Outdoor date ideas for couples

For early dates

Low stakes, easy exits, and a built-in reason to talk.

1. Coffee outdoors, two cups Meet between three and five, get a hot drink each from a window or a cart, and walk with them instead of sitting. Forty minutes, and a natural end when the cups are empty.
2. You pick every turn One of you chooses the direction at every corner for half an hour. The other asks why. Then swap. You learn more about someone's instincts than you would across a table.
3. Walk them to their stop When the evening ends, walk the other person to their station, their stop or their door instead of saying goodbye at the restaurant. The last ten minutes are the ones you'll both remember.
4. The one you'd send Each of you photographs the single thing on the walk you'd send to a friend, and you only show each other at the end. You'll learn what the other person looks at.
5. Where you can see home Walk to the nearest viewpoint, a hill, a bridge, a rooftop open to the public, and find each other's neighborhood from up there.

For couples who think they've done it all

Novelty is the thing long relationships run low on. These make an ordinary evening slightly strange.

1. Ten minutes without a word Walk together for ten minutes and neither of you speaks. It's harder than it sounds, and the first sentence afterward is usually worth it.
2. Your street, their street Each of you names a street within a mile that the other has never walked. Do both, and argue on the way home about whose was better.
3. Twenty steps, eyes shut In a park, on grass, one of you closes their eyes and the other leads by the hand for twenty steps. Then swap. It's a trust exercise disguised as a game.
4. Draw each other on a bench Two scraps of paper, two pens, five minutes each. The results will be bad. That's the point.
5. Their old route to school Go to the neighborhood where one of you grew up and walk the way they used to walk to school. Point out what's changed. Then do the other's another weekend.
6. Invent a game Make up a game that doesn't exist yet, with rules, and play it to the end on the walk. Which lamppost is the goal, what counts as a point.
7. Count the lit windows Go out at dusk and count how many windows are already lit on one street. Guess first; the loser buys dessert.
8. The same bench, a month apart Pick a bench and sit on it together for ten minutes tonight. Then do it again on the same date next month: same bench, different weather, different conversation.

One date for each season

Sunset, done properly

Sunset is the oldest date idea there is, and most people do it badly: they arrive late, from the wrong side, and leave as soon as the sun is down. Do it the other way. Check the time, find a spot with an open western view, be there twenty minutes before, and stay for the half hour after, when the color is at its best and the crowd has gone. In winter this fits between work and dinner; in summer it's a late one. Note where the sun went down and go back in a month: it will have moved along the horizon.

Getting handed a date

If you'd like someone else to supply the shape, RLQuest does that every morning: three to ten quests from a library of more than 2,700, fitted to your age, interests, the weather, the season and the time you've got. Plenty of them are two-person quests in disguise. Have a coffee outdoors with someone between three and five. Walk a mile holding someone's hand as much of the way as you can. Be outside with someone in the hour after sunset. The app checks what it can, the recorded route, the clock, the photo, and uncovers new tiles on a hexagon map of where you've been together.

It's free to download for iPhone and Android, with a Premium subscription that adds more quests per day. Everything above works with nothing but two people and a door.