Ep 130: Have Fun Together Again
By Charlotte Cummings | Feel Better Podcast
How to Have More Fun in Your Relationship (When Life Keeps Getting in the Way)
If you've found yourself going through the motions with your partner, doing the right things, showing up to dinner, watching the same Netflix shows side by side, but not actually feeling that spark of enjoyment you used to have together, you are not alone.
This is one of the most common things I hear from couples. Not that they're fighting constantly or on the verge of splitting up, but that somewhere along the way, fun got buried under the mental load, the schedules, the cost of living stress, and the endless pile of things that need to happen just to keep a household running.
And here's the thing: that matters more than most of us realise.
The Gottman Institute's research into happy relationships shows that the ratio of positive to negative interactions in a healthy relationship sits at around five to one. For every difficult moment, there need to be five good ones. Fun isn't a nice-to-have. It is actually part of the architecture of a relationship that stays strong.
So if you've been wondering how to get back there, here's where I'd start.
Get Clear on What You Actually Find Fun
This sounds almost too obvious, but it's the step most couples skip. Over time, one person's preferences can quietly take over. If every date night looks the same because one of you loves a restaurant and the other would rather be moving their body or doing something hands-on, the person whose preferences aren't being met is going to start feeling flat about the whole thing.
Have an honest look at whether what you're doing for fun actually reflects both of you. Mix it up. Take turns planning. Find ways to combine things, a bike ride to lunch, bowling followed by dinner, something that threads both of your ideas of a good time into the one outing.
It's also worth looking back. What did you enjoy when you were dating? What did one of you used to organise that the other loved? Those clues from your past are useful.
Be Open to Ideas That Aren't Yours Yet
Early in this episode I mentioned dance classes as an example of something couples dismiss before they try it. The couples doing it know something you don't: it's genuinely fun. There are a whole lot of experiences that live on the other side of "we would never do that."
A cooking class. A new sport. A group activity you've never considered. One solid experiment where you ask yourselves afterwards did we enjoy that? would we do it again? is worth more than months of sticking to your usual.
Keep a Menu
One of the biggest reasons couples stop having fun is that when a window of time actually opens up, they're too tired and overwhelmed to think of what to do. The default becomes staying home and ordering takeaways, which is sometimes exactly right, but probably not what you want every single time.
Build a running list of things you want to try or know you enjoy. Your standard go-tos, your next date night ideas, the things you've been meaning to get around to. Having that list means when the time appears, you're choosing from options rather than starting from scratch.
This is what I do with individual self-care too. When you're depleted is not the moment to figure out what helps. You want to already know.
(Side note: my husband and I used to do alphabet dating and I am officially putting it back on our menu. The A date involved affogato, Afghani food in Addington, and a restaurant we'd never been to before. The D date was Darfield, donuts, and Devil's Punch Bowl. Ten out of ten, would recommend.)
Sort Out the When
Once you know what you want to do, you need to work out when it's happening. For most busy couples, fun does not happen spontaneously. It needs to be scheduled, and that's not unromantic. That's just how life works right now.
Pre-book the babysitter. Get the grandparents locked in on a rotation. Set up a babysitting swap with another couple who has the same problem you do. Block the date in the calendar and protect it.
Ask once, set the rhythm, renegotiate if needed. That's a much more sustainable system than hoping a free night magically appears.
If the pushback is that nobody else can do bedtime with your kids, consider shifting the date to the afternoon. There is a solution to almost every logistical barrier. What matters is deciding the relationship is worth finding it.
If spontaneity is important to you, keep it. Just protect the time slot. Be as spontaneous as you want within the window you've created together.
Work Out Who's Doing What
This is where a lot of couples quietly fall over. Nobody books the babysitter. Nobody picks the restaurant. The date night just doesn't happen.
Decide who is in charge of organising fun, and for what period. Take turns by quarter. Sit down once a year and divide it up. Even outsourcing the ideas to a brainstorm session together, or yes, asking ChatGPT for inspiration, is better than leaving it as nobody's responsibility.
The mental load of fun is still mental load. Make it someone's job.
Think Smaller Too
Not every positive interaction needs to be a planned night out. The Gottman research I mentioned at the beginning is about ratio, and you can move that ratio in small ways every single day.
Sending your partner a meme that reminded you of them. A funny video. A moment of turning towards them rather than past them. Playing cards on a Tuesday night. These micro moments of connection are low effort and genuinely count.
The term for this in relationship therapy is turning towards, and it is one of the most powerful things couples can do. You don't have to wait for date night to start improving the quality of connection in your relationship.
