Triple Income, No Kids: Is Polyamory the Trick to Getting Rich?

We've all seen the acronym 'DINK' (Double Income, No Kids) but the other day I saw someone post 'TINK"s - now they meant Two Incomes, No Kids, but it got me thinking - how great would it be to have Triple Incomes pushing towards your financial independence goal!

This thought lasted about five minutes before something else caught my attention, but then a couple of weeks later I was watching "You Can't Ask That" on ABC iView and they had a segment devoted to Polyamorous people and their partners.

Which got me thinking again, and the idea has been bubbling in the back of my brain: Is Polyamory the trick to retiring early?
In 'You Can't Ask That' one of the Thruples was asked "Do you ever worry about losing your spot on the team" and one of them replied (with a laugh) "Of course not, you couldn't pay the bills without me". While they don't delve deeply into their financials I am infinitely curious. However a (very brief) googling hasn't turned up any gold in the polyamorous-finance blog space, probably because of the time committment in having multiple partners.

Thus, with absolutely no solid information (save a brief unsuccessful open relationship as a youngster that ended when I met Mr. FIRE) I need to point out that this post is entirely speculative. As thought experiments go I've found it rather interesting, although I anticipate this being my first post with an angry comment, probably using the phrase 'morally bankrupt'.

Anywho, here we go.

Dating

Firstly, dating is expensive. And being Poly means a lot more dating. When Mr. FIRE and I were dating we went out for dinner (once, that was boring... still, it's the thing you do) we went to the movies to see the Hunger Games, which ended in sitting on my car boot talking for an hour, and oddly - we took up an 8 week parkour course together.

By the end of this we knew each other well enough that dates were largely visiting each others house (okay, his house. I lived with my parents, how embarrassing!) and a lot of, ahem, Netflix and 'chill'.. or whatever it was called before Netflix. We went hiking a lot, frequented chocolate cafes like San Churros and played board games. I once threw a Monopoly board at him.

In the first couple of months of our dating I'd say we spent a couple of hundred dollars each, and most of that was on the parkour classes. However, this is definitely not typical dating. For an accurate pricing, let's look at a couple of cliche' date ideas and their costs, plus one not so cliche' excellent idea.

For the sake of argument, and because I'm a child of the modern age, let's assume that you and your date are going to split the cost evenly.

Dinner and a movie

Firstly, this is a terrible idea for a date. Dinner will be spent making awkward conversation, and then you have to sit silently next to each other in a dark room for two hours. Creepy, and uncomfortable. If you have to do the cliche' dinner and movie date, flip it around and see the movie first. You can get in for an earlier (hopefully cheaper) session, and then talk about the movie over dinner.

Cost: $15 each for a movie, $10 at the snack bar, and $30 each for dinner. Plus $5 each for some kind of dessert either at the restaurant, or after. Total: $60 each

Coffee by the beach to watch the sun set

I'm writing this post in winter, but I think we can all agree this is a summer date. While the beach can be gorgeous and empty during winter, nothing cuts a date short faster than icy winds and unexpected downpours. The beach is always a win for dates because you get to see your new heart-throb out in the sunlight, have a swim, have a walk, eat some ice-cream and either lounge around or play beach sports as suits you. Plus it's reasonably cheap.

Costs: $5 for a coffee, $5 each for the fish and chips your will inevitably get a craving for, and another $2 for an ice-cream on a hot day. Total: $12

Archery and lunch

Finally, the kind of date Mr. FIRE and I would actually go on! If we were bringing a third into our house this is the kind of date they would have to love. There is a self-paced archery course in the hills where a nice lady will give you a ten minute crash course, then sends you out to follow a trail through the woods shooting three arrows at each target. The whole course takes about two hours (including lost arrow time... oops) and prevents any awkwardness because you're focused on learning a new skill and spotting the next target. Lunch is picked up from a country bakery on the way home because by that time, you're a wee bit peckish.

Cost: $15 each for archery (plus $3 per lost arrow, ask me how I know that...) and $10 for bakery goods and coffee. Total: $25

Dating costs

Let's be honest here, Poly dating is likely to be just as expensive as regular dating. The only difference will be that you're going on more dates since you'll be scheduling in more than one partner. Depending on your flavour of Polyamory you might be going on group dates, or seeing one partner one night, and the other the next. Either way, dating starts out pretty pricey - two dates a week averages almost $50, and I picked some cheap dating ideas.

