ROMANCE SECRET #7
TRUE LOVE NEEDS TIME TO GROW
It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more.
Philippians 1:9, (ESV)
Even a year or more into our marriage, Erin and I weren’t mature enough to resolve issues, and it showed. Our mentors, Gary and Carrie Oliver, wisely challenged us to spend a day together doing something fun, to basically go on a date. But there was one boundary: we were not allowed to argue.
The recommendation had a lot of common sense behind it, or horse sense, as they said in the Old West. We loved each other, but we were so busy and so at odds that we couldn’t even talk for more than a few minutes without sniping at each other. Having a day of fun sounded great to me, especially since it was going to be an emotionally safe time. I needed to get outdoors in the beautiful Colorado wilderness. Erin needed a break from nursing.
I planned a picnic and a hike to a waterfall, excited to be with Erin. That morning we piled some food and blankets into my old gray Toyota pickup truck and started out on the adventure. It began beautifully; we talked and laughed and sang to songs on the radio. We opened some snack foods to munch on. At some point along the way, however, I made light of an issue that Erin was sensitive about.
Love is a verb, not a noun. It is active. Love is not just feelings of passion and romance. It is behavior.
Susan Forward, PhD, therapist, lecturer, and author
She reacted. I criticized her for breaking the Olivers’ rule and starting a fight by getting prickly with me. That did not go well. After a few miles, I tried some humor to get her talking again. Well, that tactic was even worse because she completely shut down. At this point, her back was to me and her legs were drawn up as if she was trying to curl up in the fetal position. She was staring out the passenger-side window. Plus, she was eating the snacks and sipping a Diet Coke as if they were for her and her only.
I felt like an idiot, thinking I screwed up the day. It was so awkward that I asked if she wanted to turn around and just go home. I got no answer.
I decided to keep going. If I had to fight with her, I’d rather fight outside in someplace beautiful than fight at home. I turned off the main highway onto a dirt road, heading to the picnic area. The road curved around a massive boulder, and as I steered the truck around the bend, I saw a brown horse standing in the middle of the road. I slammed on the brakes. The horse was not even fazed, but he did back away from the boulder just a bit.
I tried squeezing between him and the boulder, to scoot him away. He stood his ground. I rolled down my window to shout at him, but the horse only moved closer, putting his mangy head into the cab of the truck, his huge, moist nostrils flaring, then closing in the way horses sniff.
Delighted, Erin reached over to pet his ugly nose. I was hating that stupid horse because he could get Erin’s attention when I couldn’t. I tried to push his head out of the window, but he was too intent on nuzzling around, nibbling on our snack crumbs.
His sniffing paid off because he found something larger than a crumb —a full sized onion-ring crisp. Suddenly his nibbling turned into a bite —a bite right in the worst place possible for a guy . . . my, well, er, ummm, my lap. I screamed in pain. That sent the horse running.
At this point, I knew Erin was still mad, but I needed help. I turned to her for compassion —and what did I see? A guilty smirk on her face.
I interpreted the grin as proof she had orchestrated the horse’s attack by putting the Funyuns ring on my jeans. We argued about that the rest of the day —neither of us having the horse sense to let it go.
In fact, Erin and I still argue about the Funyun fiasco, although now it’s endearing. I joke often about it and ask her if this is the day she’s going to confess or if she’s going to wait until she’s on her deathbed.
If you had asked me that day if I liked spending time with Erin, I would have had a difficult time answering. If you ask couples in different phases and stages of their relationship, you’ll get different responses to the question, “How much time should you spend together?”
A man in the initial throes of romance will say, “Every minute.” A husband or wife who is absorbed in a career will say, “Two hours every other Saturday.” A new mother will answer, “I don’t care as long as I get a decent night’s sleep first.” A quarreling couple will say, “The less time, the better.”
“How much time should you spend together?”
If you ask researchers how much time couples need to spend together to make sure love grows, you get more unified responses. I’ll summarize here: as much as you can. Some specify a weekly amount: fifteen hours was the highest recommendation I found,[1] others recommend around eight hours.[2]
If a person is motivated, he or she can make the time to engage. Consider this disturbing statistic reported by a popular television psychologist:
The average couple can spend as little as one hour alone together per week; the average couple with kids —sometimes none. The average two people having an affair spend at least 15 hours per week together! Think about that for a moment. Those two people somehow manage to find 15 hours together in spite of all their other commitments, which often include other spouses and children.[3]
If you don’t spend time bonding, your marriage will grow cold, and you or your spouse may be tempted to find warmth elsewhere.
THE TIME CONTINUUM
So how much time is really enough time to keep the embers of romance stirring?