A Note on What Might Actually Be in the Way
Sometimes the real issue isn't that you don't know how to have fun, it's that there's too much on your plate, or there's unresolved conflict making it hard to want to spend time together at all.
If stress is the thing running your life right now, that needs addressing alongside making plans to reconnect. If conflict is the pattern that keeps draining you both, fixing that is actually the starting point, not an afterthought. My course Give Me 10 Minutes is a great place to begin if conflict is the thing sitting underneath all of this.
And make sure you're not just doing activities together but actually having fun. A nice dinner is lovely. But a night that makes you laugh, that gets you out of your comfort zone, that has you genuinely enjoying each other's company, that is what you're going for.
Your relationship is worth protecting right now. The world is stressful. The cost of living is real. There is a lot pulling at both of you. But the relational cost of letting fun slip away is significant, and you do have more say over it than it might feel like.
Pick one or two things from this episode and start there. That is enough.
If you want support working through the conflict side of things or resetting the patterns in your relationship, Give Me 10 Minutes was built for exactly that. You can find it at charlottecummings.nz.
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Well, welcome along to this episode of Ask Charlotte, where I'm going to be answering this listener question.
How do we have more fun in our relationship? We feel like this is just our stuck point. What do we do to keep things feeling interesting and to learn how to have fun together again? I think this is a really common challenge for couples, so it's great to see this named in this listener question. And just to set the scene for this episode, I want to share a really interesting statistic from the Gottman Institute's research into what makes for a happy relationship.
They talk about how happy, healthy relationships tend to have a ratio of positive to negative interactions of about five to one. So for every negative interaction the couple has, there are five positive interactions. To keep the relationship feeling good, we've really got to stack up those fun, lighthearted moments that make our relationship feel good.
But I get it that in our busy lives, it can just feel like fun is buried under a massive pile of life admin and you don't know where to start. For a lot of couples, this is an area that needs a reset. Okay, so let's talk about how to tackle this issue if having more fun is something you want for your relationship.
The first thing that is going to sound like a really dumb question is you've got to get back to understanding what it is that you find fun. Now a common pitfall for couples is that there can be a little bit of a leaning towards what one person in the relationship finds fun. So for example, if one person loves going out to dinner and the only time that you ever get together alone as a couple is going out for dinner together, then it's not going to feel like that much fun for the partner who prefers to do something active together.
It's important to take a look at the balance of what you've got going on when it comes to having fun and whether one person's preferences are dominating because that's not going to feel like a good time to the other person and there might be a need there to either mix up and take turns at what you're doing to have fun together or to try and have dates that are a bit of a combination of the couple of things that you would like to do. So maybe you are biking somewhere to go out and have lunch together. Maybe you're going ten pin bowling and then going out for dinner but somehow finding a way to balance what it is that you're doing so one person's preferences aren't winning all the time is really important.
It can be quite helpful too to look back on what you found fun in the past. I'm often sitting with couples as a counselor asking them about this. What did you enjoy back in the day in your relationship when you were dating? When one of you needed to organize going out together, what was it that you would plan? So look back in the past of your relationship to understand those clues about what it is that you would find fun to do together.
Sometimes you can go back to doing those things. Sometimes you can find new ways to include something like that within your relationship again. The other tip that I've got is look at what other people find fun and be open to some new ideas here.
So you might look on at something that other people do like going to a dance class and think that looks really naff. I would never do that. But the spoiler here is that they know something that you don't which is that dancing together is actually really fun.
Sometimes as couples we need to get out of our comfort zone. We need to look at what other people know that we don't know and give it a go to try some things that are new and different. Maybe you want to go to a cooking class together.
Maybe you want to sign up for some kind of group together or do something that is outside of your comfort zone. But start exploring what do other couples find fun? What do other people enjoy doing? And can we give a few things a go? Even going to do something once and recognising did I like that or not? Did I find that enjoyable or not? Is a really good activity to go through. What are other people enjoy that we might like to give a go? The other thing I encourage here is for you to keep a bit of a menu of the things that you find fun.
So often for couples that time that we have together is really precious and it might be that it doesn't come around that often or that we find ourselves with a little bit of a window of opportunity that we don't have a whole lot of time to plan for. So perhaps having a menu of the things that you want to do or try together the default things that you find fun and enjoyable or the next ideas for date nights together can be really helpful so that when you are given those moments or you make those times to spend together you're not scratching your head thinking we just don't know what to do. We're overwhelmed.
