The years had passed quickly for Norma, filled with the challenges, joys, and general busyness of having a marriage, children, and household to manage. Her husband had been great through it all, maybe even more dedicated and reliable than she had been, Norma had to admit. They had made a great team together, Norma was sure. The only thing of which she was not so sure was whether they had adequately treasured their time together. Was it just that they had been too busy to make more time for one another and to give one another more energy? Or had they missed something in their marriage, like giving it too low of a priority, beneath the general duties of a household and maintaining the appearance of its normalcy? Norma wasn’t sure. But now that the children were gone, Norma was ready to make some changes to prioritize their marriage. She only hoped her husband was ready to do the same and that the changes they made would bring them closer together.
Time
The subject of time is a good way to look deep into the quality of a marriage and how each spouse perceives that quality. You’ll hear spouses question themselves and one another as to whether they spend time together, spend enough time together, spend quality time together, and enjoy or like spending time together. Try asking your spouse those questions, and you’ll see how your spouse’s answers and your reaction to them reveal underlying currents, feelings, expectations, and aspirations within your marital relationship. You and your spouse may, for instance, spend abundant quality time together, every spare minute outside of essential work or childcare duties. Yet you or your spouse may still express that you don’t spend enough quality time together. If that’s your spouse’s response, don’t take umbrage, argue the contrary facts, or cry in exasperation over what else you could possibly do. Instead, construe your spouse’s response as an abiding passion for you and your marriage together. Express the same attitude that more time would still not be enough, for time with your spouse should in a perfect world stand absolutely still.
Structure
That curious expression about time, that one occasionally wishes that it would stand still, reveals something helpful to know about time’s place in the cosmic structure. The material world, including you, your spouse, and your physical presence together in or outside of your marital household, is solid, perceptible, and in that sense stable. That’s why you and your spouse had wedding photographs taken, to freeze the moment for posterity so that you could reach back to hearten one another with it at any time. Time, though, is the material world’s invisible and mysterious change agent. Indeed, time may not in any independent sense even exist, but for the changes in the material world that occur, well, over time. Time is, in other words, only a way of expressing the material world’s instability and its tendency to constantly and episodically change. Eliminate the concept of time, and you’d simply think of time as change. If things never changed, time would indeed stand still, which is to mean that time would not exist. Looking at time in that sense of its place as a change agent in the cosmic structure helps reveal why spouses want time together. Spouses want each other, unchanged, continually, eternally. Spouses know that time carries the risk of losing one another, which is why they make time a marital issue.
Perception
Thus, when a wife says to her husband that she doesn’t think that she and her husband spend enough time together, the husband has more than one way to look at his wife’s response. In the ordinary assessment of the wife’s response, the husband might mentally examine his calendar to confirm that he had devoted every evening that week and the entire weekend to time with his wife, while simultaneously confirming that his work obligations left no room for more marital time. The husband might even rankle that he might need and deserve some alone time or time with his fishing or hunting buddies somewhere in that schedule. The husband might be thinking that time, after all, is a limited commodity that one must allocate among competing demands. Imagine, of course, how the wife would feel if the husband responded after that typical fashion. Yet in a more-productive way of looking at it, the husband might recognize that his wife is expressing sentimentally that their presence together is her priority, passion, and ultimate satisfaction, just as it is the husband’s priority, passion, and ultimate satisfaction. Imagine how much better the wife would feel if her husband responded after that atypical fashion. And both husband and wife should simultaneously know that if they indeed lingered together overlong, as if time were indeed standing still, both would soon stir time by rushing off to lesser pleasures and pressing duties. See your mutual desires for more time together not as a complaint or demand but as an appropriate passion.
