the secret to fantastic dates.

We just had an epic weekend of successful dates. Granted, we've sort of already decided we liked each other, so this post has nothing to do with having a romantic date. That's up to you. But beyond that, I can confidently say that the secret to fantastic dates lies in two things:



Seriously, saving money makes everything more fun. There are obviously countless ways to do this, but these two are the easiest for me. Please indulge me as I show how they made our weekend awesome.

First, we celebrated the end of the work week with dinner at Againn - a delicious gastropub with cocktails that are both incredibly satisfying to drink, and cleverly named (I had a Churchill Downer this time). We had a Living Social certificate that gave us $60 of food and drink for $30 (for those who don't know how Living Social works). With that kind of a deal, it's impossible not to feel good about your meal, even if it's not objectively yummy, like ours was.



From there we went to the Shakespeare Theater with our friends Gabe and Abby to see Merchant of Venice (possibly my favorite Shakespeare play). Here, because we're young people living in a city that wants its young people to be "cultured", we were able to get great tickets for $15 through their youth program. I may not feel like a "youth" most of the time, but when it gets me $15 tickets, I can switch gears very quickly.



[Now in the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that we had one Groupon mishap. We went to a bar afterwards for which we also had a coupon, but Will's phone (which had the Groupon on it) died. But I'm going to count that more as a technology failure than a Groupon one. Plus we still ended up with beers, so nothing could be too terribly wrong.]

Saturday night we used super cheap movie tickets that we got on Living Social to see Midnight in Paris, which we had been wanting to see for awhile. It was charming and whimsical...and about $20 cheaper than it normally would have been. Score, score, score. [Also, you should see the movie. It's just fun...and chock full of great actors clearly having a good time.]



And this morning, we rounded things out with brunch at Union Street Public House in Old Town. I've mentioned this place before - it's definitely one of our favorites. And when, thanks to Groupon, we can pay $20 for mimosas, eggs benedict, and a Monte Carlo sandwich, you have to admit that that's a pretty solid date.



Reading back over this post, I feel like my thoughts can be summarized by a character from one of my favorite books: "If one were truly thrifty in small ways, one could make up for it in large ways, such as extravagance." That sounds like a winning formula to me!