Bucket List Ideas for Couples, Sorted by This Saturday, This Year, and Someday

Most couples make a bucket list once. It happens late, usually on a good night, and it produces about fifteen items in a note on somebody's phone. Neither of you opens the note again.

You did not stop wanting any of it. Look at what got written down. Japan. The northern lights. A house with land. Learn to sail. Every line is a someday line, so the list has no first move, and nothing on it gets crossed off in the year that follows.

So this one is sorted by when you could do it: this Saturday, this season, this year, and someday. Someday comes last and it is the shortest section here, which is the reverse of how these lists get built.

There is a second problem with the list you already made, and it is the more interesting one. Some of what is on it is one person's list wearing the word we. The last section is about those items, because they are the best thing on the page and most couples quietly trade them away.

Why the list you already made stopped working

Two failure modes, and almost every abandoned couples bucket list has both.

Everything on it cost a year. A list whose cheapest item is a flight cannot be started on a Tuesday. Nothing gets crossed off in the first twelve months, so it never delivers the small win that would have made either of you open it again. The list needs a bottom rung.

One of you wrote most of it. Whoever suggested making a list is usually the one holding the phone, and the one holding the phone types their own ideas first. The other person agrees to things at eleven at night. Six months later neither of you can remember which items were whose, and the ones that were never really shared are the ones that stall.

What the research supports, and what it does not

Arthur Aron and colleagues published five studies on couples doing things together in 2000, and three of them were randomized experiments rather than surveys.

In the largest, 63 married couples were assigned to one of three groups. One group did a novel and faintly ridiculous physical task: strapped to each other at one wrist and one ankle, crawling the length of a gym mat and back over a barrier, carrying a pillow they were not allowed to touch with hands, arms or teeth. A second group rolled a ball back and forth on the same mats for seven minutes. A third did nothing together at all. The couples given the novel task reported higher relationship quality afterwards than either of the others.

Without that third group you could argue the boring task had dragged people down; with it, the exciting one is doing the lifting. Two limits, stated plainly: it was one seven-minute lab task and nobody has tested whether writing a list down does anything, and the comparison was novel against dull rather than expensive against cheap, so it is no argument for spending money.

What it supports is narrower and more useful. On a shared list, the axis that matters is new rather than nice. Keep the strange items and drop the ones that are a slightly better version of a night you already have.

How to build one, in about twenty minutes

Five steps. The first and the last make the difference, and they are the two people skip.

1. Write separately, in silence

   Ten each, no talking and no reading over a shoulder. A list made out loud converges on whatever the more enthusiastic person says first, and you will both mistake that convergence for agreement.

   Ten is the right number because the tenth one is where it gets honest. The first three are the ones you would say at a dinner party.

2. Read them out without commenting

   One of you reads all ten, then the other reads all ten. No reactions in between and no negotiating. Every reaction you give is information the other person will use to quietly edit their remaining nine.

3. Score everything, including your own

   Zero to five stars, both of you, on every item on both lists. Scoring your own matters as much as scoring theirs, because it separates the things you want from the things you said.

   Two five-star items and a two-star item tells you something. "Sounds good" tells you nothing, which is why the exercise uses numbers.

4. Write down whose each one is

   Every item gets a name against it. Items with both names are your near-term list. Items with one name are what the last section of this page is about, and they deserve more attention than the shared ones, not less.

5. Put a date on one of them before you close the list

   Take the highest-scoring thing that could be done inside a month and give it a real date on a calendar you both look at. A day and a number, booked the way you would book a dentist.

   This is the step everybody skips, and skipping it is why you are reading an article about bucket lists instead of rereading your own.

The four groups, and what each one asks of you

Couples bucket list ideas you could do this Saturday

Half your list should look like this. Nothing here needs a booking, savings or time off, which makes these the only ones with a real chance of being crossed off in the next month.

• Watch the sunrise somewhere neither of you has watched it. Look up the time first. In June that is a four-something alarm and in December it is a civilised seven, and the difference decides whether this happens at all.
• Cook the national dish of a country neither of you has been to, from a recipe written in that country's language with a translation app open. Thirty dollars of groceries and one argument about quantities.
• Take one photograph and commit to retaking it. Same pose, same spot, same week every year. The first one is dull and the fifth one is the best thing in the house.
• Give one of you the entire day. They plan every hour of it; the other gets no input and no complaints. Swap next month. You find out quickly what the other person thinks a good day is made of.
• Eat at the place you have driven past for six years. Under $60, and the odds are genuinely even.
• Read the same book at the same pace, two copies, each of you annotating for the other, swapped at the end. About $16 secondhand.
• Sleep somewhere that is not your bed and not a hotel. The garden, the balcony, the floor of the living room, with both phones charging in another room.
• Write down how you met, separately, then read both versions. They will not match, and the parts that do not match are the good part.

Ideas that need a booking and about a month

These cost real money and, more to the point, a date you both defend against everything else that will come for it. Book the date first and work the details out afterwards, because the reverse order is how these die.

