You don’t find time for your marriage. You make it. And sometimes that means deciding what you’re going to stop doing.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, “We just don’t have time.”
No time for date nights.
No time to sit down and talk.
No time to spend together without the kids.
No time for anything beyond keeping the household running and getting everybody where they need to be.
And I get it. Life gets busy.
But here’s something I want you to think about.
Have you ever had your doctor tell you that you need to exercise more, drink more water, or get more sleep?
And your immediate response was, “I don’t have time for that.”
Then, almost as soon as those words left your mouth, you caught yourself and said, “Well, I guess I’ll have to MAKE time.”
There it is.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about when it comes to your marriage.
You don’t magically find an extra hour lying around somewhere. You decide that something matters enough to give it some of the time you already have.
And then you figure out how.
I’ve been learning Portuguese.
I already speak Spanish, so that gives me a bit of a head start. But I’ve been using Duolingo and spending about 15–20 minutes every evening practicing.
Out loud.
My husband sometimes laughs because he hears me making all these noises and can’t figure out what I’m saying.
And I have to tell him, “I’m not talking to you. I’m doing my Portuguese!”
Now, here’s the thing.
I’m not going to become fluent in Portuguese by thinking about learning Portuguese.
I’m not going to get better because I downloaded the app.
I have to actually practice.
And the same is true of practically anything we want to improve.
If you want to become a better piano player, you practice the piano. If you want to get stronger, you exercise. If you want to learn another language, you spend time speaking it.
We understand this when it comes to sports, music, education, and our careers.
But somehow, when it comes to marriage, we expect things to improve without actually spending time working on them.
We want to feel closer to our spouse.
We want better conversations.
We want more affection, more connection, and a marriage we actually enjoy.
But we haven’t made any room in our lives for those things to happen.
Your marriage isn’t going to get better simply because you wish it would.
You have to participate in making it better.
When a couple tells me they don’t have time for each other, one of the first things I want to know is how they’re currently spending their time.
Not how they think they’re spending it.
How they’re actually spending it.
So I’ll ask them something like this:
“Over the last four weeks, approximately how much time have you spent together? Just the two of you, actually connecting?”
Not driving the kids to soccer.
Not discussing who is picking up groceries.
Not sitting on opposite ends of the couch, each looking at a phone.
I’m talking about time when you’re actually paying attention to each other.
And I’ll ask them to give me a number.
Sometimes they have to stop and think.
Sometimes they’re surprised.
And sometimes they’re a little embarrassed by the answer.
But I don’t ask that question to embarrass anybody.
I ask because you cannot change something you’re not willing to look at.
And after almost 14 years of working with married couples, I can tell you that this happens to people all the time.
Life gets full.
Responsibilities pile up.
We get into routines.
And before we know it, the person we promised to share our life with is getting whatever time and energy we happen to have left over.
That’s not necessarily because we don’t love them.
Sometimes we’ve simply stopped paying attention.
This is where I want couples to get practical.
Look at your calendar. Look at your evenings. Look at your weekends.
How much of your time is genuinely outside your control?
And how much of it have you simply gotten accustomed to giving away?
Maybe you’re spending an hour scrolling on your phone every night.
Maybe you’re watching another episode of a show you don’t even particularly care about.
Maybe you’re consistently giving work an extra two hours because you feel like you have to, even though nobody has actually asked you to.
Or maybe you’ve filled your family’s schedule with so many activities that there’s barely room to breathe.
I’m not suggesting you quit your job, abandon your responsibilities, or stop taking your children to their activities.
I’m asking you to look at the numbers.
What is one thing you could spend a little less time doing so that you could spend a little more time with your spouse?
You might be surprised by how little you actually need to change.
Sometimes it’s 15 minutes less on your phone.
Sometimes it’s setting a boundary with work.
Sometimes it’s deciding that not every evening needs to be filled with another activity.
And sometimes it’s simply sitting down together and agreeing that your marriage deserves a place on the calendar, too.
There’s a principle called the Rule of 100 that I love.
The idea is that if you spend 100 hours a year practicing something—whether that’s karate, playing the violin, or learning another language—you’ll get a whole lot better at it.
Some versions of this rule claim that 100 hours puts you ahead of 95% of people. I wouldn’t treat that percentage as a scientifically established fact, but I love the principle behind it.
Because do you know what 100 hours a year works out to?
A little over 16 minutes a day.
That’s it.
Sixteen minutes.
Think about what could happen if you gave your spouse 16 minutes of genuine, undivided attention every single day.
Not 16 minutes of discussing bills, errands, and schedules.
Sixteen minutes of being together.
Talking.
Laughing.
Asking how the other person is doing.
Listening.
Actually enjoying each other’s company.
Would 16 minutes solve every problem in your marriage? Of course not.
But imagine what consistent attention could begin to change over the course of a year.
You don’t need three cruises through Europe.
You don’t need expensive date nights every weekend.
Those things can be wonderful, but they’re not a substitute for the ordinary, everyday attention a marriage needs.
Think about a plant.
You can’t ignore it for six months and then expect one enormous watering to make up for everything it missed.
It needs regular attention.
And so does your marriage.
Here’s where I don’t want you to get discouraged.
Maybe 16 minutes sounds perfectly manageable.