Moving in to one house

Fast forward a few months and you and your Poly partner(s) are ready to move in together! Just like when a couple moves in together you probably have too much furniture and more TVs than you could ever possibly need. You'll probably pull in a quick bit off cash selling off the extra TV's and the smallest couch - or maybe you're garage will be full for months of things you don't want or need.

Of course, there is a third option where you pay for a storage space, but this is a finance blog so I'm not recommending that. I'm frowning sternly at the concept.

Moving three people in together has advantages over moving two in together - you only need one fridge, one TV, one washing machine, so you can sell off all the extras. 

However, you need space for three people. Mr. FIRE and I live in a snug 'two-bedroom' house, which is really one-bedroom and a study. The study couldn't comfortably fit a bed and a wardrobe, but it does nicely fit our computer desks. If we had a third person we would need to strongly contemplate moving into a bigger place, and paying more rent. On average an extra bedroom in our suburb would cost an extra $80 a week. Mr. FIRE and I currently pay $150 a week each towards the mortgage, so moving somewhere bigger but adding a third person would actually save us $25 a week each.

Savings: $25 a week less in rent, plus a short term boost of approximately $2,500 as we sold off excess appliances and furniture.

Living together - the long term

The happy time of all living together! We've already covered that three people are paying one rental bill / mortgage, but we are also only paying one set of utility bills! The water bill would be the happiest change - currently we pay over $150 for usage and a measly $40 for usage. Assuming having a third person in the house means 50% more usage, then our quarterly bills would go from $190 to $210. Rather than $95each, we would be paying $70.

Let's dig further. Our utilities also include gas and electricity. I doubt these would go up by 50% by having another person in the house because a lot of the usage is communal - having lights on, cooking dinner, running the fridge. Let's be generous and say it goes up by 30% to account for an extra load of washing each week and maybe a bigger fridge.

Based on our last set of quarterly bills, our gas would go from $144 to $168, and electricity from $276 to $370. Our individual split was previous $72 and $138, now it's $56 and $123.

Lastly, the internet. We pay $60 a month for unlimited data. We wouldn't need to upgrade our plan, so what was $30each a month is now $20 each.

On utilities we're saving almost $100 a quarter. Not a massive amount, but also nothing to sneeze at

Food shopping is the third biggest expense for most Australia, and now we can shop in bulk, and bulk buying is always cheaper. We also wouldn't have to worry so much about wasted food, so let's say we can knock $20 each off our monthly food budget (10% off).

Total savings: $160 a quarter.

Money in!

While I've been focusing on expenses and savings, there is one more very important thing to consider - this is a triple income household. If we assume our mythical third person is making an average wage of $60,000 with expenses similar to mine they would be bringing an extra $24,000 into our household savings - after tax.

Adding their $24,000 savings to my goal of $28,000 in a year means as a household we've almost doubled our savings (I would include Mr. FIRE here, but he still can't tell me his savings rate...). This is assuming that they have the same expenses as I currently do.

As I've worked through above those, we can expect a 10% reduction in groceries ($20), and roughly 30% off of our utilities ($28). Plus another 15% off rental expenses ($25). This would drop my monthly expenses from $1833 (excluding my rental property) to something closer to $1750.

So not only do we bring an extra $60,000 income into the household, we reduce our expenses, which reduces our FIRE number, and increase our savings.

Assuming two people in my house, earning $70,000 each and spending $25,000, we could save $90,000 a year. With a combined expenditure of $50,000 we would be ready to retire in ten years.

Assuming three people in my house, spending and earning the same way, we could save $135,000 a year - with our 'bulk discount' lifestyle let's round that up to $140,000. With a combined expenditure of $70,000 we would be ready to retire in eight and a half years.

While eighteen months isn't a massive reduction in costs, there's also all the incidental benefits to consider. Three people sharing the cooking, cleaning and yard work. Three people around means there are always enough people for board games. Plus with different work and hobby schedules, hopefully there would always be someone around for a cuddle on a cold winter night.

What about bad things?

Well, firstly, bad things like broken dishwashers, car crashes and random medical emergencies would be less terrible with all the costs split three ways instead of two.

But what about when you stop wanting to split things three ways? What about a divorce, or a break-up? If they're messy with two people involved, imagine the mess with a third. With one in three marriage ending in divorce.

