Oh my God, I don’t have time for my marriage! How could I have missed it? After all, I knew that it’s hard to have a relationship if you don’t have time for it. Time is the air love needs to breathe. But when you’re suffocating slowly, it can take a long while to realize what’s really going on.Extract from The Weekend Marriage by Mira Kirshenbaum, my next 'look forward' read.
It’s not that I’d been working every minute. But I saw that the pace of my life, plus my husband’s busy life, meant we were too often like ships passing in the night. No, change that. Like two New York City taxis that every now and then find themselves waiting at the same red light together.
This is the weekend marriage. It’s the marriage most of us have these days: during a typical week you have only minutes, not hours, to spend feeling like a couple—getting close, having fun together, feeling intimate. It’s not one of those rare situations where one person works in a far-off city Monday through Friday. In the weekend marriage you and your spouse sleep under the same roof most nights but you rarely have enough time for each other except on weekends. If then.
Few of us are exempt. Whoever is busiest or most drained determines how much time the two of you have together. If he or she has only a few minutes a day for the relationship, that’s all the relationship gets.
I knew in my bones that neglect is how you kill a relationship, just the way neglect kills pets, plants, and other vulnerable living things. And we’re right to be scared. I’ve learned that the weekend marriage is now the most important and least understood reason why couples end up getting divorced.
Like many of us, I felt guilty. What kind of person was I to make my relationship such a low priority?
It didn’t seem fair that there’s no time left for love if you live the way you’re supposed to—work hard, keep up your home, spend time with family, and do all the other things that come along with being responsible and living a normal life.
But it wasn’t just about not having time for each other. I noticed that something weird happens when you go from having plenty of time together, like when you’re first starting out, to not having much time. You’d think that the good and bad ways you used to interact would shrink in the same proportions. You’d spend less time making love and having nice easy conversations, but you’d also spend less time arguing and being mad at each other.
But the proportions don’t stay the same. The bad stuff—the disagreements, the irritability, the misunderstandings—seem to take up more time than they did before. It’s the good stuff that gets squeezed out. Here’s my variation on Murphy’s Law: the less time you have together, the more things go wrong in your relationship.
I am not married, haven't been for a long time. But I guess this applies to relationships as well. If most of us examine our lives, I'll lay an even bet you'd not like some things you find.