Let's stay home and get Uber Eats. This is actually the same as what I talk about with individual self-care. You want to have that menu there and identified ahead of time so you're just choosing from a list of options that you have already thought out and you're not at the drawing board trying to come up with it all from scratch.
Now back early on in our relationship my husband and I did something called alphabet dating and it is really fun. Newsflash to him, I think that we should try that again. Alphabet dating is where you go through and organize dates themed on different letters of the alphabet.
I remember the A date was going and getting affogato and having Afghani food in Addington. It was a really great night and we went to a restaurant we'd never been to. We did something afterwards that was going out to get affogatos that kind of stretched out the time that we had together and it was really lovely and fun.
The D date was going to Darfield and getting donuts and walking the Devil's Punch Bowl. I still remember some of those dates because they were super fun. So alphabet dating can be a really good challenge if you're wanting to get creative and potentially do some things that you haven't done before.
It's well worth a try. The other thing that you need to consider if you're wanting to have more fun in your relationship is when it's going to happen and this is such a big challenge for so many people. So once you've worked out the what, you need to work out when.
So fun doesn't tend to happen in most busy relationships with our busy lives these days unless there is some kind of schedule, unless there's a rhythm that we're able to follow. So being able to pre-book babysitters, going we want to go out every second Saturday night, we're going to arrange the grandparents to have the kids for a sleepover or we're going to have a babysitting swap with our friends where we babysit for one another once a month and this is what it looks like for us. Having something blocked out in your calendar is really great accountability back to the health of your relationship.
Going this is time that we have got set aside for ourselves to do something that is fun and helpful and life-giving for us. Wherever possible, try and do things that set yourself up for ask once and repeated benefit. So maybe you say to the babysitter or the grandparents or the friends can we do this and can we do this with this kind of rhythm? Yeah it's fine if it doesn't work out for some reason and something needs to change or be renegotiated but are we able to give this a go at this particular rhythm and we make a different plan if it doesn't work? Having that default plan in place and asking once is a really good place to start.
So if you need help to make having fun together happen get that set in motion and think creatively rather than just saying we don't have any grandparents in town or we don't have the money to pay for a babysitter. There are other people who face that problem too who'd probably be more than willing to do some babysitting swapping with you. My antenatal group had a really great babysitting swapping system so that we could get out and about when we had little kids.
So I'd argue here that where there is a will there is definitely a way in terms of finding time together. If the pushback is well nobody else can get my kids to sleep then you need to get creative about thinking well maybe we're going to do our dates later in the afternoon on a Saturday and we're getting a family member to come around and sit with the kids at a time of day that's not as pressured as bedtime. There are ways around every challenge and pushback that you might have to why you can't have fun together.
So start thinking creatively about what the solutions are so that you've got a pattern for when the fun is going to happen. Now the thing that I can hear at least some of you saying is oh it doesn't sound like fun to be that organized and I get it that for some people their personality inclination is to be a whole lot more spontaneous. Now my argument here is that if you've got the time set aside that's the first part of the equation and then you can be spontaneous within that.
So maybe you don't like it to be pre-determined what it is you're going to do. You want to see how much energy you've got. You want to see what the weather's doing.
You want to see what you feel like in that particular moment. Then be my guest but I reckon you're going to have way more success at having more fun in your relationship if you at least have the time set aside. So let yourselves be spontaneous if that is your preference but block the time out and have a rhythm to it and it is so much more likely that you'll have more fun in your relationship.
Now I think the other key question that needs to be covered here is who? Who is organizing this? If we've got the what in place if we've got the rhythm of when it is happening who is in charge of this? And I see this being one of the places where couples fall over when it comes to having fun together. No one's really got the bandwidth to spend any time working out what it is that they're going to do. So work that out.
Who is organizing what? Are we taking turns at this? Are we sitting down once a year and asking ChatGPT for some ideas? Are we taking a quarter of the year each to organize this? What is it that's going to work for us around who is spending the mental energy setting up the fun that we want to have? Booking the babysitters, making the reservations, booking the tickets for something, planning that holiday or that time away. Get a plan for who is doing what. And sitting down and having that conversation once a year is not a bad idea.
Okay so now I want to give some general tips and other ideas around having more fun in your relationship. You'll remember what I shared at the beginning of the episode about increasing that ratio of positive interactions to negative interactions within our relationship. So my encouragement here is to think about micro fun and any opportunities that you have to inject some fun into your relationship in easier day-to-day ways.