Sociologists Jeffrey Dew and W. Bradford Wilcox compiled a report called The National Marriage Project in which they determined that a married person who spent “time alone” with his or her spouse “talking, or sharing an activity” on a weekly basis was 3.5 times more likely to say he or she was “very happy” in his or her marriage than a spouse who spent fewer hours with his or her mate.[4]
Talking and doing things together doesn’t just happen. You need to be intentional about it. The late marriage expert David Mace, cofounder of the North Carolina-based Association for Couples in Marriage Enrichment, wrote:
One of the great illusions of our time is that love is self-sustaining. It is not. Love must be fed and nurtured, constantly renewed. That demands ingenuity and consideration, but first and foremost, it demands time.[5]
Now, decades later, Mace’s statement is even more relevant.
Psychologist and blogger Leslie Becker-Phelps advises to set aside administrative talk and tasks. Find time to discuss heart and dream issues:
Spend more time together. I don’t mean get-more-things-done-together time. Or even air-your-problems time. Partners need to have time when they can each share what naturally bubbles up from deep within —interests, values, or experiences that are expressions of their true selves. And they need their partners to have the time, focus and interest to really listen. This kind of being together is often lost in the overcrowded shuffling of daily activities.[6]
THE VALUE OF MARRIAGE
Valuing marriage makes a marked difference in the quality of commitment. Spending time together says to your spouse, “You matter to me; our marriage matters to me. We matter!”
If you act as if you value marriage, the feelings often follow. If you wait till you feel like marriage is important, you may delay planning those special times and they may not happen.
On a similar note, spend money on making those times happen. Hire a cleaning service to free up time for romance and getting emotionally connected. Pay babysitters. Pay for hotels or other lodging. Pay money now so that you can spend time with your spouse or “pay” later in terms of emotional distance and strife. Bottom line: spend money on your marriage.
A friend of mine I’ll call Doug recently went through cancer treatment. After Doug finished with chemo, he and his wife sold their home and moved into a townhome, cutting their living square footage in half. He no longer wants to spend time on roof repairs, yard maintenance, or collecting stuff. He has decided they have enough for retirement, so he’s spending money on little extras that he never would have before.
A man doesn’t own his marriage; he is only the steward of his wife’s love.
Ed Cole, founder of the Christian Men’s Network
Doug let his wife buy a brand-new couch, a former no-no because previously they saved money by purchasing only second-hand furniture. He also accepted the idea of buying organic food at more expensive health food stores.
His wife recently whispered to me, “Greg, that chemo affected my husband’s brain. We eat out together sometimes. He wants to visit the kids and doesn’t mind paying for the plane tickets. I don’t know what happened, but I like it.”
I know what happened. After having a wrestling match with cancer, Doug reevaluated what was important and decided that building strong relationships with his wife and children was a priority, something worth spending time and money for today, not a tomorrow that may never come.
LOVED VERSUS LIKED
I would much rather have Erin tell me that she “likes” me than she “loves” me. In my mind, she made a lifelong commitment to love me, meaning she has to love me because it’s a decision or an obligation. Her real choice is to like me. Liking me means that she enjoys being around me —that I’m her best friend. Being liked is appealing to me, because it means I’m a priority and that Erin will strive to spend time with me.
This telling scene from Mrs. Doubtfire, a hilarious movie on the sobering topic of child custody, shows what can happen if couples don’t prioritize and spend meaningful time together. Late actor Robin Williams masterfully portrays the character Daniel Hillard, who dons the costume of an eccentric elderly nanny so he can care for his children after a bitter divorce strips him of his parental rights.
MIRANDA HILLARD: Daniel was so wonderfully different, and funny! He could always make me laugh.
DANIEL, AS MRS. DOUBTFIRE: They always say the key to a solid marriage is laughter.
MIRANDA HILLARD: But after a few years, everything just stopped being funny.
DANIEL, AS MRS. DOUBTFIRE: Why?
MIRANDA HILLARD: I was working all the time, and he was always between jobs. I hardly ever got to see the kids, and on the nights I’d try to get home early to be with them, something would go wrong. The house would be wrecked, and I’d have to clean it up. He never knew, but so many nights I just cried myself to sleep.
DANIEL, AS MRS. DOUBTFIRE: [crushed] Really?
MIRANDA HILLARD: The truth is, I didn’t like who I was when I was with him. I would turn into this horrible person.[7]
If you let anger and resentment build up, you’ll become distant. Keeping those negative feelings under control is exhausting. More often than not, couples are cranky with each other when they don’t have enough time together. In marriage, absence does not make the heart grow fonder. When you like your spouse and spend time with him or her, you’ll also probably like yourself because you’ll be at your best. American poet Roy Croft summarized this feeling: “I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you.”[8]
In marriage, absence does not make the heart grow fonder.
