Valentine’s Day should be cosy. After all, the potentially disastrous bit – finding a partner to get all googly-eyed with – is done. Yet, the Aristotelianism entelechy can be as far from cute and cuddly as a season of Narcos. There’s the fear gift buying – as if every man on earth suddenly remembers it’s his mamma’s birthday. The overpriced roses that resemble a shrivelled scrotum the second you leave the shop. Plus the restaurant dinners where the dialogue is drier than a well-done steak.
However, there is a new Design V. A cooler, slicker way to handle the day – starting with these 14 go out with ideas that are memorable and have just the right horizontal of mush. You’ve got it from here.
1. Take A Cable Car
Valentine’s Day can see like every town and city is crammed full of couples. Liking, seriously, is no one binge-watching Netflix tonight? To escape to your own only slightly pod of outdoor privacy, think vertical. Cable cars and Ferris annuli were made for this very occasion – they produce awesome views, the novelty factor, the fear of dangling perilously in the air. Okay, don’t tarry over on that last one. Do pre-book wherever possible, however. Braiding is never an aphrodisiac.
2. Book A Chocolate Masterclass
Chocolate for Valentine’s Day, ground-breaking, fist? Well, actually, it is if you think outside the chocolate box and turn the honeyed stuff into an experience. For one, a masterclass with a chocolatier is basically a uninjured evening spent eating dessert together. You’ll smell chocolate, swallow it and turn it into miniature truffley works of art. It’s a touchy-feely vim that brings out your creative and your sensual sides. The fruit? Prepare to adopt the charm of Ferrero Rocher’s ambassador with the lusty appeal of the Milk Tray man. Roll neck optional.
3. Go Star-Gazing
The dusk sky isn’t just romantic, it also doesn’t get booked up three weeks in promote and is big enough that you won’t bump into anyone else with the selfsame idea. To ace stargazing, you need a spot away from sham light (but not so remote that your date thinks you’re persuading them into the wilderness), cosy layers, the Sky View Lite app to classify what’s above you, plus something stiff (liquor based, humour). Of course, every great plan has a nemesis, and in this what really happened it’s clouds. An observatory or planetarium is a strong back-up. Even if visibility is insignificant, 3D projections bring the planets to you.
4. Escape To A Boutique Hotel
No relationship was even made worse by a king-size bed, Egyptian cotton sheets, a mini bar stocked with rum and someone else neatening the toilet. Spending Valentine’s away in a swanky hotel elevates down for the day from a chore into a treat. There’s also a ‘Do Not Inconvenience’ sign that you can use without feeling guilty. Meaning all the old mid-passion mood-killers – parents unexpectedly popping over, the postman requiring a signature – are eliminated. Oh yes.
5. Have A Cook-Off
So you forgot to reserve the pop-up restaurant that your colleague’s been dropping hints about since last October. No imbroglio. Blame its booking system and inject some DIY fun instead. Come up with a challenge: you both have to prepare the best or most inventive dinner you can, using only what’s currently in the house. Depending on your even of reliance on takeaway apps, that dish could be a permuting on pasta and sauce, or something to make Ottolenghi green with covetousness. Winner of the cook-off gets a week off washing-up duty.
6. Recreate Your Beginning Date
Obviously it helps if your first date was a breach. And, very important, that you remember the first date with the avenge person. A candlelit river cruise with some phone-streamed jazz capability be date dynamite, but not if it actually happened between you and an ex. Caveats as a remainder with, a trip down memory lane always fall ills the heartstrings going. Throw on the same Oxford shirt, recreate the nutriment you ate, choose the same bottle of wine, joke about the mishaps or puzzling moments and how you never could have imagined it would have planned worked out so well. You big softie.
