Couples are taught all the time that they need to spend more time together. Find time for one another. Prioritize their relationship. Plan date nights. Go on vacation. Dedicate one evening each week to doing something special.

This is all good advice. The only difficulty is: A number of couples are already spending a lot of time together.

They wake up in bed together. Eat breakfast at the same table. Work from the same home. Have dinner together. Sit on the same sofa. See the same television. Get to bed about the same time each night.

That can be hours and hours each day of being with each other. So why is it that a couple that spends four hours in the same room feels as if they haven’t spent any time together?

Maybe the issue is not the length of time. Maybe it’s what’s inside of it. Like with everything else, maybe the problem is not quantity, but quality. 

Being together is not the same as doing things together

Imagine a perfectly average evening. One person is scrolling on Instagram. The other is watching TV. Sometimes one person puts the other one onto a reel. There is some debate as to whether the washing machine has completed its cycle. One of you wonders what’s going on in the show because you’ve been staring at your phone for ten minutes. Then you both go to sleep.

It’s been the whole evening together. Technically, But if anyone should ask,

“What’d you guys do last night?” The answer would likely be: “Nothing.”

Interesting term. Nothing. Nothing, even when three hours have passed while you were sitting next to the person you have chosen to spend your life with.

We have mistaken closeness for connection

Living together makes it easy to spend time together. Connection is different. A connection demands a certain amount of attention. This is when you both are in the same moment. 

Making something with each other. Playing a game. Going for a stroll. Fighting over a crossword clue. Dancing like crazy. Giving each other massages. Talking without glancing at another screen at the same time.

None of those things inherently demand *more* time. They just have a different approach to time. 

Twenty minutes may change an evening

Visualize the two of you two hours together tonight. You don’t have to change the whole night. 

Spend twenty minutes. Put both phones down. Bring beverages. Play three hands of cards. Sit on the veranda outside. Learn a silly dance. Rub one another for fifteen minutes. Go for a walk around the block, hand in hand.

Then return to Netflix if you want. You are still watching television. You relaxed regardless. You haven’t turned your weekday into a relationship-improvement seminar. But now, if anybody asks you what you did last night, you have something to say: “We tried learning salsa in the living room. It was a mess.”

That’s an evening you would remember even if the other hundred minutes went to Netflix.

Build relationships with little moments

We tend to put too much weight on the major things like anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, weekend jaunts, fancy dinners and the like. They’re memorable because they’re odd. 

But most partnerships don’t live there. They’re lived at 8:37 on a Wednesday night. They’re lived while dinner cooks. They’ve lived through that odd hour between ending work and selecting what to eat. They are lived on Sunday afternoons when both of you don’t have anything really pressing to do.

There are hundreds of these little time pockets each year. Most of the time we don’t notice them since they don’t seem important. But perhaps that’s simply where relationships grow dull or remain exciting.

Do not save everything for the weekend

Somehow the week has become a time for administration. Monday to  Thursday goes to work, eating, curing, resting and repeating. Then Friday comes and we’re meant to suddenly be interesting individuals. “What do you want to do this weekend? That’s a lot of pressure to put on Saturday.

What if Wednesday got something as well? Not a fancy restaurant meal. Not show tickets. Just anything. Cook dinner in the dark. Go get ice cream after 10. Read something to each other. Snap goofy pictures. Put on music and dance. Do something a bit intimate. Do something neither of you anticipated to be doing when you woke up in the morning. Wednesday doesn’t need a plan. It needs a break.

Store phones somewhere else

An experiment worth doing, and painful. Next time you are out together, count how many times one of you pulls out a phone. Not because anything important happened. Because there was a space there. A conversation paused. Somebody went to the toilet. The television was a little boring. Your hand went almost instinctively hunting for something more engaging. Our phones are remarkably good at filling vacant times.

But there were other things to fill the vacant times. You could have said you were bored. You could have kissed. You could have thought of something to do. Even sitting in the balcony would have been better than picking up your phones.

Boredom isn’t necessarily something that needs mending. Sometimes boredom is the five minutes before someone utters: “I have an idea.”

Quality time doesn’t need to be special

Another reason the word “quality time” isn’t especially helpful. That sounds so righteous. Like you should be sitting opposite each other having a meaningful talk about your hopes and anxieties.

Sometimes you don’t need to know each other better. Sometimes you need to “enjoy each other more actively”.

Save the sofa

This is not an argument against relationships that are comfortable. The reverse. Few things are better than being able to do nothing at all with someone and enjoy their company.

Keep that one. Keep Netflix. Keep scrolling side by side. Keep the nights when you’re both tired, hardly talk. You don’t need constant entertainment in a relationship. But don’t confuse ease with connection.

Sometimes, before you go back to your routine of the evening, ask a different question. Ask: “What are we going to do for the next twenty minutes?”

You might discover that you already have all the time you needed. You just had to do something with it.

Spurkle helps couples get more out of the time they already spend together. You don’t need another free evening. You need an idea.