7 Signs Your Marriage Needs More Quality Time Together

Nearly 50% of married couples believe they aren’t spending enough quality time together as spouses. This statistic alone reveals that most couples need more shared experiences and meaningful interactions. An important aspect of being married and feeling fulfilled in a relationship is the ability to have quality time available not as a luxury but as a necessity.

Since quality time is necessary, it’s easy to see that limited quality time can lead to many common issues. If you never spend quality time with a spouse, it is likely that the two of you will grow apart. If you are unable to stop being so busy and spend time with your spouse, they may feel isolated, as if you do not understand them. Becoming isolated in a relationship is something that often leads to resentment, and more often than not, divorce. Lack of time spent often leads to a lack of communication and a relationship at risk. Be careful to be mindful of how often there are new shared experiences, as these could help make the relationship last longer.

So, how do you know that you need to get creative and design weekly date nights around a shared, mutually beneficial hobby? How do you know if you need to schedule a time outside of work and general recreation to talk with your spouse? By recognizing the signs and quickly working to make things right, you can begin to have a much better relationship with your spouse much like the one you experienced early in the nurturing and loving process of dating.

1. Decreased Marriage Intimacy

In any marriage, intimacy can be a key ingredient that keeps the relationship strong and resilient. But if we are not careful, the busyness of life can often rob us of this essential connection. Whether we are busy with work, our social lives, or our own interests, we can stop spending as much quality time with our spouse as we used to. This is problematic because it creates room for an emotional gap to form in the relationship. Without shared experiences and regular, meaningful interaction, we might have trouble figuring out our partner’s heart or feeling known by them ourselves. We can start to feel somewhat lonely in the relationship, like we are living life alongside our spouse instead of with them.

Intimacy is about more than just the act of sex. In fact, it’s about more than just physical closeness in general. Physical closeness—like holding hands, hugging, or making sure my wife and I sit right next to each other on the days we catch the bus to work together—can certainly enhance feelings of intimacy. It can help you feel endeared to your partner. But marital intimacy also requires you to be emotionally close. In other words, intimacy also involves being able to carry on a solid, rewarding conversation with your spouse. You need to be interested in each other’s thoughts, opinions, and unique vicissitudes; you need to know how to listen well and how to ask the right questions.

Research suggests that when married people spend time together in shared activities or one-on-one discussion, they often (though not always) feel their intimacy for each other grow. This suggests that spending time alone talking with your spouse or engaging together in a mutually enjoyable activity can bring about a greater sense of bonding. Again, the act of spending quality time together immediately strengthens the emotional tie that exists between you, while also creating an environment that is conducive to closeness. The physical and emotional connection that is your relationship can’t help but improve.

2. Poor Marriage Communication

Failure to spend sufficient quality time together can affect a couple’s ability to communicate effectively. When couples don’t share enough experiences and don’t get to talk—as a couple—about their own thoughts and feelings—not prioritizing quality time together—can easily and obviously lead to misunderstandings and wrongful assumptions about your partner’s intentions. On all levels and on all topics that are important to you, you aren’t in proper communication. You and your partner might easily form a—wrong—concept about what your partner thinks and how your partner feels about that particular topic.

For example, if you only see each other for a few hours a day—maximum—and your partner is currently going through a rough ‘work-atmosphere’ (comes home late every day, …), even in the few moments, you were able to communicate with your partner—you might only get the normal “day-to-day” talk or information your partner has to tell you: simple, unimportant, practical things that couples (have to) talk about (“Today, I paid the electric bill”, …; “Didn’t you phone the floorers today?”). You may not realize that your partner is suffering emotionally because they feel consumed at work. You may not even notice or know that your partner is professionally doing quite badly at the time.

For example, you’re going through some sort of personal challenge. But, in everyday life, this particular sadness doesn’t come up in conversation until: while your partner might be under a lot of pressure at work, alone, and just all to and by herself, which makes the problem in her situation at the mature level of college much much better. You might interpret that—because of the overall imperfection of your relationship—you’re looking for the opportunity to move out.

Those examples are meant to serve as an illustration of all the reasons why I think you probably don’t have enough quality time together and/or need to rethink your strategy of combining the dating side of your relationship with studying. I can see how you would think that the more scheduled the time together at this stage, the better you’ll get along. However, there’s clearly a good reason and necessity to take some quality time apart from each other to connect emotionally and therefore in communication as well.

3. Increased Arguments and Conflicts

In a marriage, one of the biggest potential pain points is not spending enough quality time with one another. When you fail to spend quality time, you may feel like you are growing apart – like your spouse doesn’t “get you”, which naturally leads to a lot of fighting because you don’t understand each other. There are natural voids which occur which are filled in by your spouse’s imagination.

Knowing yourself and being the kind of person who is unoffendable will help with one of the major pains most couples endure – fighting. This mental resistance to taking offense, along with huge amounts of patience, will be the candle that illuminates the room in the midst of dark times. You can’t be the offended wife who throws a tantrum, or the husband who constantly hurls abuse at his wife only to later find a listening ear in a “low-maintenance” work colleague who’s “much less complicated”. Dig deep for the gold.

To avoid the negative waterfall effect of quality time deprivation, try to make a habit of spending at least half an hour or 60 minutes each day just focusing on one another. It could be dinner. It could be a date night. Whatever it is, it needs to be in place in order for you to save yourself from the effects of the massive pain point that is marriage overwhelm.