I think that this is the reason why couples send each other memes because it's a point of connection. It's an opportunity to say this reminded me of you or I'm thinking of you in the middle of the day or I thought that you would find this funny. They are great little points of connection within our relationship and they're low-hanging fruit.
They're things that we can do easily without much energy. So think about those opportunities during the day to do some little fun things together. It might be playing cards together in the evening once a week.
It might be sending each other those memes. It might be having a competition to see who can find the funniest video that makes the other person laugh more or playing a game together on your kid's PlayStation. We talk about this in relationship therapy as turning towards each other and we want to increase those interactions where we turn towards our partner and engage with them rather than turning away.
The other piece of advice I have is does it have to be solo? Now so many people have barriers to connecting and having fun that are who's going to organize this and when is it going to happen and we just let the plans slip if we're not careful. Well having other couples that you can do things with that are fun can be really helpful and I'd encourage you to think about whether the fun stuff that you want to do together really needs to be solo or whether it can include other couples who might have some of the same dilemmas as you. So maybe you do some group dates, maybe you find another couple who want to have date nights together with you and then you're dividing the labor of organizing these nights out.
You're also adding to the accountability because it's not just your relationship that you're protecting and making efforts for here, it's theirs as well and that can be really socially helpful in terms of keeping our relationships feeling full of life and energized. So no, your dates don't all have to be solo. The other encouragement that I would have if you're struggling to have fun in your relationship is to think about what is on your plate.
Is it that there's no time to have fun together because there is too much on your plate and that needs to be addressed? Sometimes we're needing to find some things in our life that we're going to say no to, sometimes we're needing to disappoint others and have some boundaries that protect our relationship. I've got some great episodes around saying no and working out what to give up around learning to disappoint other people but I do find that for some couples there are some really legitimate barriers here to having fun together that need to be addressed that are not just about the practical challenges. If you've got too much on your plate and you're stressed and wired and tired, you're not going to feel like spending time together.
So that's the issue that needs to be addressed and go and get some help if you need to have those conversations with a professional who can guide you through that. You want to dive into past podcast episodes, there's a whole bunch there that you can get into to look at what's on your plate and how you make more space for the things that matter to you like your relationship. Just a reminder here, you're actually in charge of your life and if you've got some feelings that are running the show, you're sacrificing things that are really important to you like your relationship with your life partner, then it's time to get those things in check.
The other thing that sometimes needs to happen is fixing the conflict. If we are at war with our partner, if there are patterns of conflict that are constantly draining us and making us feel tired and resentful towards them, then no, we're not going to want to go out and have fun with them. So maybe your starting point needs to be fixing your conflict and having a plan for that while also then making some plans to have fun together.
My course Give Me 10 Minutes is a really great way to sort the conflict patterns in your relationship if you're needing some quick help with this. Now the other thing I'd encourage you to think about here is whether you're doing activities together or whether you're doing things that are fun and that are making you laugh. So much as I love a good restaurant date, I will totally admit that sometimes the best dates that I have been on have been fun.
I've been going and having a games night with some friends. I've been going and doing something active that makes us giggle and laugh along the way. So just check in and ask yourself a question.
Are we loading up our time that we have together as a couple with activities, with things that are nice and enjoyable to do but perhaps aren't fun, don't make us feel connected, don't make us laugh and re-engage with one another. And maybe you want to introduce some different kinds of activities that are a little bit more engaging, that are a little bit more fun and not just social things to do together. Well I hope this episode has got you thinking about how to introduce more fun in your relationship.
There's likely only one or two little ideas that you're needing to pick up to make a start here and really make a change for how your relationship feels. You deserve to have a relationship that feels fun. One of the things I'm really worried about as a couples therapist right now is what's happening to the place of fun within people's relationships.
There's a lot of conflict going on in the world. The cost of living is climbing. The cost of our mortgages is just going up and up and we're entering one of those times where things are quite crunchy and difficult.
When there is a level of stress in the world around us and in running our day-to-day lives that is really hard to ignore. And we're really good at talking about costs like economic costs and we don't give enough time to thinking about relational costs. When we look back at times like COVID there were a lot of relationships that didn't survive that time.
And while interest rates might be a concern right now and the availability of fuel is a topic that we're all talking about I'm quite worried about relationships. I'm worried that we lose our connections with one another that we stop finding ways to have fun together and relationships fall apart as a consequence of this time too. So my little encouragement to you is to think about the investment that it is to make time and space for one another within your relationship.
To have fun together to find ways to reconnect and to hold your relationship together through the stresses of life. It's really important to do. I hope this episode has inspired you and I'd love to hear what you get up to.