Management
Although time is not quite the commodity that we imagine or pretend that it is, giving some attention to managing one’s time as if it were a commodity can increase marital time together. A prior chapter has already addressed how shifting work hours around priority marital time, such as the dinner and evening hours and the weekends, can give the marital relationship a healthy routine and strong reassurance. The amount of time may be less important than the regularity and predictability of time. After all, spouses also need time apart. Constant time with anyone, even one so dear as one’s spouse, could become wearing, especially when a spouse isn’t feeling well. Give one another all the time you each ask, and you each may want something else, as in don’t you have something to do? Regular, predictable, established, and largely unvarying routines of marital time together give both spouses something to which to look forward. So, learn from your spouse the priority times your spouse needs and prefers, and manage your schedule accordingly, as best you can, to share that time. If you can squeeze more time out of schedules, then all the better.
Spending
What you and your spouse do with the time, or, as we say, how you spend it together, can be more important than the amount or regularity of the time the two of you spend together. Once again, time isn’t exactly a commodity, like cash or credit, that one saves or spends. Time is going to march past whether you like it or not. You can’t exactly bank it to lavish on one another later. By spending time, we are instead describing the activity you and your spouse engage in or your other material circumstances during your time together. The very simple rule, harder in the application, is to make those activities and circumstances as positive, beneficial, engaging, pleasant, and memorable as you both can. We sometimes forget how easy improving time together can be. A smile, laugh, or light touch may be all the moment takes to make it special enough to last the rest of the morning, afternoon, or evening, and even into the next day. A fine dinner out, walk along the beach at sunset, or drive up into the mountains may be spectacular. Try to arrange those special times as often and intentionally as you can. You’ll both appreciate and remember it. But simple kindnesses will also often do.
Wasting
The corollary to spending regular quality time together is not to waste that time. Every moment together that you spend arguing, insulting, offending, contending, or rudely rather than joyfully competing, is a moment wasted. Not only do those ill-considered words and insensitive acts waste your time together, but they also reduce the confidence and trust you share with one another about the next time together, and the time together after that. A series of poorly spent times together, where arguments, insensitivities, and offenses occur, can infect marital attitudes so that spouses may soon take unreasonable offense at even well-meaning acts or overlook kindnesses, expecting insensitivity. Don’t let your times together devolve to lower levels out of which you find it hard to climb. Instead, treat your times together like recharging a marital battery with love, care, interest, and concern, so that you can draw on that warmth and closeness in times of need. You may not feel up to the warmth and kindness, but making a practice of it anyway may quickly restore your energy and good feelings, and refresh the momentum in your marital relationship.
Stopping
On rare special occasions, time within the marital relationship can seem to stop or at least slow down. These times, when the clock evaporates and the air shimmers with eternity, can be hard to predict and arrange. Sometimes, the time-stopping moments just happen, even under the strangest of circumstances, like on the way to a mutual visit to the dentist or on the way back from taking a pet to the vet. But more often, they have to do with some special seasonal or life event, or they appear when deliberately arranged. Bringing a first newborn baby home from the hospital, taking a kindergartener to school together for the first day, watching a child in a middle school play, or seeing a child off to the high school prom may spur those magical moments. Yet so, too, may a quiet birthday celebration, just the two of you, at your spouse’s favorite fancy restaurant or during a leisurely, long afternoon at the beach on a pristine day. Plan these moments, whether they arrive according to your plans or not. You and your spouse will enjoy the planning and anticipation, while appreciating even more when time does stop.
Treasuring
Ensuring that you spend sufficient quality time together depends not just on civil behavior and magic moments but also on the attitude of each spouse toward their times together. Indeed, disposition or attitude may matter most, when the attitude is to relish, cherish, and treasure time together. You don’t even have to remain civil to one another in those times in order to treasure them, if, for instance, the two of you are sharing an especially challenging bike or canoe trip, or a marathon or triathlon, or bad weather suddenly descends on your idyllic camping trip. Time doesn’t have to stop in a glittering moment, for you and your spouse to treasure one another’s presence. You each need not even be in good health or physical fitness. Indeed, for some couples, the most treasured times together are when one or both are in poor health, ravaged by disease or worn out and broken down by age and life. Those times together are especially poignant for the beauty, strength, and acuity you’ve each lost but still remember and even still sense dwelling deep inside the other. Treasure every moment with your spouse, no matter your mood or your spouse’s mood, no matter the circumstances, and no matter the stage of life, because when you and your spouse are together, your marriage stands tall as the fractal embodiment of the trinitarian creator’s own spirit and life, and as the pattern of creation.