BUSY, BUSY, BUSY
Busyness is what keeps spouses from enjoying time together. It’s so hard to find time for your spouse, it seems God didn’t make enough time in the day! But He did, and everyone gets twenty-four hours. It’s our job to figure out how to manage the onslaught of competing commitments and responsibilities. Work, kids, household chores, school activities, sports, friends, church, extended family, social activities, and hobbies all conspire to keep you apart from your spouse.
I see it over and over again: Couples don’t make spending enough time together a priority, and that might be the primary reason for divorce today. The commitment to spending time together gets bumped down and then off the to-do list. By spending so much time on the job, hobbies, kids, ministry, community-building endeavors, and personal passions, a spouse sends a strong message to his or her mate: you don’t matter. And when the commitment to the marriage isn’t demonstrated in terms of time, look out, trouble is on its way.
There’s a fallacy that “one day” couples will have free time, and then they’ll work on their marriage. Their intentions are misguided. Life will never slow down, only your bodies will! My dad and mom, who are now in their eighties, are busier than ever, just with different things. If they want to feel close, they have to choose to clear their calendars from other obligations. Some spouses can’t even put down the phone, and research indicates that in today’s culture bumping your spouse’s call to take another is no longer considered impolite.[9]
The first and most important “fight” in your marriage is to resolve conflict. The second is to “fight” for time together. You have to be feisty when you “take on” your calendar. You also need to be stealthy, ever guarding the minutes so the time thief doesn’t steal them. Become as dedicated as a special ops agent trained to repel commitments that conflict with a healthy marriage. You also need the physical discipline of a soldier. You must fight fatigue and press yourself to have the energy to spend with your spouse. When children are small, it’s difficult to see spending time with them as “the enemy.” The danger is that you view time with kids while they’re “growing” as priceless, and you make a commitment to them. Meanwhile your spouse is also “growing,” but he or she is growing apart from you.
FADING RELATIONSHIPS
Erin and I have managed to work through our issues since the horse-in-the-road episode. (See “Romance Secret #4: True Love Fights for Peace.”) But some people don’t let go of issues, and they avoid their relationship time together. That behavior is like looking at an old photo taken on a vintage Polaroid camera. Over the years, the colors fade. The defining outlines do too, and if you don’t store them properly, you won’t be able to identify the people in the photos.
That’s what can happen to you as a couple. You can let so many days go without recapturing the romance that over time your relationship will change so much it becomes unrecognizable.
When couples feel lonely in their marriage, they begin to perceive that they have suffered a great loss —their best friend has faded from memory, or worse, died from malnourishment. One writer explains it like this: “Distance in relationships is love’s silent killer.”[10]
Dr. Dana Fillmore notes:
The reality is, it is virtually impossible to be in love with someone you don’t really know and are not connected with; and it is virtually impossible to truly know someone with whom you never spend time; you can certainly “love” them —but be “in love”? No.[11]
You can become so distant, so far apart emotionally, that you no longer desire your spouse, like Miranda Hillard of Mrs. Doubtfire. Someone new can come and add infidelity into the picture. Those old family photos will then not only be faded but they may be replaced by new ones with new faces.
CARPE DIEM?
How do you avoid drifting apart from your spouse for lack of time? Here’s how I found a solution. It’s not pretty, but it works. For many years, I was rigid about my time expectations for our marriage. I wanted entire days if not weeks to spend in leisure with Erin. In certain seasons of our marriage, that was just not possible, and I felt a lot of frustration. While I have never given up on that vision and still believe that longer dates and weekends dedicated to intimacy are needed, they aren’t always practical. I now am more flexible, having adjusted my expectations to match reality. And while I can rarely apply carpe diem, which means to “seize the day,” I can express carpe quinque, which means to “seize five” or set aside a few minutes to connect with my spouse.
Seasons of life change, so it’s important to grasp snatches of time and redeem them rather than complaining that there’s not enough time. Since I’ve learned that lesson, I have stopped feeling like a failure because we don’t get a date night every week —and I even wrote a book about how important they are! I failed to stay connected to Erin emotionally when I was in grad school, but I’ve now passed through some other stressful periods successfully keeping more or less emotionally and spiritually in tune with her. Those seasons are infant care, starting a new job, moving across the country, being an international speaker, elder care, and losing a parent to cancer.
What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?
Gary Thomas, Sacred Marriage
Here’s how everyday connection moments look like at the Smalley house: I start my workday routine at 5 a.m. by working out in the basement. Then for a few minutes I watch ESPN with my son, Garrison. While he gets ready for school, I unload the dishwasher. Next I sit on the side of the bed and check in with Erin.
I ask personal questions about her feelings, because that’s how she connects with me best. (Remember, I outlined the importance of finding out what nourishes your spouse in “Romance Secret #6: True Love Nourishes.”) I might ask, “What’s going on with the kids?” or “How are you feeling?” or “What’s your day look like?” I don’t fix her problems or offer advice. I do commiserate by saying something like, “I hate that for you,” or “That’s a tough one. I’ll be praying for the decisions you have to make.”
