Make your own weekend fun

It doesn't matter if other people want to do 'nothing'

On a recent weekend I wanted to go to Longwood Gardens. I enjoy botanical gardens, particularly in fall, and I wanted to eat in the lovely beer garden over lunch. There was a dahlia show going on too, which I thought would be fun.

It takes about an hour to get to Longwood, so this was going to be a 4-hour adventure. My kids had zero interest in going. Flowers are always a tough sell, as is an hour in the car. Did that mean it wasn’t going to happen?

Nope. It turns out you can make your own weekend fun, even without other family members.

As I talk to people about their lives, I find one of the biggest sources of family consternation is different appetites for activity. This isn’t the case in my family (my husband tends to like adventures, but he was having a low-key day when I went to Longwood because he was running a half-marathon the next morning). What often happens is that one family member wants to have weekend adventures. Another wants to do “nothing.” Party A, who clearly reads my work, could remind Party B that it is impossible to do nothing. He/she will do something, but probably just not something as fun as if anyone had put some thought into it. But sometimes Party A doesn’t have this conversation, or it isn’t convincing. So what winds up happening is that people putter around the house and spend the weekend half-heartedly doing chores and watching things they didn’t intend to watch in the time outside children’s activities, rather than staking a claim for chosen leisure.

But here’s a realization. Party B, as an adult, cannot be made to do anything. But Party B cannot prevent Party A from doing what he or she wants to do. If Party B wants to do “nothing,” Party A can leave him/her to it — and make plans that don’t involve Party B.

Checking in

Now, there are nice, reasonably collaborative ways to do this that still result in Party B’s inertia not crimping the fun. As in, “I’d like to meet my friend Mary for dinner Saturday. Let me know if you’d like to come. If I don’t hear from you by tomorrow otherwise, I’ll assume we don’t have other plans and you don’t want to come, and so she and I will make our reservation.”

Or, “I’d like to go bike along the river Saturday afternoon after Joe’s soccer game. If you have other ideas, please let me know by tomorrow evening, but if not, I’ll assume that’s OK.”

Figuring out the kids

The only real issue here is if you have children who are too young to watch themselves. Party A going off on a solo adventure might mean that Party B will need to be responsible for the children. Now, if Party A mostly is in charge of the kids during the week…that could be fine. Indeed, that sounds like a decent trade-off. If this is more evenly split, then maybe Party A could offer to trade off hours in a way that Party B would like, as in “After I go on my bike ride, I’ll take Joe during the game Saturday night so you can watch it.” In other cases, you might arrange for small kids to be doing something else. I recently went to another botanical garden, Chanticleer, during a playdate for my 5-year-old at another child’s house.

But in any case, reaching consensus with family members is tough. When some people don’t want to do things, that doesn’t mean others can’t do things. As long as people get the sort of leisure they want, there’s no need to require everybody to do everything together — or to not do things just because one person (or a set of people) doesn’t want to. You can make your own weekend fun, whatever everyone else wants to do.