Divorces are financially devastating as couple split assets, sell off houses, fight over fridges and pets. With a third person do the assets get split three ways? Do more things disappear in the night as scorned lovers try and take what they treasure before you can hide it from them? Do you statistically increase the likelihood of coming home to find all your clothes in garbage bags on the front lawn?

Probably yes.

What do you think? Would a third person in your FIRE journey speed up the process? Should you just get a housemate instead? 

Frugal date nights: Board Games

With winter well and truly set in frugal dates like fishing, picnics and hikes are few and far between. Mr. FIRE and I are still looking for ways to spend quality time together and while they largely involving building a nest on the couch, enjoying the wine and cheese and projecting a movie straight onto a wall sometimes we like something a little more intensive.

We play board games. Somehow we're still together....

Board games have been pretty integral to our relationship since it's early days. The first time I met Mr. FIRE's friends was over a long weekend and a game of Munchkin. It was also the first time I yelled at Mr. FIRE's friends, insulted a couple of them and did my absolute best to sabotage their game. Munchkin is a vicious backstabbing game that largely consists of bending the rules as far as possible and picking on whoever is in the lead. It was great fun.

Unfortunately Mr. FIRE and I are both the kind to bend the rules as far as they go, and our regular gaming group isn't particularly willing to break up our arguments. Many a game has ended with someone throwing cards down and leaving the room in a huff. We aren't allowed to play Munchkin anymore - in four years it's the only serious argument we've ever had. That and Betrayal at House on the Hill. Anything where the rules are wiggly and open to interpretation doesn't end well in the FIRE household.

However we still love gaming. We have friends over at least once a month to eat like teenagers, play Offspring too loudly and swear over dice rolls. We're all an introverted nerdy bunch of weirdos and having some structure to our interactions is great.

On top of playing with friends, Mr. FIRE and I like to game together occasionally. Unfortunately most games are made for 3+ players. Oh, they might say 2-4 players on the box, but they're pretty dull with just two people (looking at you Takenoko, with your cute panda and terrible gardener).

However there are some games that play brilliantly with two people. Paired with a small glass of mead or port, and some home baked snacks, they make for a brilliantly frugal date night.

Disclaimer: All the links to Amazon in this post are affiliate links. If you go on to buy the game I'll make a little bit of money at no extra cost to you. Click a link and feed a starving blogger? :) 

Lords of Waterdeep

This is a favourite in our household. In Lords of Waterdeep: A Dungeons & Dragons Board Game you don't play any lowly adventurers seeking glory - you play the Lords sending the cannon fodder adventurers to glory. Of course you take a cut of their glory.

Lords of Waterdeep is a worker placement game. In each round you can take a certain number of actions to do things like visiting places in town to recruit adventurers to your cause, building new stores in town and collecting quests.

The game is brilliantly balanced so that building new stores brings you ongoing benefits - if people visit the store, and certain quests give you extra abilities moving forward like bonus points. Halfway through the game each player is given an extra action each round - if no one has built a building by this time, then there won't be enough actions available each turn.

Playing this game in our house is reasonably quiet as you try and plan each move, and build up fallback plans in case something goes wrong. Most actions can only be done by one player each turn (for example, only one person each round can visit the plinth and recruit a priest) so certain spaces are a hot commodity. While we plan in near silence, there's always a little friendly abuse if Mr. FIRE takes the space I needed to finish a quest.

To add an extra twist to the game, each player is assigned a Lord at random at the start of the game. Lords receive bonus points for completing certain quests, for example Brianne Byndraeth earns an extra 4 points for each Arcana and Skullduggery quest, while Mirt the Moneylender earns 4 bonus points for each Commerce and Piety quest. These aren't revealed till the end of the game, so while you can take a guess at the bonus points, you never quite know where your opponent is up to.

Side tip: There is also a Lord call Larissa Neathal, aka 'The Builder'. She scores 6 points extra for each building. While this is great in a multiplayer game, in a two player game there isn't really enough competition for spaces to make her worthwhile, I suggest taking her out.

Photo credit: deskovehry.com

Lords of Waterdeep is a rather deep game that takes around an hour for a good solid play through. The first game may take a while as you work out all the rules, but you won't play much faster as you get more familiar because there are plenty of intricacies and plans to be made and games often come down to one or two moves.

If you already have Lords of Waterdeep, I strongly recommend adding the expansion Scoundrels of Skullport into your collection. It's actually two expansions in one, the 'Under the Mountain' expansion, and the 'Skullport' expansion. Under the Mountain is a simple 'more stuff' expansion that creates more town spaces, and gives you a couple more Lords.