• Learn something neither of you can do. Pottery nights run about $50 to $90 a head; glassblowing and blacksmithing roughly double that. Being equally incompetent at something is a shortcut to a good evening.
• See a band you loved at nineteen, while they are still touring. Check whether they still are. Frequently the answer is no, which is the argument for this whole page. $60 to $200.
• Sleep somewhere with no street address. Fire lookouts, lighthouse cottages, mountain huts. Most release dates on a fixed calendar and the good ones go within minutes, so the skill is knowing the release date rather than having the money.
• Eat at the restaurant you have been calling too expensive, booked thirty days out for the first seating of the evening. Early tables are the ones nobody else is fighting over, and the room is still quiet enough to hear each other in.
• Go to the thing that happens one weekend a year near you. The harvest, the boil, the festival, the migration. The constraint is the calendar rather than the money, which is what makes them easy to miss forever.
• Get portraits taken that are not wedding photos, of the two of you as you look right now. $250 to $450, and the reason to do it this year is that you will not look like this in ten.
• Learn to sail, or crew for somebody who already can. A weekend keelboat course runs $200 to $400 each, and clubs are usually short of crew, which is the free version.
• Book a hotel in your own city. One night, no itinerary, both phones left somewhere you would have to stand up to reach.

Ideas worth a year of saving

This is where most couples' entire list currently lives. Two or three at a time is plenty, and the rest of the list should be paying you back in the meantime.

• Walk something with a name. A stage of the Camino, the West Highland Way, a section of the Appalachian Trail. Two weeks, and boots you broke in months earlier.
• Learn enough of a language to order dinner in it, then go and order dinner in it. The trip is the exam, and having a date for the exam is the only reason anybody ever finishes a language app.
• Get certified to dive. Two weekends of coursework and a few hundred dollars each, though the dive shop sets that price rather than the certifying body, so it varies more than you would expect.
• Spend a month somewhere else, working. The only item here that pays back part of its own cost, and the one most likely to be possible now and impossible in three years.
• Get the dog, if the dog is genuinely on both lists. The most expensive item here over its lifetime, and the only one that can be a mistake.
• Go and look for the northern lights, for a week rather than a weekend. The aurora is weather-dependent, so a short trip is a coin toss and a long one is a plan.
• Put the money on one page: what you have, what you owe, and what you are saving it for. Unromantic, and it decides how many of the items above ever happen.

The someday list, and why to write it down anyway

Live abroad for a year. Sail out of sight of land. Be at a World Cup. Take your parents somewhere they have never been, while they can still walk it. The house with the tree.

Keep this section short, and write it down even for the items you privately suspect you will never get to.

Waiting for something you are going to do beats waiting for something you are going to own. Amit Kumar, Matthew Killingsworth and Thomas Gilovich showed that across four studies in Psychological Science in 2014, and we went through those properly in the birthday post. Their participants were individuals buying things rather than couples planning them, so do not stretch it. The waiting is still part of what you get.

A someday item you have said out loud gives you something to bring up in February. One that lives only in your head gives you nothing at all.

If you are long distance

A bucket list does more work at distance than it does up close, and almost nobody writing these lists mentions long distance at all.

One of the things that quietly wears a long-distance relationship down is running out of things to say that are not a recap of your day, which is the argument in our long distance post. A shared list of things you have not done yet is a renewable supply of exactly that conversation.

Two rules make it work apart. Keep a second, shorter list of things you can only do in the same room, and schedule those against the next visit, which turns a reunion into an occasion instead of four days you both feel guilty about wasting. And put one item on the list about closing the distance, with a number attached, even if the number turns out to be wrong. That is the item couples most often leave off, and it decides all the others.

The items only one of you wants

When you read the two lists out, they sort themselves into three piles. Things you both wrote down. Things one of you wrote that the other likes fine. And things one of you wrote that the other quietly does not want to do.

The third pile is the only part of the exercise that tells you something you did not already know, and the usual advice about it is to find the overlap. Follow that advice and you end up with five items, all of them safe, none of them anybody's real dream.

The third pile runs on a different rule. The person whose item it is does it, and the other one comes as a passenger. Going to something because it matters to them, rather than because you want it, is a real way to be in someone's life, and it is most of what a long marriage is made of. You do not have to want the drum circle. You have to be at the drum circle.

Two things keep that fair. You each set a cap, two a year or whatever you can honestly commit to, so nobody's list eats the calendar. And "I will come, and I am not doing the jump" is a complete answer.

Watch for the item somebody wrote down and then took back off the list when they saw the other person's face. That item does not go away. It goes quiet.

The intersection of two people's dreams is usually brunch.

Where to keep the list

Anywhere you will both open. A shared note works. Paper on the fridge works better than most apps, because a list you walk past is a list you read.

We built the version we wanted for ourselves. The Bucket List is one of the games inside a Big Moments membership, and it runs the process at the top of this page: you each add dreams privately, they stay hidden until you both hit reveal, then you rate them together from one to five stars. There is a field for whose dream it is, because the answer matters. Anything you both give four stars or more goes straight into the Cup Draw, where it stops being a list item and becomes a date you drew on a Tuesday.

It ships empty, on purpose. It holds 200 dreams at 140 characters each, and none of them are ours. That is what the ideas above are for.

It sits inside a paid membership rather than the free look, so the honest version of this pitch is to take the free month first and decide afterwards. If you would rather stay on the ideas end of things, our date night idea generator is free and needs no account.

Claim your free month of Big Moments PremiumJust your email. No card, no commitment.

Research referenced

• Aron, A., Norman, C. C., Aron, E. N., McKenna, C., and Heyman, R. E., “Couples' Shared Participation in Novel and Arousing Activities and Experienced Relationship Quality,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78(2), 273 to 284 (2000). The experiment described above is Study 4: 63 married couples, three groups, including a no-activity control.
• Kumar, A., Killingsworth, M. A., and Gilovich, T., “Waiting for Merlot: Anticipatory Consumption of Experiential and Material Purchases,” Psychological Science 25(10), 1924 to 1931 (2014).