About a year after our son was born, my wife, Akiko, and I vowed that we would have a date night every month. It was the kind of commitment made by thousands of couples every day, with the very idea of a date night now so cliché, it was made into a middling movie of the same name that thousands of couples have wasted at least one date night watching. (To be fair, Tina Fey was pretty good in it.)
After the turmoil of childbirth, months of sleeplessness, hormonal whiplash and, most significantly, the sudden re-arrangement of your lives around the simple but incessant needs of a fragile new human being, the idea that you might want to regularly reconnect with the person with whom you embarked on this journey is a no-brainer. But you can?t: That person doesn?t exist. When Aki and I went on our first date night (dinner and a movie, with my in-laws babysitting), we made some familiar rules: We wouldn?t talk about Owen. We would not look at photos of Owen. We would not talk about our favourite photos of Owen. But it was our first night away from him, and we kept our phones on. A few minutes into dinner, Aki?s phone buzzed. Her father texted a photo of Owen asleep in his grandmother?s arms. We cooed. Aki put her phone away. Fifteen minutes later, another picture?this time of Owen asleep in his grandfather?s arms. More cooing. Aki put her phone away again. But then our conversation shifted. We didn?t talk about Owen exactly, but we did talk about all the different ways that life wi...