The Skullport expansion introduces the concept of corruption. There are quests and town spaces that give you a lot more money and units than usual, but they also give you corruption tokens. These cost you points at the end of the game, and the more in play the more costly they are. The spaces are oh so tempting though, and it's hard to keep a clean slate.

The Skullport expansion has a lord call The Xanather who gains 4 victory points for each corruption token. Unfortunately he still has to take the penalty for having the corruption, so he's pretty worthless. I'd suggest removing him from the game.

Carcassone

Lords of Waterdeep is a big intimidating game with a 24-page rulebook and at least 15 minutes set up on your first game. By contrast, Carcassone has a trifold pamphlet that you can skim read in five minutes or less. There is also zero set up for the game, you can play straight out of the box. All you need is a big open table, put the box within arms reach, and you're ready to go.

Our version came with a mini-expansion called 'The River' which gives us 30 seconds of set up time, and a bit of structure for starting the game. Once again, all you need is the box within arms reach and a big open table. To set up The River expansion, grab the river tiles out of the box and play them first, then go on with the rest of the game.

Carcassone is beautiful, relaxing and deceptively simple. You can your friends (2-5 players, and good with any number) and slowly putting together a countryside by laying tiles. With the river expansion you start by placing the source tile (the start of the river) and lay out the river one tile at a time before ending at a small pond. After that you can expand out into building more of the country side.

The rules are pretty simple, pick up a tile and place it down. You have to place your tile against an existing tile (which is why The River expansion is so nice, it gives you somewhere to build from) and your placement has to make sense - for example there are roads, towns and open fields. When placing tiles roads must touch roads, towns against towns, and fields against fields.

Photo Credit: The Board Game Family

Whenever you place a tile you have an option to place down a meeple (cute little person shaped tokens) on the road, in the town, or in the monastery. Each feature scores points, once it's completed. For example roads start and end at towns or villages, once a road is completed you score 1 point for each tile. Towns are worth 2 points per tile, and need to have a complete wall. Monasteries are worth 1 point for the monastery, and 1 point for each surrounding tile, scored when the monastery is completely surrounded.

There is also the option to play a farmer - by claiming a field the farmer scores 3 points per adjacent completed city at the end of the game. The field stops at any road, river or city - to be honest we've never played with farmers. We treat it as an optional extra and have enjoyed the game without it plenty of times.

In the game you have only 7 meeples, and you don't get them back until they score so it can be stressful committing your last meeple to the board. You can also force and opponent to share their hard earned points by connecting your road or town to theirs. If you have an equal number of meeples, you both score the full points, however if one player has more then they get all the points and the player with less gets nothing.

Other than that, Carcassone has very little opportunity to back stab your opponents, it's largely a peaceful game of building a beautiful countryside. Beautiful isn't an exaggeration either, the artwork in this game is wonderful, with plenty of cute little details, but still simple to understand at a glace. It's a wonderful, easy to play game that even Mr. FIRE and I can't fight over.

Pandemic

Finally, sometimes it's nice to work together on a board game. Pandemic pits you and your friends (2-4, more players makes the game harder) against four virulent diseases that have broken out worldwide. You take on various roles of CDC researchers and you travel the world curing breakouts and trying to research a cure before mass panic breaks out and everybody dies.

This game is brutal. Absolutely horrendously evil. At the start of each turn you draw from the player deck, what you hope for is cards that will help you develop a cure. Sometimes your turn up an Epidemic, where all hell breaks loose.

To understand why Epidemics suck (apart from the obvious implications of the name) you have to understand the 'infection phase'. In a normal, not horrible round, you draw from the player deck, and then run the infection phase. In the infection phase you flip cards in the infection deck and place disease tokens on a city as instructed by the card. The harder you've set the game, the more cards you flip. Once you've pulled a card it goes into the discard pile, and you don't have to add diseases to the city again. Unless...

If you've drawn an Epidemic then you first grab an infection card from the bottom of the pile and place three disease cubes on that town. You then shuffle the discarded infection cards and place them on top of the infection deck. Then you draw your infection cards, piling more diseases onto the already sickened cities. If the game asks you to add more disease cubes to a city that already has three, you have an Outbreak and you need to place disease cubes in every adjacent city. If one of the adjacent cities already has three disease cubes, then other Outbreak occurs, and the disease keeps spreading.