Distractions
You and your spouse may already practice civil behaviors and hold the right loving attitude toward one another, but still find your time with each other somehow absent or lacking. Distractions can be the enemy that steals life from marriage. Sometimes, a marriage’s demise has more to do with the many little things than the one big thing, even many little things that in themselves are not necessarily bad and may under the right circumstances be good. The distractions may be preoccupation with school, work, or business, or with the many entertainments and recreations of modern American life. The distractions may also be children, elderly parents, other family members, neighbors, or friends. The distractions may even be the marital household itself, always calling to have one or the other spouse clean, maintain, repair, restock, rearrange, or improve it. Or the distraction may be the tiny screen you carry around in your pocket, the very bane of an ordinary, peaceful, contemplative, and sane life. In this age, appreciating time with your spouse takes a degree of discipline that would challenge a Tibetan monk, which is why monks disappear inside spartan monasteries, to restore their contemplative spirits. If you’re having an issue feeling good about the time you spend with your spouse, then banish distractions while showing more discipline. Doing so may do you both much good.
Idols
The greater challenge to the quality of your married time together may be when one or the other spouse makes an idol of something in their life. The concept of an idol may today be peculiar or quaint, exiled to the religious realm. But idols abound in modern culture and society, more so than ever. We laugh that the ancients might have had several or many gods at any one time, each represented in the form of totems and worshiped with frequent gifts and devotions. Yet what is a totem but an icon, logo, symbol, hallmark, trademark, image, or insignia representing a spirit, aspiration, or hope, like those images everywhere around us on our clothes, cars, bags, cups, hats, mugs, and other items, and even tattooed onto our skin? In watching television and videos, and listening to radio and podcasts, to which we devote substantial subscription funds, we encounter and devote time and attention to hundreds of images, which we may as well recognize are idols. Indeed, we idolize figures, products, services, and lifestyles. We give up our souls to a consumerism and materialism that are overtly ideologies, designed to overcome and replace our far greater need and desire for the humanity and divinity we share with our spouses. Don’t sacrifice your marriage on materialism’s altar or to any other idol.
Reflection
How, on a scale of one to ten, would you rate the quantity and quality of your time with your spouse? Does your rating represent fact or aspiration, or a mix of both? Do you spend plenty of time but wish it were better quality? Or do you spend quality time but wish it were greater quantity? What would make your time together better times? What would make your time together more frequent or longer? Can you manage your time away from your spouse better, to increase the regularity, frequency, length, and predictability of your time with your spouse? Can you change some behaviors when with your spouse to reduce the insensitivity while increasing the kindness? What special moments have you experienced with your spouse where time seemed to stop? Can you arrange or at least anticipate and encourage the next one of those moments? What is your attitude toward time that you spend with your spouse? Is it generally positive or negative? Appreciative or dismissive? What might make you treasure time with your spouse? Hope that an attitude change doesn’t require an illness or absence. What is your biggest distraction from quality time with your spouse? Are you idolizing something that supplants the value of your marriage and spouse?
Key Points
Quality time with your spouse is essential to maintaining a marriage.
Time constantly changes circumstances, requiring dedication.
How spouses perceive marital time reflects feelings more than fact.
Managing your time wisely can increase quality time with your spouse.
Spending time together in a good mood and circumstances helps.
Wasting time together in contention or insensitivity undoes efforts.
Time stops in special moments, whether unexpected or arranged.
To treasure whatever time you have with your spouse is the attitude.
Minimize distractions with discipline, to attend to your spouse.
Idolize nothing that draws you away from your marriage and spouse.