REXBURG—The new Spring semester at BYU-Idaho brings with it a new opportunity to bring a date to the university-sponsored Date Night. The theme for this semester’s Date Night is “Around the World,” and will offer students an opportunity to participate in games and activities rooted in foreign and domestic culture.
The event will be held on campus this Friday from 7 to 10 p.m.
Kennedy Meyer, a student director for the large-scale team for Campus Life, said Date Night is for any student, and it isn’t exclusively for students who are dating.
“But really, Date Night is supposed to be a fun, free date that you can go on to get to know someone or to get to know your spouse or your fiancé better,” Meyer said.
Meyer said the purpose of Date Night is to promote a healthy dating culture. She said people grow together when they do things together.
“I think it shows that there’s multiple ways that you can date somebody and that it’s not just like an exact formula of like ‘We have to go play spike ball’ or ‘We have to go and paint a Bob Ross picture,’” Meyer said.
Students are invited to dress to represent a country or culture that means something to them.
Meyer said the Campus Life Department is working hard to transform campus to represent as many cultures as possible for the event. The featured countries include Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Polynesia as well as the USA.
Meyer said taking a date can provide an opportunity to learn a lot about someone’s interests.
“Oh, does this person handle needing to wait a long time? Well, are they a patient person? Or you can kind of see things like what things that they—what things excite them, you know, because there’s a big list of things that you can go and do,” Meyer said.
Meyer said Campus Life is working creatively to solve problems with long lines at Date Night by implementing activities that are bigger, or activities that are fun to watch while students are waiting to participate, such as a “Hot Ones” hot sauce challenge that will take place in the Crossroads. The challenge has two ways that a couple can win. One person will be participating in the challenge, and the other will guess at how far the participant will make it down the line of hot sauces. If they guess it right, they win. Alternatively, a couple can win if the participant makes it through all of the challenge sauces.
“We’ll also have milk, you know, so people don’t die,” Meyer said.
As with all Date Nights, the price of admission is a date. A student only needs to bring a partner to participate in all the activities.
For information about event specifics and the locations of individual events, find Date Night online.