11 Fall Date Ideas For Clinically Depressed Married Couples Who No Longer Love Each Other

Every year around this time, millions of Americans collectively cream their britches over the allure of quintessential "fall activities" and "fall date ideas." As soon as Labor Day comes to an end, verified journalists with 2.8K followers and Odyssey Online writers with dorm curfews gallop to their decorated MacBooks at lightning speeds to bust out the same exact listicle.

The problem with these articles, besides the fact that they're recycled garbage, is that they only cater and appeal to active couples who enjoy each other's presence enough to do shitty activities together. Here's a list of realistic fall date ideas for the lazier, unhappier, and less enthused couples out there.

1. Go apple picking
1. Go to the grocery store to purchase apples while your spouse stays home and masturbates (or vice versa)

Eliminate all the painstaking bullshit that comes with manually picking apples from inconveniently-located tree branches at overcrowded public orchards, and just non-mutually buy a pre-bagged bundle of them from a local supermarket. Spice up the date by having a best-of-three "rock, paper, scissors" competition to determine who has to make the trip and who gets to stay home and have an underwhelming, self-induced orgasm for the first time in 3–6 weeks.

Apple ideas (off the top of my head): Red Delicious, McIntosh, Honeycrisp, Granny Smith

2. Go to the pumpkin patch
2. Pretend to google "pumpkin patches near me" and then feign disappointment while telling your partner "the only one within 30 miles of us doesn't open until next weekend."

Avoid spending an unbearable amount of time struggling to carry around oversized gourds in a sprawling field filled with screaming preschoolers with undiagnosed ADHD, and just straight up not do that while pretending like you "made an attempt" to do something mildly romantic with your spouse who had no desire to actually go to a pumpkin patch with you anyway.

3. Go to a corn maze
3. Take turns individually walking through the woods for extended periods of time

Eliminate the complete and utter absence of fun and thrills that comes with being temporarily trapped inside a convoluted wall of crops with someone who brings you absolutely no joy, and just take turns spending alone time getting lost in a nearby woods or forested area. Spice things up by timing each other and seeing who can spend the longest time in the woods without coming home. Try to break your personal records next fall.

4. Carve pumpkins
4. Chop wood 

Head out back with an axe and just go to fucking town on various sized logs and tree trunks. It feels good to use physical force and aggression to permanently destruct something, doesn't it? Is that a rush of excitement you feel? Not quite. But it beats tediously engraving poorly-drawn facial features into a pumpkin that will be decomposed or smashed to a pulp within 48 hours. Spice things up by dressing up like an authentic lumberjack/lumberjill and suffering near-fatal injuries.

5. Make a warm fall dinner together
5. Go to Panera Bread together

Make the short trip to Panera and order a fall-themed dish like autumn squash soup even though that's not what you're craving. Go to the bathroom and sit in the stall while your partner waits with that buzzer thing. Periodically make passive aggressive comments like "you enjoying that?" to express how annoyed you are by the sound of your spouse loudly slurping their soup. Shoot them down when they mention that they want to get a cookie to-go by saying "We have Oreos at home" even though you ate the last five before leaving the house.

6. Tailgate a college football game
6. Pregame your uncoordinated child's flag football game

Let's face it. Genetically, your son probably has, at best, about a zero percent chance of ever being a semi decent football player at any level. Numb the embarrassing feeling of having to watch him tripping over clovers and hopelessly flailing his pudgy arms at opposing players' flags by arriving at the game severely intoxicated. The smile on his face when he sees both of you together—not looking completely miserable—will be absolutely priceless (aside from the $250 you blew on his registration fee and Nike Vapor Shark 4s).

7. Go to a haunted house
7. Leave your front door wide open for a night

Avoid wasting time and money traveling to a haunted house, waiting in a long line amongst ornery preteens and their obliviously barred-out suburban mothers, and walking through a tightly-packed public space while high school theater kids dressed up in costumes attempt to scare you and your unamused spouse. Instead, just make your own house scary to be in for an entire night by leaving your front door wide open for burglars, serial killers, arsonists, rabid coyotes, and sexual pests to enter at their own will. Spice things up and surprise your partner by purposely causing a carbon monoxide leak in your home without telling them. Leave for the night.

8. Cuddle up and watch a scary movie together
8. Keep a comfortable distance and watch your wedding video together

Avoid physically feeling the grotesque contours of each other's aging bodies and pretending to "feel something" during the predictable jump-scare scenes of an outdated horror movie you've seen 17 times, and watch something that's truly horrifying: real footage of a time in your lives when you still had a hairline and she still smiled. Look at you two being genuinely happy while surrounded by friends who you don't communicate with anymore. It's only been like five or six years. What the fuck happened?

9. Go to an escape room together
9. Make a homemade escape room for your spouse

I'm not quite white enough to know what an actual escape room is, but I'd imagine it's some type of room that's difficult to escape. Sounds like something you can just create in your own home, right?
Once she's trapped in the room and the door is thoroughly locked, padlocked, and boarded up, let the games begin and head to the liquor store. Her general lack of tactile skills, problem solving abilities, and adequate tools will give you, at minimum, enough time to finish off a few bottles of vodka before she eventually escapes.

10. Run a 5K together on Thanksgiving
10. Take 50mg of adderall and convince your spouse's family that you enjoy spending time with them on Thanksgiving

Avoid competing in an organized foot race on a major holiday like a complete dickhead, and burn that same amount of calories while also feeling a semblance of artificial euphoria. No one will question why you haven't eaten a single bite of food when you're enthusiastically helping with household tasks, cleaning things that don't need cleaned, and making elaborate plans to go white water rafting with your brother-in-law in May.

11. Bake a fall dessert together
11. Waddle into a gas station and use the sticky, Dr. Pepper-stained quarters and dimes from your cup holder to pay for a handful of those suspicious looking Hostess fruit pies that no one else has bought since the mid '90s.

You know what I'm talking about.

Spice up the date by wrapping the yummy pies in tin foil and warming them up in the microwave for 3-5 minutes while the two of you go outside and take in all the beautiful fall foliage.