Or maybe you’re in a season with young children, demanding jobs, aging parents, or a dozen other responsibilities, and even 16 minutes sounds difficult.
That’s okay.
Start with five.
Seriously.
Five minutes.
I once heard someone answer the question, “What’s the best exercise for women over 50?”
Their answer?
“Whatever exercise you’ll actually do.”
I LOVE that answer.
Because the same principle applies to your marriage.
The best plan for spending time together is one you’ll actually follow through on.
It reminds me of the Miracle Morning routine. Ideally, you’d spend an hour completing the different parts of the routine. But if you can’t manage an hour, you can shorten the activities to just a minute each.
The point is to do something rather than nothing.
Maybe you sit down together in the morning and have coffee.
And if you don’t have time to drink the entire cup together, perhaps you just spend a few minutes making it together before heading in different directions.
Maybe you spend 10 minutes reconnecting after work.
Maybe you take a short walk around the block.
Maybe you put your phones away and talk for a few minutes before going to bed.
The point isn’t to create another impossible standard that you can fail to meet.
The point is to begin.
Because five minutes of genuine connection is better than zero minutes.
And once five becomes a habit, you can build on it.
Here’s what I’d like you to do.
Sometime this week, sit down with your spouse for 10 minutes.
Look at how you’ve been spending your time.
Not to blame each other.
Not to argue about who’s busier.
But to answer three questions:
Then make a plan.
Pick something small enough that you’ll actually follow through.
Try it for a week.
See what works.
Adjust what doesn’t.
And keep going.
Because the goal isn’t to create a perfect schedule.
The goal is to build a marriage where spending time together becomes something you do, not something you keep meaning to get around to.
If you’re looking for a goal, I love the Rule of 100: approximately 16 minutes of intentional time together every day adds up to almost 100 hours over a year.
But here’s what I want you to understand: Any amount of meaningful time together is better than none.
It’s a little like exercise. What’s the best exercise routine? One you’ll actually do.
The same principle applies to your marriage.
If you’re coming out of a particularly busy season, start with five minutes. Have your coffee together. Check in after work. Sit next to each other without your phones.
You can always build from there.
Don’t let the idea of doing it perfectly stop you from doing something.
The first thing I’d want to know is whether your spouse genuinely has very little time for anything or whether they seem to have time for everything except you.
Those are two different situations.
If they’re overwhelmed by work, children, and responsibilities, you may need to look together at what can change.
But if they regularly make time for hobbies, friends, television, or other interests while telling you there’s no time for your marriage, I’d want you to have a different conversation.
I’d ask a very important question:
“Do you care about this marriage?”
If the answer is yes—and in my experience, more often than not, it is—then we need to make your choices reflect that answer.
Because the things we care about need to show up somewhere in how we spend our time.
Your spouse may not even realize how much time is disappearing into other activities or how neglected you’re feeling.
So tell them.
“I know you care about us. But when there’s always time for everything else and never time for me, I end up feeling unimportant and unloved. Can we look at this together?”
That’s a conversation worth having.
And if your spouse tells you they genuinely no longer care about the marriage, that’s a different and much more serious conversation. It’s not simply a scheduling problem anymore.
Despite what you might believe when you’re raising little kids, you actually have more options than you think.
I remember those days very well.
One of the things my husband and I used to do was have Friday lunch dates. There was a little restaurant near his work called Element Pizza, and we’d meet there at noon for salad and pizza while the kids were still at daycare or school.
No babysitter required. Easy peasy.
And delicious. If you’ve never tried their salad dressing, you don’t know what you’re missing!
We also did coffee dates. Sometimes we’d grab coffee and go for a walk. Other times I’d bring our drinks and we’d walk along the river if the weather cooperated.
Cheap, simple, and we got to spend time together.
And here’s one more thing: Save some energy for your spouse.
If you know you’re planning to spend time together that evening, try not to use up every last bit of yourself before you get there.
Your date doesn’t have to be expensive. It doesn’t have to involve an elaborate plan, a fancy restaurant, or five hours away from your children.
Sometimes it’s pizza at noon. Sometimes it’s a walk by the river. And sometimes it’s two people folding laundry on the couch.
The point is that you’re making room for each other in the life you actually have.
Here’s something else I want you to know.
Sometimes the problem isn’t simply that you haven’t been spending enough time together.
Sometimes you finally make the time, sit down across from each other, and within 10 minutes you’re having the same argument you’ve had 50 times before.
Or you realize you don’t even know what to talk about anymore.
Or one of you has been feeling lonely and unimportant for so long that spending a little more time together doesn’t begin to address everything that’s happened.
And that’s where simply putting another date night on the calendar isn’t going to be enough.
You need to figure out what’s actually happening between you.
I’m Danka Bogott. I’ve been helping married couples in Minneapolis and Edina for almost 14 years, and I fix marriages for a living.
I work with couples who love each other, want their marriage to work, and have somehow gotten themselves painfully stuck.
I’m not a sit-back-and-nod kind of marriage coach.
If we work together, we’re going to identify the patterns that keep getting you into trouble, learn what to do differently, and practice those changes until they become part of how you actually live together.
If you’re tired of having the same problems and are ready to do something about them, let’s talk.
Schedule an initial phone consultation, and we’ll talk about what’s happening in your marriage, what you’ve already tried, and whether working together would be a good fit.
