Date Night Dilemma: Why They Don’t Work

Date nights suck. Experts routinely recommend them, but they are just recycling the same tired clichés. There's a 'married couples should go on date nights' template article somewhere, and every publication with female readers (more on this gendered bs later) trots it out twice a year.
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Talk to a married couple with young kids and ask about date nights. There is a 90% chance you will get an eye roll. If they are honest, you will hear things like:
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1. They are another thing on the to-do list. That list hasn't gotten done in a long time.
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2. We are not fun. We used to be, but we are not anymore.
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3. We will talk about the kids. We already always talk about the kids. This is a mildly preferable topic to discussing how we used to be fun, but certainly preferable to discussing our marriage and how we are failing each other.
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4. Who is planning this thing? Oh, that was tonight? Oh shit. Same place up the street again? Remember that time you thought ax throwing was going to be fun?
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5. We. Are. Tired. No one is sexy and sparkling; we are hanging on.
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If we get our act together and go out, there is a decent chance it will be a bad, painful, boring 'date' that will make us wonder why we like each other.
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Early dating is fresh and forward-looking. A good date leaves unencumbered optimism. It's a blank slate, where you are tricked by the person's best possible presentation and imagine what life could be like with them. A good date is when nothing gets in the way of your hope. A bad early date is over. Next. A new blank slate.
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Been-together-awhile-marriage 'dating' is logistics management. It's showing up tired and stressed and trying to fake it with someone who knows when you are faking it. It's having evidence blocking your hope. It's dragging your history and hurts and baggage to dinner and trying to machete your way through the weeds, trying to find your way through.
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I wanted to let you know that you aren't the only one who thinks date nights suck.
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They aren't the fix.