IT COULD happen so easily.

When you started dating you were on your best behaviour – freshly scrubbed, impeccably dressed, charming and witty.

You were always up for meeting your new sweetheart. Even if you’d had a tough day at work you’d find the energy to get it together for your romantic meal/trip to the cinema/chat over a glass of wine.

Then suddenly you realise you’re both sitting in front of the telly in your track suits, eating your dinner off trays and having a conversation about whose turn it is to do the laundry.

When my boyfriend moved in with me this was one of my big fears – that we’d go from being spontaneous and romantic to Wayne and Waynetta slob.

OK, so I’ve never been someone who sits in front of the telly in a tracksuit so being in a live-in relationship was unlikely to result in this nightmare vision.

But there is a danger when you live with someone that because you see them all the time, your time together becomes less precious.

So how do you balance the practicalities of living with someone without totally losing the best behaviour, best outfit, going out and doing something different aspect of dating?

The answer would seem to be ‘date nights’.

This is the road my boyfriend and I have gone down, anyway.

We’re both quite busy and without scheduling time together would be in danger of only seeing each other when I flake out on the sofa after the gym or he meanders in after a night out.

We’re not massively ridged about it but generally have at least one school night a week, while weekends vary from not seeing each other at all to ones filled with day trips and dinners for two.

My friend Dave took a somewhat different approach with one of his girlfriends. He says: “When I lived with an ex we had arranged evenings NOT to see each other, and spend time with friends/ family etc. It stopped us going stir crazy in the bedsit we lived in at the time!”

My friend May and her partner are pretty structured about date nights. She says: “My partner works from Monday through to Thursday evenings so we don’t even eat together then, so the evenings in which we are together tend to have more significance than might otherwise be the case.

We reserve Fridays for socialising but have mostly managed to keep Saturday as our date night. We usually don’t do anything special; he cooks the dinner and then we watch a DVD. I think it’s important to set aside time which is specifically ‘together time’.”

I’m happy to be flexible about when my boyfriend and I have together time as long as we do have it, whether that’s going out to the theatre or staying in with a DVD and a bottle of wine.

After all, we didn’t get together because of a shared love of washing dishes, eating dinner off trays and channel hopping.