The Marriage Paradox: High Expectations, Low Priority

Expectations for marriage have never been higher, but it’s often the last priority.


Quality time together is in the ‘important but not urgent’ category– it doesn’t pay the bills or give us the desperate demands that the kids do.


When the relationship struggles (maybe because we didn’t prioritize it), spending time on the marriage requires bravery and actual emotional work—the last thing we want to do at the end of a long day.


The generational trendlines are not in our favor:

Parents’ time spent raising their kids has grown by 68% since 1965.

More moms are working, and they are spending 76% more time on paid work than in 1965.

We spend an average of 4 hours and 29 minutes on our phones daily. (Up 20% from 2019!)


As an old coworker put it in a private message, juggling all of life ‘while also attempting to have a good marriage is no joke.’


But are we actually spending less time on our marriages than our parents? From the research, the short answer seems to be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.


As one paper put it:

“Despite major demographic changes over the past 50 years and strong evidence that time spent with a spouse is important for marriages, we know very little about how time with a spouse has changed—or not—in the United States.”