In the evenings, Erin knows I need to connect by doing something fun. We’ll take a quick walk around the block or watch an episode of Seinfeld.
Couples have such limited time with each other that recognizing the nourishing emotional superfoods your spouse needs is crucial to making carpe quinque work.
You can “anchor” your daily routine to these short but important visits.[12] Creating unique traditions and rituals as a couple should be started from day one. But if you haven’t started, then look to today for a new beginning. These rituals are, according to educator Lois Clark, “repeated, coordinated, and significant. Examples of marriage rituals are a cup of tea after the children go to bed, a morning walk before the children get up, or a hug and a kiss upon returning from work.”[13]
Another researcher offers this fact for encouragement:
Scientific research says that it is the small, positive moments that matter in keeping relationships satisfied. The day doesn’t have to be full of fireworks, but it must have moments of connection —something that can seem difficult when time is scarce.[14]
UNDERSTAND GENDER DIFFERENCES
Just as there are general gender differences in communication styles, so differences also exist between men and women in their expectation of energizing together time.
Men prefer to “do things together.” Men are looking for the fun, the laughter, the humor, and the sex.
Women are looking for relationship togetherness, a place to express feelings.
Women are in search of deep emotional connection. Women are looking for relationship togetherness, a place to express feelings.
Meeting the Needs of Men
Have a weekly date night. This is fun time spent away from the house. Couples who devote time specifically to one another at least once a week are markedly more likely to enjoy high-quality relationships and lower divorce rates, compared to couples who do not devote much couple time to one another.[15]
One night a week, go out alone for a minimum of two hours to have fun. The purpose of a “date” is to enjoy each other by asking questions, reminiscing, trying something new. Don’t administrate or manage your marriage on a date by talking about the budget, kids, household responsibilities, schedules, or to-do lists. This makes the date feel transactional —like a business meeting instead of a time to connect and have fun.
Also, protect your fun times from conflict. Conflict destroys recreation because it intensifies emotions and people can’t relax and enjoy each other. (You saw this in the opening story about the horse biting me!) If this pattern occurs too often, a husband may lose the desire to spend time with his wife because the experience ends up in conflict. Instead of allowing anger and hurt feelings to take over, de-escalate the argument or sensitive discussion by agreeing to talk about the issue at a different time.
The goal of an attentive wife is to plan dates that appeal to a man’s desire for activity. Research shows that new activities activate the brain’s reward system, creating excitement, exhilaration, and joy.[16] Do things like these:
- hiking
- Putt-Putt golfing
- shopping
- watching a new movie
- bowling
- working out at the YMCA, gym, rec center, or workout club
Women find that these activities inject play and excitement into your marriage. Couples who spend ninety minutes on exciting activities that they did not typically do showed a significantly greater increase in marital satisfaction.[17]
Meeting the Needs of Women
Women need uninterrupted time to feel nourished and loved. So if you only have five minutes, check in with your wife’s emotional life. She needs to vent and explain what’s in her mind and heart. If she can’t release that information, she’ll stuff it and get cold and distant or grow hard and angry.
Help her with the evening household duties and turn off your cell phone out of respect when you talk to her. Close the laptop. Turn off the television. Pretend your newspaper, fantasy football league or the stock market report don’t exist. Help with the kitchen cleanup and give the kids’ baths or supervise their homework; strive to know and be known as outlined in “Romance Secret #3.”
Let your wife know she’s valued. Compliment her for the ordinary but wonderful things she does —cooking, working, exercising, gardening, driving the kids, volunteering, laundry, or looking nice for you.
The goal of an attentive husband would be show curiosity and interest, to ask her questions that don’t have a yes or no answer. For example, ask “How are you feeling emotionally today?”
At the Smalley dinner table we ask the high-low question: What was the highlight of your day and what was the low point? We find that question opens up meaningful conversation about important values and experiences.
Here are some other ideas for activities you can do together:
- Make dinner
- Greet your wife when she returns home —act excited to see her
- Share a cup of coffee in the morning before work
- Thank your wife for something that she did that day
- Compliment your wife on her appearance
- Pray for and with your wife in the morning
- Talk at bedtime but make a rule not to talk about money, work, or the kids
- Do chores together and talk while you work
- Call your wife while you’re driving home to hear about her day
Men find these activities keep them updated and current with their wives. These are together times they can look forward to.
Here’s one last piece of advice I got from a wise mentor I work with who got the advice from a cancer survivor: “Buy memories, not things.” No other use of money will be more satisfying, both now and in the years to come.
Next up, the married couple’s guide to great sex: “True Love Embraces.”