HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: So, what do people do at night?

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Scrabble, sex, streaming.

Cooking, cocktails, cleaning.

Parenting, phone time, Pilates.

What are you doing between the hours of, let's say, 7-10pm?

Watch: Jessie, Holly and Emily discuss 'otroverts' on Mamamia Out Loud. Post continues after video.

This is the question posed by an iconic Outlouder called Renee, who went into our podcast Facebook group and asked:

What do people do at night? I'm sick of mindless Netflix and scrolling on my phone! My Hubby and I are in the same room but aren't really interacting. What's the alternative? Chess? Puzzles? What does everyone else do?

What, indeed?

The answers to this question were like one of my favourite childhood pastimes — looking in other people's windows. Yes, I am aware that makes me sound like a creepy child, and perhaps I was, but let's go with the word curious because it's less confronting. The realisation that behind every window in my street were other people's stories, consciousness, secrets, fears and feelings was a serious awakening for me as a kid. Maybe as a writer, maybe as a nosey parker. But ever since, a whole lifetime since, I have wanted to know how other people fill their time.

Of course, What Do You Do At Night? was perhaps a more interesting question before the answer was the same for everyone: I look at my phone.

But as Renee's question suggests, very many of us are trying to find ways to fill the evening hours without being alone with our screens, even in a house full of people.

Full disclosure: Often, in my house, we are all on our phones for a while after dinner. Often, I will shout "get off your phone" at my daughter while looking down at the one in my hand. Or we'll all be watching a movie together ('wholesome!') and I'll be slapping my daughter's screen out of her hand while mine vibrates in between the cushions, always in arm's reach.

But I understand Renee's angst about too much parallel phone time. It doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel restful, it doesn't feel connecting, to sit next to my partner Brent after a long day of looking at a screen, looking at a screen. Not all the time.

In the comment thread of this question, the Outlouders had many answers, except for one. Amongst the encouragement to pick up a hobby, get out salsa dancing, and to play Connections (Connections really is excellent), a young innocent asked the kind of question a long-single person might ask a long-married one. "Why don't you have sex? It's right there, on tap, in your house!"

And no one seemed to think this was a good idea. Not with children and teenagers stalking the home, rejecting bedtimes, making requests and offering cutting feedback at all kinds of strange hours of the evening. Not with the exhaustion. And the full stomachs.

So, what do people do at night? For me, each era has brought a different answer. I used to go out. Most nights of the week. Drinks, dinner, something for work… a crammed diary and a midnight-to-2am movable curfew and a mild hangover every day from Wednesday.

Then there were the Bedtime Years. The decade or so when the time between walking in the door from work and getting the kids to sleep were manic and bath-splashed and chaotic, culminating in an 8pm collapse when silence finally settled after several false starts. Sometimes, often, I used to work then, cracking open the computer to catch up on what I'd left at work that day, or writing, or getting a jump on tomorrow. Those were the tail-chasing years with no empty moments.

Now, we're just beyond the babysitter era. We can go out, if we want to, but we live in a small town with few after-dark options. Our socialising happens when it happens, in the golden hour of late afternoon or early evening, down at the local pub or out at a vineyard for pizza or in a friend's backyard.

Listen to Mamamia Out Loud where Holly talks more about this topic. Post continues after audio.

Nights are mostly for home, now.

So what do we do? We cook. We clean up. We fold washing. So. Much. Washing.

We watch family TV (when your oldest hits somewhere around 10, suddenly, the genius of the phrase "it's a family show" is revealed to you), or a movie cut up into short sessions over several nights. We nag about homework. We taxi the teenager to and from where she needs to be. On weekends, Brent and I go to the pub at what I would once have called "early doors", walking around the corner as the sky changes, having a cold drink in the beer garden, talking about something that needs talking about or doing the weekend newspaper quiz. We choose an adult co-watching show to measure out over the next few weeks.

I might worry that we are Steve and Miranda in the first season of And Just Like That, only without the dessert tray.

On a weekend, we'll cook something decent and sometimes sit around the firepit with some music on and try to interest the kids in marshmallows or Cards Against Humanity (Family Edition, obvs). We do our local trivia competition. And yes, we scroll our phones on the couch or in bed.

I still sometimes work at night, propped up on cushions in bed, disappearing into my laptop as teens and the dog wander in and out, sprawling across me as if I summoned them with my need to focus on something else. And then I read, always, before sleep.

Sometimes, sometimes, Brent and I go out for dinner with friends. Or come to the city and do something from the old times, like see a band. If it's a birthday or a pre-holiday night or a Really Can't Be F-ed night, we take the kids to the pub or club for dinner because we don't live in a place with delivery food. Imagine that.

Typing all this crystallises just how dull and suburban we have become. Or just how content and calm we have become. One of those.

If school-aged me peered through my living room window from the street and saw us — soft pants, on the lounge with my feet in Brent's lap, a dog trying to push between us to drain some affection, a teenager schlumping past with a snack in hand — what would she think?

She'd think: This is what old people do at night. How cute.

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Feature image: Instagram @wainwrightholly.