How To Make Romance Part Of Your Day-To-Day

A D&NKQ date night a few years back

While planning our honeymoons and other getaways, we collaborate on what sorts of experiences we’d like to create for ourselves and each other. Maybe a higher energy city experience or a lower energy sort of “check out” environment, where we decide hour-by-hour how we want to create the next hour. We agree on our intention for each honeymoon ahead of time, usually writing a sentence about the energy and context, plus some supporting points that cover what we’d like to experience…and not experience. Then, we shake on it and carefully plan our getaway to match our intention. We also talk about it a lot beforehand to remind ourselves of our intentions and to ensure that what we plan is consistent with them…all the while building sweet anticipation.

After observing that more people than ever are using the Proximity and O.Henry Hotels for romantic getaways and thinking about our own rather methodical approach to “together time,” we decided to collaborate with our colleagues to increase the already-high appeal of these hotels as romantic retreats. We’ve improved the lighting so that most any mood you can imagine can be set. We’ve also improved the acoustics and connectivity of our stereos. With these controls, you can make the rooms brighter than ever; and when the time is right, you can set a romantic mood by turning just a few knobs to attain umpteen different settings. In addition, all of the bedrooms now have stereos with Bluetooth® connectivity. It is like you are the lighting and sound director at a theater—you create the ambiance you both desire!

A few months back, Nancy and I slipped out of town for one of our honeymoons. As we were stopped at the third cycle of a traffic light on our way home it hit us: We should have stayed closer to home. This was a particularly hard forehead slap, because we’d paid higher prices than in past years at similar places, the traffic wasn’t fun, and we were spending time commuting that we could have spent in a context more in keeping with our intentions. I’m not making this up. We just looked at each other and had a bit of a self-deprecating laugh.

We remembered how much we’ve enjoyed staying at the Proximity and O.Henry—and how we are always surprised that once we get to our room, it doesn’t feel like we are “at work” or even “in town.” We’ve learned we can check out by checking in! As we got out of the traffic, we kept talking about it and decided we owed it to our neighbors to offer some hints about how to use QW’s nearby hotels and restaurants for romantic getaways. Like us, they might end up having even more fun and might not spend as much! We reasoned that if we, of all people, had neglected to consider these wonderful hotels for our romantic getaway, others might too.