How do dual career couples create quality time together?

What is love? By Merriam Webster it is defined as strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties. When we are born, we experience love firstly in our homes, from our parents, siblings and extended family. As we grow up, we engage ourselves in romantic relationships and we are getting familiar with another type of love, a love towards a partner. A partner who we admire, a partner to whom we show affection, a partner that is sexually attractive to us… Eventually, when after a certain period of time the relationship is getting stronger in trust, love, respect; and we make a decision to move in together, get married, have children…

This is the point where I will stop because recently I heard the fact that dual career couples with young children spent less than 10% of an evening in the same room, and they talked to each other an average of 35 minutes a week. Can you imagine? 35 minutes only with a person you are sharing love, children and home with? And when I read that those 35 minutes are mostly spent on daily activities and logistics such as grocery shopping, who will take the children from kindergarten / school, what shall we prepare for dinner, it hit me even stronger! I mean, really???

Then, I started thinking is this my case as well? Am I part of the statistics? So I decided to track the time spent together with my husband. And yes, it hit me. The days when we are going to the office our time spent together was even less than 35 minutes. The days we worked both from home it was more – but it was also not high quality time – as in most cases we could not have our lunch break together.

This insight led me thinking… Shall we continue this way? Hmm, my intuition deep inside of me was telling me that something was wrong here. I felt a pain in my stomach, a feeling that I experience when I am not aligned with my core values. I went to my diary, where on the first page I have written down my core values:

1. Family

2. Open and transparent communication

Oh, no! I just realized that I haven’t been honoring my top values, thus the unpleasant feeling in my stomach. Next thing I did I asked myself: do I want this to continue like this? A voice in my mind was whispering: no, no, no… Then suddenly, an image I have seen on social media popped in my head: Move you are not a tree! This was a sign from the universe that I have been waiting for to change something! I need to change something! And that marks the first milestone of this journey – my awareness that something in my life is not going as it should be and a decision made that I don’t want to stay there.

Next thing I did I was analyzing the past year 2022, trying to find some good practices that we did with my husband when it comes to quality time spent together. It couldn’t have been so bad as the statistics. The hyper achiever in me was rejecting the fact that I could be performing so badly in something that matters so much for me. And while going through the year, I found one excellent example of how we did a joint activity with my husband. It was watching the show Let’s Dance, the German version. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the concept it is a dancing competition where celebrities dance with professional dancers in couples. It is an amazing show and we really enjoyed doing it together.

Here I would like to list the elements that made this activity more meaningful than just watching TV together after a long working week:

1. We created a ritual of watching it every Friday evening, after putting our child to sleep
2. We have chosen a topic that we are both very passionate about – dancing
3. It was in German – a language that we both love and speak, but unfortunately we do not use it on a daily basis (We live in a French Speaking Canton in Switzerland). This show was a great opportunity to work towards a common goal: extending our German vocabulary.
4. In addition to the watching, we incorporated also a discussion about the choreography, the music, the costumes, the jury. It brought us back to the time we were going to dancing schools and our dancing experience, lessons, friends…

All in all, it was a great activity that brought us together and strengthened our relationship. I was thrilled to read that the new season will start shortly again on RTL Deutschland and we are eagerly waiting its start on February 17, 2023.

I am happy to hear your experience on the topic. What are the activities you are doing with your partner despite working full time, taking care of children and home activities? I invite you to share them in the comments below.