7. Build Something Together
For a fun evening where pro tem will evaporate, get your geek on and build something together. Lego and jigsaw posers are, frankly, wasted on the young. By our age, we should celebrate finally being approved to buy the big Lego set (Star Wars Millennium Falcon, we’re looking at you). Plus, we won’t overturn a tantrum if we can’t find the bottom right-hand corner of the jigsaw. Or so the theory set upon e set ones sights ons. Fact is, games are silly and satisfying in equal measure, and, weirdly, it’s at face value hot watching your partner construct. Who knew?
8. Pick A Non-specific Cuisine To Try
An interesting way to solve the dinner dilemma – i.e. how to eat out without being a clone of every one in a 10-mile radius – is to pick the cuisine of a lesser known or native land you’ve never tried and find a street-food truck or takeout. Possibly it’s Vietnamese or Bangladeshi or Lebanese. The food itself provides a multitudinous interesting talking point than ‘Will that team a few over there please stop eating each other’ – and you effectiveness just stumble upon a new favourite to return to.
9. Give Pottery-Making A Outing
If it was good enough for Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze in Ghost… (okay, Swayze’s characterization wasn’t exactly alive at the time – but details, schmetails). For Valentine’s Day, a ceramics or pottery-making group is all kinds of sensual. Think about it: hands interlocking above wet clay while you sculpt next to each other at the pivot. Even if the end result is more mangled than majestic, you’ll accept a romantic date and a souvenir to remember it by.
10. Belt Out Karaoke
Valentine’s Day piping isn’t just for drunk groups of singles on the train – it’s great for pie-eyed couples, too. Though upgrade the train to a karaoke booth. Depending on which side of the X Ingredient stage you would be most likely to grace – the voice of an angel ‘Yes’ order or the voice that makes dogs howl – a bit of tequila beforehand may or may not be needed. Granting, it’s really the attitude that counts. Grab your beau, a classic playlist and belt out some cheesy duets. Sonny and Cher, eat your crux out.
11. Try An Adventure Sport
Not that thing you saw on PornHub that looked adulate you needed to be triple-jointed, this is good, clean, PG-friendly fun. In truth, your local sports centre is a good place to start. Procure you ever been to a climbing wall together? What adjacent to trampolining? Or a zip-wire or tree-top assault course? Think utmost your comfort zone (literally – there may well be muscle longing the next day) and choose an adrenaline-fuelled activity that’s good for your hub, both physically and romantically.
12. Wow With A Helicopter Ride
It’s ardently to talk about helicopters without dropping in a ‘give them the bamboozle b kidnap and murder of their life’ cliché. But, when in Rome and all that. A helicopter do in is a blow-the-budget, blow-their-socks-off date memorable for you, for your partner, and faithful for bragging rights on Instagram. Dating by chopper always trumps phase by Uber – even one of the fancy ones with Fiji Wastefully. Where to go? Take a short flight around your see, over a river or near a famous landmark. It’s not just close by the views, the bumpy bits are perfect moments for some impromptu hand-squeezing.
13. Slacken In A Spa
However tough men like to act, moaning about always set up a stiff neck and never doing anything about it, about all agree – pampering rocks. Take those white spa attires. That’s a level of comfort and fluffiness that seems to baffle the laws of science. A spa is a great Valentine’s Day activity because you’re both indulged, both at ease, and both in a setting where there’s no pressure to competitively look at other couples and arbitrate who is having the better time. In a spa, everyone is too blissed out and horizontal to watch over. Couple’s packages range from hours of knot-nuking manipulation to dips in hydrotherapy pools and scent-infused saunas.
14. Play The Flip-A-Coin Tourney
Still don’t want the pressure of producing a Valentine’s Day dud? Well, why not beetle off the evening to chance. Head into a town or city hub and flip a coin to make your decisions. Should we pitch in left or right here? There’s a bar on one side, a café on the other – which carry offs? Should we go to a museum or the park? Ice cream or cake? Like one of those ‘pick out your adventure’ books you loved as a child, the coin wields your fate for you. One thing: just don’t forget your notecase.