It is nasty. You then have four actions in your turn (move, heal, research a cure) to try and mop up the damage.

To win at Pandemic you need to research all four cures. Thankfully you don't need to wipe the diseases off the board, just figure out how to do it. The mop up happens post game.

To lose at Pandemic... well, there are so many ways! If you run out of disease cubes and cannot place them on the board when required, you lose. If more than seven outbreaks occur you lose. If you run out of cards in the player deck, you lose. In each case the in-game explanation is that the people of the world have panicked, rioted, and probably died. Yay!

Despite this, Pandemic is a great couples game. I suggest playing with cold drinks and cold snacks, because you'll be so engrossed in planning saving the world that any warm food will go cold before you remember to eat it. Pandemic isn't really played a turn at a time - you'll map out your plans for the next three to four turns, agreeing on an action plan to save the world. And then, halfway into your plan you'll draw the wrong card and have to start all over again.

When we first played Pandemic we lost horribly and constantly. After about twenty playthroughs, we actually started to win consistently. So we bought the expansions.

We have two of the expansions and since we have never beaten the second expansion, we haven't bothered to buy the third (State of Emergency, if you're curious).

The first expansion is On The Brink. It comes with two ways to make the game harder, Mutation events or the Virulent Strain challenge. In Mutation events one of the diseases mutates (surprise surprise) and you now have a fifth purple disease to cure. In the Virulent Strain challenge one of the diseases becomes extra bad with horrible rules like 'put down two disease cubes instead of just one'. We've beaten both of these challenges, but not at the same time. This game is hard, did I mention?

The second expansion is called In The Lab. You can't just wave your hands and research a cure anymore. You need to collect samples of the disease and process them through the lab. This is impossible. Losing still makes for a great date night, but we've never won this game.

(Technically, Mr. FIRE won this game once, but I wasn't there so it doesn't count. He was playing with a guy named Jesus - miracles are required to finish this game!)

Frugal wins?

At a glance board games are expensive. I bought mine for $60-$80 each. The current prices seem to be sitting around the $20-$40 mark, which isn't so bad. It all comes down to how much you play the games. If you only play them once or twice then they are a huge expense, but you can easily play them enough that they come down to a $1 an hour dollars to fun, or even less.

After the initial outlay for games the only cost for a date night is dinner and wine. Since you eat every day anyway (I assume) date night can be 'free'. However to jazz it up a bit Mr. FIRE and I play games with a glass of wine and a bowl of snacks. Depending on your budget this could be a fancy antipasto platter complete with stuffed olives, or a name brand packet of potato chips.

Whichever way you choose to go with dinner, you can knock out a wonderful date night for $20 or less. You have to interact with each other, probably yell at each other, and you'll have to focus on each other - no one wins a game with a phone in their hand. And winning is the most important thing. Right..?

Date night: Gon' Fishin'

Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he'll sit in a boat and drink beer all day. Teach a FIREy Lady to fish and she'll inside on dragging you out to the beach on a sunny afternoon to catch a million tiny fish, throw them all back and call it a brilliant date.

I remember going fishing with my granddad as a kid. As a very small kid. I'm sure my memory is pretty skewed by I remember sitting in a little tin boat smaller than your average car with my pop, mum and brother. Four of us, teeny tiny boat. It was dark, the waves were big, and the rod was huge. I remember pop trying to get me to balance the rod on my finger, but I was A. too scared to let go of the boat, and B. convinced the rod would fall in the water.

In short, my first fishing experience was not exactly positive.

For years after that I told all the typical fishing jokes about sitting in a boat and drinking beer, and imagined that 'going fishing' was an excuse to sit on a beach with your mates. Or a boat. It was definitely something men did that pissed off their wives, and the running joke for taking a sick day.

I was wrong. So very wrong. Fishing is awesome. Here's the post about fishing as a great date that I promised to write way back at the end of March.

There are a few things you need to know to go fishing, and it really helps to have someone with you that has done it before and knows their way around a tackle box, how to attach fish hooks and weights, how to pick the right bait. I'm that green at it that I'm sure I've got all the terminology wrong, but I'm still going to take a stab at walking your through your first fishing trip. For me, it's an excellent excuse to go out in the sunshine (or rain), it's both really exciting and really relaxing, and you absolutely never have a hand free to drink a beer.

