Being a family-life columinist has its perks.

During interviews with highly qualified professionals in the field, I am often able to slip in a question I need answered or a problem I need solved.

When my grade-school son refused to have anything in his lunch except pepperoni sandwiches with barbecue sauce, I asked a pediatric nutritionist I was interviewing on another topic if she thought this was unhealthy.

After an uncomfortable pause, she said, "See if he will go for a cheese sandwich just once a week.

"But if he doesn't, don't worry about it. It won't kill him."

Likewise, I once complained to a marriage counselor I was interviewing that all my husband ever wanted to do was go to the movies, while I felt we should be going out to dinner and having meaningful conversations.

"Do you like movies?" she asked.

"Well, yeah. I love movies," I said. But we weren't getting any outstanding marital issues resolved while both of us were looking at a big screen.

"You know what?" she said. "Go to the movies."

In the long run, she said, it would do more for our marriage than arguing about the kids or the credit card bills over an expensive dinner.

I thought of that conversation when a recent New York Times headline suggested that long-married couples need to change up their regular date nights to spark the love chemicals in the brain.

Going to the same restaurant with the same old friends is deadening, the news story said, and researchers can prove it with brain scans.

Meanwhile, doing something new and different -- going to a play, taking an art class together -- can release brain chemicals and fire up the same circuits that glowed during early romantic love.

It is more than brain chemistry. The New York Times said that those who had a more exciting date night reported higher marital satisfaction.

I remember when the kids were young and a night out -- we never managed to schedule a regular "date night" -- was so rare that we considered hiring a babysitter just so we could drive around the block and fall asleep in the car.

Dinner out with friends -- all of whom were under the same work-family pressures -- seemed an impossible dream.

Anyone suggesting that such a stale idea for an evening out would do nothing to rekindle love would have been met with an incredulous stare.

Food and adult company were the goals -- not the sting of Cupid's arrow.

But those kids are all gone now. Just when all our friends are available for dinner any night of the week, we learn that it might not be good for our marriages.

I have to say that after all the trials and tribulations these marriages have weathered, to suggest that dinner out with friends is not helpful seems laughable.

But with a tip of my hat to science, I e-mailed the New York Times story to my husband to see if it would spark his imagination.

He said he agreed. After 25 years, we certainly needed to change up our routine of dinner out with the same friends at the same Italian restaurant.

And he promised to take me to a hockey game.

susan.reimer@baltsun.com