I mean, together alone. How do you balance your alone time with your time with your partner? How much would you say you really enjoy spending time with your partner? Do you do other things while spending time together, like TV or websurfing?
I’m having a bit of an issue with this in my own relationship and need to try to find a mid-range of “normal”.
The Mr. and I spend pretty well all of our non-work time together, but I suspect we’re a bit weird.
Sometimes I might be reading a book (like when he’s watching hockey) but we’re still in the same room together. Usually we’re hanging out and chatting, or gone out shopping together or to a movie or whatever.
I missed a question: I enjoy spending time with the Mr. more than anyone else (otherwise, why would I have married him?). Sometimes we’ll zone out from each other (like reading or watching hockey) but generally we’re best friends, laugh at each others jokes, and get each other like other people don’t get us. So, lots of time works well for us, but again - I think we’re kind of weird.
I’d like to stake out the territory on the far end of the spectrum.
Virtually all of it.
Mrs. Devil and I work out of our house, often closely together on projects (we do editing and design, two services that complement each other). So a typical day begins together with coffee/breakfast, then heads to the office, eventually making its way down to cook together, and finally to wind down the evening together. 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Together. It’s bliss.
We have an active social life, but generally prefer to do things together, and most of our friends are couples. We’ve been drumming together for several years now, and hit at least one circle a month. There are the odd times when we do something vaguely gender-specific without each other, but those are by far the anomaly. Mundane shopping chores (e.g., food) suck, so we generally do those types of things together to make it more fun and to make the time pass more quickly. Again, there are times when we do chores on own, but those are in the minority and typically when there are work or other pressures involved.
We’re not a moopie-poopie-boopie-surgary couple, we just get along very well—the clichéd ‘best friends’. And of course we do go to the bathroom alone, do our cardio alone (though we do lift heavy objects together three times a week), and she’ll spend a few hours here and there on her nails or whatnot or I’ll spend some time shooting zombies and the like, but we’re generally in the same house—so between waves we’ll pass by each other for a few minutes of chatting. And though we often work on the same project, hours of the day can go by with both of us immersed in our own part of it. Still in the same room, but in our own little workaday world.
Oh, of course we do get all riled up at each other from time to time (particularly when we were quitting smoking), but again those are the rare times.
Funny thing is, when we met we were both looking for a casual relationship—on match.com of all places. On our first date we ended up talking on the couch for seventeen hours straight, and it’s never stopped. That was seven years ago. We now have a one-year-old son.
Man, life is good (and it just keeps getting better).
Jim and I spend most of our non-work time together. Jim has more outside hobbies than I do (he curls in winter two nights a week and coaches baseball in summer), but otherwise we hang out together. Like alice says, we enjoy spending time together. When we go on vacations, we always drive, and spend up to ten hours a day in the car together. We spend up to two weeks together pretty much 24/7, and it doesn’t seem to create too much friction. I’m a very independent individual; Jim is one of the few people in the world that I can be around this much.
In a few weeks, torie, my husband and I will have been married for forty-three years. And there have been periods of time during which we have had “issues” with the amount of time we spent together.
I believe that each decade or so there were significant changes in our circumstances - children, working necessities, changes in our needs and wants, which all influenced, not only the amount of time we spent together, but also the quality of time spent together.
One rather spectacular period, during which we rarely spoke an angry word to each other, occurred when I was working nights and he was working days and we left a tape recorder on the kitchen table for communication purposes and spent awake time together on weekends!
We had two periods of separation (each less than a year) while we worked out the inevitable kinks in our marriage and during which we spent almost no time together.
At present we occupy a room together for a couple of hours each evening, sometimes doing something together and other times each occupied with our own interests. Date night is Friday night. We work at household tasks most Saturdays and play day is Sunday.
I’m retired and he is still working so I’m impatiently waiting for him to make the big decision and join me in travel.
It’s been my experience that a long-time committed relationship is an ever-changing situation.
I’ll take the territory at the other end of the scale!
We live separately due to DH’s work, and he makes it home for maybe two to three weekends a month. He usually comes home Saturday morning and leaves again Sunday night. Of that time, he spends a lot of it upstairs in the music room, usually with the younger boy for company. We all eat together but the older boy is off with his friends or at cram school (sucks, but this is Japan) and as we don’t know which weekends he’s free until the day is upon us, I often have a plan that may or may not accommodate him. I used to try to keep weekends free but it resulted in too many lonely days with nothing to do…
So our time together as a couple results in maybe one or two full days a month.
We just came home from a week’s holiday together which was bliss! I don’t like the fact that we spend so little time together but we never get tired of each other. The thrill of seeing him or hearing his car in the drive has not worn off yet either, and we’ve been married for 15 years now.
My husband and I will often be in the same room together, but doing our own thing, and I don’t really count that as time spent together. It’s not time spent apart, either, it’s somewhere in the middle. Kind of like that stage when kids aren’t actually playing with each other, but they’ll happily amuse themselves alongside each other.
We go for a walk around the park in the mornings together, which is about 30 minutes. Then I go off to work whilst he works from home. In the evenings, we’ll probably spend a couple of hours together, that’s having dinner and maybe watching a program on television.
My husband is an aspiring writer, so he works on his writing for a couple of hours each evening, during which I tend to play Warcraft.
We spend most of our weekends together unless one of us has a specific thing to do that doesn’t involve the other.
Normally we are together 24 hours a day, it probably averages out to 23 hours over a year due to just one of us having to go on business trips sometimes.