First, get some gear

Mr. FIRE and I own one fishing rod. Between two of us. We can still have a kickass fishing date, because I use a hand reel. It's literally a coil of fishing wire with a hook and a weight on the end. Give it a swing and toss it in the water.

Of course, you probably want a real rod right? Fair enough, I don't blame you. Swing by your local and ask for a basic, beginners rod. Put your foot down and don't let them sell you anything specialised or fancy, you're new to fishing, you just need an ugly stick with some line on it. 

You can also pick up a tackle box - it should come with some weights, hooks, a few bits of line, maybe even a knife. Again, ask the nice person at the shop for a beginners kit.

If your tackle box doesn't come with a knife, make sure you grab one. You'll need it to cut up your bait, and maybe your fish! In fact, grab two knives, a cheap one for messy work, and a top notch filleting knife for cleaning your catch.

Finally, grab a measuring tape and a big bucket - you need to know how big your fish are, and you need to be able to carry them back!

Second, find somewhere nice

Remember this is a fishing date! Don't go to your mates secret spot under the bridge by the burnt out cars (no seriously, someone suggested a place... that's what we found). Anywhere the river meets the ocean can be nice, or a bay, or a river. Ask google, or your friends, and check it out on google maps before you go there. Try and find somewhere with a low mosquito population.

Third, go at the right time

Fish don't just hang out waiting to be caught. Turns out that if you go around high tide as the water is rising the fish will be coming in to have a feed. This is how Mr. FIRE and I ended up pulling fish in constantly. 

Fourth, shop again

So you've got all your gear, you know where you're going and you're about to walk out the door. Now is the time to get your bait - no point in buying it earlier when you don't know where you're going and what type of bait you need! Mr. FIRE and I use cockles for beach fishing, and you can generally find a bait shop on your way.

Now is also a great time to find a phone app that lists the species of fish where you are going and the size limits. If you can't find an app, you can generally find a website devoted to fishing in your area that you can load up on your phone. Otherwise, popular fishing places tend to have signs detailing the common fish you can catch in that area and your size limits. Snap a picture with your phone on the way past and you're good to go.

Okay, I'm here, now what?

Fish! Squish some bait onto your hook and toss it in the water. If you're fishing for small stuff you'll want to get a little bit of tension on your fishing line. Then you need to zone out for a bit, find a zen space, and feel what is happening on the line. If you're using a rod, slide your finger along the line near the reel, if you have a hand reel, just run the line through your fingers. If you're fishing somewhere quiet, you'll very quickly start to feel the difference between the hook moving in the current, and little fishey's nibbling at your bait. If you're fishing in the ocean or on a windy day it takes a bit longer to get the feel for it.

Mr. FIRE and I mainly fish using cockles as our bait. They're cheap, easy to find, work for most little fishey's and are easy to thread onto the hook. But they fall apart, so you can't just wait for the fish to swallow the hook. When you feel the fishey's having a good nibble (not a gentle nibble, but a good nibble) give the line a quick tug. If you're lucky, you'll have a fishey!

Reel him in, and pull out your phone app to figure out what he is, and if you can keep him. Mr. FIRE and I went beach fishing and caught a fish every few minutes, we only kept one. Everyone else was too small to take home. That's okay though, actually getting dinner is a bonus! Fishing is fun!

A few things to keep in mind - fish aren't super keen on being pulled out of the water with a hook in their mouth. First thing you need to do when you get them out of the water is take that hook out. Check your fish you spines before you grab him, and make sure you have a good grip when taking the hook out. I once caught a puffer fish... It took a couple of minutes to safely get the hook out and flip him back into the water using the flat of our bait knife. I was not touching him with my hands.

If you have picked a good time and a good spot, you won't really have a moment free to drink a beer. And your hands will smell like fish pretty much straight away, so unless you like Eau Du Fish permeating your beer, just skip it.

But seriously, date night?

What makes a great date? Spending time together, enjoying beautiful weather, engaging in a shared activities, celebrating each others successes. Fishing does all these things.

Fishing also forces you to do something we don't often do in our high-speed high-tech world. It makes you slow down, focus, and stop fidgeting. In a world of fidget spinners and endless mobile phone games and apps fishing forces you to disengage from those things. Your hands are busy the whole time. You can also to talk to your partner for added entertainment. Isn't that the definition of a great date? No one is playing with their phones, everyone is relaxing and you are talking to each other.

And if you're lucky you'll also be having a wonderful seafood dinner after.