4. Feeling of Emotional Distance

If you and your spouse never spend any of that crucial QT together, you can start to feel an emotional distance form between you. That’s because life (work, kids, responsibilities) can preoccupy so much of your time that you don’t have the chance to. Over time, this might make you and your spouse feel so different that you can’t communicate openly about how you’re feeling.

Think about it this way: when you and your spouse got together, didn’t it often feel as though you wanted to spend every single second of every single day with them? You were overcome with feelings of longing and desire for more quality time together.

What changed? We all have jobs (more or less), but it’s making the time to spend with your spouse that will keep you together.

5. Lack of Shared Activities and Interests

Couples may drift apart because not having shared experiences can create emotional distance. When partners stop going along on each other’s (relationship) journeys, they are missing opportunities for shared empathy cues and simply too many chances to connect from the dreaded distance. Over time and left unchecked, this emotional drift could be grounds for divorce.

Preventing drift can be as simple as encouraging couples to work on finding shared hobbies and having new experiences. This is obviously easier said than done at first. One loves playing the harp and the other loves to work on vintage Cadillacs. That’s okay, because instead they can get into the kitchen and have fun cooking unique meals together, hike, or take a dance class.

It doesn’t have to be anything extravagant or expensive. What sometimes follows is plenty of quality time spent together and maybe even a cache of emotional memories that can naturally help lead to future empathic convos. This lays the perfect foundation for forming and maintaining a healthier (and longer) bond. After all, it’s only natural to just want to have your best friend around you a whole lot more and maybe a whole lot more stuff! For what it’s worth, this may or may not also serve an all-natural dose of sexual desire!

6. Neglecting Each Other’s Needs

In a marriage, not spending enough time alone together can result in husbands and wives neglecting to meet each other’s emotional—and even physical—needs. It’s all too easy to become so caught up in the busyness of maintaining a career, keeping up with personal interests and hobbies, or caring for the kids (and, in some cases, even aging parents!) that a couple can actually make each other feel lonely, ignored, insignificant, or even undesirable. Emotional distance can quickly occur. Never feeling like it’s the right time to address certain concerns, a husband and a wife may continue to grow dissatisfied with many aspects of their marriage relationship.

So be more intentional about being alone together.

Enjoy some set-apart, special time alone together—a “date night”—each week when you can shut out the rest of the world to focus just on each other. Enjoy quality conversations, talk about plans together, engage in activities you both enjoy, share laughter, cook and eat a meal together, or enjoy a relaxing, romantic walk.

Do whatever it is you enjoy doing together, but be sure to find time to be alone—and to just talk. Be mindful of words you share during this set-apart time. Be sure to use kind words. Share words of affirmation with one another, if even at this time alone on your date night; kindness and words of affirmation can build intimacy in relationships. Engage in active listening, and provide thoughtful responses to your spouse’s probing questions. Share how you’ve felt during the past week and why you’ve felt the way you have. Strike up a conversation about what’s coming up next in your life.

7. Considering Marriage Counselling

Unresolved issues in a marriage—like communication difficulties, trust violations, or incongruent life goals—can build relentlessly. Each unresolved issue is layered atop the one prior, causing a gradual breakdown in the relationship. Marriage counseling (when practiced by a well-trained therapist) can end this trench warfare. The therapist’s office becomes a forum for each person to have his or her say. Then, together, they will poke and prod at how the other person sees the troublesome topics.

The best outcome of this guided conversation is more quality time spent with your significant other. The therapist will present techniques to help the couple make their everyday conversations suffer less from ineffective language. They will teach the techniques appropriate to their diagnosis. But each person has his or her communication barriers. Reducible, these barriers become conversational friction points; each makes the average conversation between a husband and wife a chore. Learning to speak with less friction results in a happy day-to-day life with a spouse.

And finally, couples that spend time in therapy come out healthier overall. Keeping relationship issues shelved in the “we’ll get to it someday” pile slowly drives a wedge between romantic partners. Therapy helps partners set a concrete goal, keep to that goal, and then hit it soundly. Redefining the forward path in life becomes a point of unity. In doing so, the couple will learn trust and be intimate with each other. That will, with proper reinforcement, lead to happiness and health in a marriage.

One of the key signs to look for is a decline in communication with your spouse. If you find that you are not talking as much or that the conversation is surface-level, it may be a hint that you and your spouse are not connecting. Another sign to look for is that there are fewer things that you do together that you both enjoy. If you are spending more time doing your own things than doing things together, you may begin to have feelings for your partner that resemble feelings for a roommate more than a spouse. Irritability is another sign. If you find that you and your partner are bickering at things that you would normally let slide, it may be time to focus on the relationship.

The earlier you address these issues, the better chance you have of warding off deeper marriage problems. The types of marriage problems these symptoms could turn into are deep-seated resentment, serious loneliness, infidelity, and more. Stopping the problem before it gets to this point will be your best chance at repairing any harm done.

Adding more quality time together with your partner will increase the longevity and quality of your relationship. Use this time to get a better idea of who your partner is — this will greatly improve the longevity of the relationship. Your best bet at preventing deeper marriage problems early on is to nurture these symptoms with quality time and tenderness. If you feel that the problems are more than you can handle and you can’t stop arguing with your spouse, get a professional counselor involved.