Is that a threesome?
My husband and I are apart only when I go to work. We spend the rest of the time together as a family. However, he and I only have alone time after the kids and his mom go to sleep. We arrange for dates every so often, where I’ll take a vacation day and he and I will go have fun together. Even when we’re both on the computer, we’re talking to each other. We’ll both be in the same room and we’ll pull up Google Talk and send links, I love yous, etc.
This is pretty much Mr. Athena and I as well. We both work out of the house, occasionally on joint projects. We spend virtually 24/7 together, with the exception that sometimes one of us will run errands/visit family/exercise separately.
We get along a LOT better than I would have ever guessed, though we did have issues when our offices were right next to each other (I actually had to walk through his to get out of mine!) When we moved, we made sure to move to a house where our offices were not even within shouting range, and that’s worked out well. We IM and call each other during the day.
At night, we tend to do one of 3 things - we either go out, usually with friends, or we stay in, cook dinner, watch a movie, or we have a “free night” where I usually read or play games, he usually watches TV shows I don’t like, plays guitar, or does any number of hobbies he has that I don’t get into.
I like it. I’d rather do things with him than anyone else, and would miss him if anything changed.
Well, both Sr. Olives and I are in grad school (though I’m currently on summer break) so we don’t see one another as often as either of us would like.
We exist in the same room together outside of school/work hours, but usually we’re both working on school work.
I estimate we spend about 4 hours a day existing in the same room together and about 1-2 hours a day actually spending time together. On the weekends it’s closer to 8 hours existing/4-5 hours spending time together. Whenever he gets home we always take a moment to cuddle and check in before we get to work. Right now I am missing him hard-core because he’s been home late every single night this week.
I am a person who very much needs my alone time. I would say one out of every three days we do our own thing during free time instead of spending time together. Usually that means he plays Diablo II while I play the Wii or post here.
We spend most time together, but we aren’t exactly joined at the hip. We’ve each gone off for the entire summer to do our own thing on multiple different occasions. I’ve noticed the longer we’re together (going on 8 years as a couple now) the harder it is to be away from him for extended periods of time. Particularly now, as we’re both socially isolated in a state far away from family and friends, we need one another more than ever.
We’re usually together when we’re not at work. I also spend about 5 hours a week or so with my running group without him, as well as grocery shopping, nail appts, ect. We’ll usually meet up for lunch at least once a week and will often just hang out on the patio on a nice night and chill, play a board game, or whatever.
We also always have google chat up at work and chat throughout the day. There’s really no one else I’d rather be spending time with/talking to. 
Most of the time we’re not at work or school. We do most of our errands together, like grocery shopping, etc, too. We’ve been together for about 6 years, living together for 5, and married 4.
I like it. I’d rather spend time with my husband than anyone else I know, that’s why I married him. It’s not that we never spend time apart, with other friends, but the majority of our time is spent together. Some of that time - mostly during weeknights, is spent “together but doing our own thing” (eg, I’m knitting or reading, he’s playing a game or on the 'net). Even then we still talk to each other though, we don’t just sit together, ignoring each other completely.
Most of our spare time is spent together. I go to my book club and he goes to the occasional card game or what have you but mostly we spend all of our spare time with one another.
A lot of it, especially now that we have no kids in the house. We chat online often while we’re at work, meet each other for lunch at least a couple times a week, and spend most evenings together either watching a movie, cooking, dining out, or just talking. We spend most weekends together doing different activities.
But we also have our separate time. We have separate computer lounges, bathrooms, and bedrooms. An average night might see both of us at our computers for an hour or two chatting with other friends, reading the news, doing homework, whatever.
We are absolutely best friends. We have so much fun together and I enjoy every minute of it. And it’s nice to know we are both comfortable enough to know when it’s ‘alone alone’ time.
My wife and I spend most of our time together when I’m not at work, but we also give each other space when either of us wants it. I have various community organizations I’m involved with after hours, have different tastes in movies than she does, and have some friends that she doesn’t particularly care for, so sometimes I’m off doing my own thing. On the other hand, she has some friends I could take or leave, often does volunteer work, and is a member of two book clubs. I’m a night owl and she’s more of a morning person. We really enjoy our time together and can always make each other laugh, but we’ve also found it’s best not to be too clingy. We’ll celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary in August.
I’d say we spend virtually every evening together, going out on our own maybe once every 2-3 weeks. But my girlfriend works Saturdays, so we really only have Sunday as a full day together, which really sucks.
When we’re together, in the evenings, we devote pretty much our whole evening together - we don’t sit on a computer or play video games, for instance. We’re both big foodies so our evenings revolve around cooking and eating and chatting, with the odd TV programme thrown in.
We probably socialise with others about once a week, and always look forward to being alone together afterwards, which makes us sound pretty unsociable - maybe we are! (Certainly never used to be, maybe it’s old age, ha).
For the record, I don’t think we’re ‘that’ typical. We’ve been together 3 years, living together 18 months, so it’s partly still a novelty.
:smack:
Hope the extra comma would make that a little more clear.
But now that you mention it, things are getting a little boring around here and torie sounds like she could use a little more “married” time. . .
We’ve been together 13 years and spend nearly all of our time together, or close to each other. We do not work together, so there’s that. But while i have a few more outside hobbies than he does, it’s not many, and I genuinely enjoy all of the time we spend. Even if we are doing different things we’re in one of three rooms in the same house. We have different tastes in things but we each accept the other’s taste and needs.