This text is a part of SELF’s Maintain It Sizzling bundle, a set of content material that celebrates love and lust. All through February, we’ll be doling out recommendation and inspiration for feeling scorching, getting sexy, and nurturing romantic relationships.

Kevin had a mission from the second we lastly bought our cramped-but-cute piece of the suburban pie: to show our residence’s cement-floored, cobwebby storage right into a bar akin to the beloved Manhattan dives of our youth. Although it took a great deal of strategizing, cash (wooden partitions à la McSorley’s—costlier than you would possibly suppose!), eBay trawling, and pandemic hours, he did it. 

The result’s the GarBar: a darkish, traditional, surprisingly stylish refuge plastered with gig posters and classic pennants, the place my husband reads novels, watches baseball, and listens to dad rock—and the place all our associates need to hang around, even within the winter. (Area heaters assist with the chilliness, however I do advocate a jacket.)

When baseball season’s over, our associates have gone, and we’re the GarBar’s solely patrons, it turns into a distinct kind of place. It’s unusual to say so, however a few of the most tender, electrical moments of this period of our marriage have occurred on the market. 

We found the amorous pull of the GarBar by chance one night time. I usually desire to do my studying in mattress, however Kevin requested me to come back out and weigh in on some new artwork he’d put up—a Pavement poster, a tin beer signal, I overlook—and, earlier than I knew it, he was pouring me a second drink as we laughed, seated sideways on the bar, my ft in his lap. An early-aughts indie rock band was on the stereo, summer time rain fell in sheets past the roll-up door, he appeared so good within the faint gentle of the Edison bulbs he’d hung…you may guess the place the night took us. 

Now, after we attain a type of inevitable dips in closeness that happens in any long-term relationship, and our conversations develop into utilitarian (Did you set the Shipt order by means of? Are you able to deliver rest room paper upstairs?) relatively than intellectually stimulating or flirty or probing, a “date” within the bar after our 5-year-old son has gone to sleep is a dependable remedy. It’s additionally cost-effective—no babysitter’s wanted, as long as you sometimes look on the child monitor app, and there’s no markup on the booze.