life’s small pleasures. The problem begins when watching something stops being a choice and becomes the default.

Because somewhere along the way, many couples stop asking what would be fun? And start asking what should we watch?

Relationships develop defaults

At the beginning of a relationship, almost everything feels like an activity. Getting coffee is a date. Walking around a neighbourhood is a date. Cooking together is a date. Taking a bus somewhere you’ve never been is an adventure.

You don’t necessarily do extraordinary things. Ordinary things feel extraordinary because you’re doing them with someone new.

Then familiarity arrives. This is, in many ways, exactly what we want from a relationship. You become comfortable around each other. You build routines. You no longer need an elaborate plan every time you meet. But comfort has a sneaky side effect. It makes defaults incredibly easy.

Dinner. Sofa. Television. Phones. Bed. Repeat.

Not because you’ve become boring people. Because deciding what to do requires effort. “What do you want to do?” is a surprisingly difficult question.

Think about how enormous that question actually is. What could two people do tonight? Go out? Stay home? Cook? Play something? Make something? Learn something? Invite people over? Go somewhere? Try something romantic? Do absolutely nothing? There are thousands of possibilities. Which makes “What should we do?” strangely difficult to answer.

“I don’t know” is much easier. So is opening Netflix. The problem isn’t a lack of things to do. It’s the effort required to think of them. 

Five choices are better than five hundred

Imagine instead that somebody gave you five ideas. Not 500. Five.

Maybe one sounds ridiculous. The second isn’t really your thing. One sounds interesting, but you’d rather save it for Saturday. And then you reach number four. You look at each other. 

“Should we do this?”

“Why not?”

Suddenly, you’ve gone from having no idea what to do to having a plan. 

This is something we think about a lot at Spurkle. Sometimes spontaneity needs a prompt. 

Novelty doesn’t have to mean skydiving

When people hear that relationships need novelty, it’s easy to imagine expensive holidays, elaborate dates or dramatic bucket-list experiences.

But novelty can be tiny. Cook something neither of you has made before.

Blindfold each other for a food tasting. Learn one dance from YouTube.

Paint each other’s portraits badly. Take public transport somewhere you’ve never been. Give each other ridiculous new nicknames for an evening. Turn the lights off and spend an hour without screens.

The activity itself isn’t always the important part. The interruption is. You’ve broken the pattern. And once the pattern breaks, something interesting happens: you start interacting differently.

You laugh about something new. You discover that your partner is surprisingly competitive. You learn something about them you somehow didn’t know. You create an inside joke. You touch. You flirt. You talk. You make a memory.

Remember when you were dating?

Think back to the beginning. A large part of the excitement came from not knowing exactly what would happen next. Where will we go? What will we talk about? Will this date be good? Will there be another one?

Long-term relationships naturally lose some of that uncertainty. That’s partly what makes them wonderful. There is security in knowing someone deeply.

But security and surprise don’t have to be opposites.

You can know who you’re spending Saturday with without knowing what you’re going to do together. And perhaps that’s something worth protecting.

Don’t get rid of Netflix

This isn’t an argument for cancelling your subscription. Some evenings should involve ordering food, getting under a blanket and watching three episodes of something neither of you will remember six months later.

Those evenings are great. Just make sure they’re a choice. Not the answer to a question neither of you could answer.

Because relationships probably don’t need dramatically more excitement. They just need occasional interruptions to the ordinary. A different conversation. A ridiculous idea. A little anticipation. A reason to put the remote down. A story that didn’t exist yesterday.

Sometimes, all it takes is one suggestion.

Spurkle gives couples five ideas every day to help them have fun, get closer and keep discovering each other.