I am single, but do let me share my gamut of experiences here. From observing my friends.
Some of my friends’ (who are male, incidentally) SO just have to check on their guys every single hour or so. It could be a SMS, but more than often, it would be a phone call. My friends would relate whatever is happening to them at the moment…“Hi darling…yes, I am killing some aliens at Crowbar’s home now, on the Xbox360…have you taken breakfast?”
Thankfully, some of my other friends don’t seem to be connected to their SO all the time. So how is it like for you all?
PS. I only notice unmarried couples doing this though. Maybe having to spend the rest of your lives together change something…
In previous relationships, a lot. I trust this one enough that I don’t need to call her more than once a day (and that’s more to let *her *know where *I *am, since I tend to be out a lot).
Every freaking hour? Gawd, kill me now. Are these people in middle school or sumptin?
If we are doing different things for the day, we can be outa touch ALLLLL DAYYYY LONGGGGG (gasp). Now, we might contact each other for something like “hey, I am at the store, what was it you wanted from here again?”
I regularly go out paddling/kayaking without the SO. Leave early in the morning, on the river all day long without any contact, and I’ll call only when I get off the river (to let her know I am safe and to give the postman time to clear out before I get home).
If we are in different parts of the country, its a regular end of the day "hows it going, having fun, anything important I need to know about? " kinda call. And even then, it not a STRICT requirement for the daily contact. About one time outa 10 for that a daily contact is not made for whatever reason.
Yeah, that doesn’t change for some people when they get married. I know a surprisingly large number of people who call or take calls from their spouses every hour or two at work. I feel this is a)unprofessional as you are not being paid to gab on the phone to your spouse b)total overkill as they will be seeing said spouses at home in a few hours c) a waste of everyone’s time because they typically share insights such as the fact that they’re working.
How frequently we’re in contact depends on what’s going on. If one of us is out of town, we’ll talk a couple times a week unless something really major happens–when a friend of ours’ dad went from being in the hospital but stable to being brain dead in a matter of days, we talked a few times a day. We typically email about half the days we don’t speak on the phone. If we’re both home, we’ll see each other in the evening and once in a great while at lunch time, with the very occasional phone call or email to ask a quick question.
Not currently coupled, so I’ll just go by my last GF.
We had an hour-long phone conversation every night. There’d also be at least one e-mail per day, though in the beginning of the relationship it was more like 10-20 per day.
In my previous relationship the phone calls were on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays.
My annoying, moronic co-worker that I mention here so often talks to her moronic, annoying husband all the live long day. The first thing she does when she comes tromping in in the morning is call him and it’s non stop all damned day. Yesterday she interrupted another co-worker’s fairwell luncheon to have a ten minute conversation with her husband about the refrigerator he was looking at at Sears. By the way they are in the 50s and 60s and have been married 20 + years.
I used to work with another dumb old biddy whose husband would call every day just before she was about to leave for the day. What the hell is wrong with people?
I used to work in a large office with 6 or 7 other guys. No one called/got called by their girlfriend every minute of every day, but there would usually be 2 or 3 calls a day between all of us. Most phone calls ended with “OK, I’ll see you later. Yep. OK. Me too. Say it? But everyone’s listening. OK, you know, love thing. sigh I wuv you too.”
This was usually met with derision and mocking kissing noises from all the other guys in the room. It got to the point where at the end of every phone call, all the guys in the room would shout, in unison, “Oh Schmoopy!”
When my wife and I were dating, we’d commonly not see one another during the week (Monday-Thursday). On days like that, we’d usually call each other in the evening, to see how each other’s days had gone, and to say good-night.
OTOH, we’ve been married for 18 years, so that was before cell phones and the Internet. If we were dating today, it’s possible that we’d text each other occasionally during the day, but probably not a lot more than that.
My SO and I both use a computer for the majority of our day, and use an instant message service as well, to keep in touch with coworkers mainly, but we have each other on there as well. So, we have a constant “window” of communication open. It isn’t like we are constantly talking to one another, but you know, we could be.
We also call each other pretty frequently too. I guess we are in touch with one another the vast majority of the time, when I think about it. Sorry it upsets people so much (no, I’m not), but its our relationship and we like it this way.
I’m in a long distance relationship, if that matters. On weekdays, I always send a “good morning” email to her first thing. She usually replies, we might do one or two replies after that. I usually don’t talk to her again until the evening when we either do Skype for up to an hour or we talk on the phone for maybe 30 minutes. In the beginning of our relationship (about 2 years at this point), we spoke for a lot longer, sometimes as much as two or three hours. I told her I couldn’t keep up that pace as I frankly didn’t have that much to say to anybody.
I live with my SO. We e-mail back and forth throughout the day, but it’s just about silly things. I don’t think we talk on the phone even once a week.
My aunt & brother and SIL, who all live together, talk constantly. They call each other during every break, and every free minute of the day. It makes me crazy. It’s so weird.
Her: “are you going to miss me?”
Me: “Um…I guess.”
“Well I’ll be out of town all weekend! You won’t see me for forever!”
“You’re going to be gone a day.”
“Two days!”
“Really then? When are you getting back?”
“Saturday evening.”
“uh huh. And I’m going to work right now. So since I wasn’t planning on seeing you anyway during that time regardless of your plans, it’s really less than 24 hours.”
“Oh well fine. But will you miss me?”
“Ayup. Sure. Have fun!”
We text each other occasionally during the work day, not more than twice I’d say, just to keep each other up to date if there’s anything the other person needs to know. And yes, sometimes what the other person needs to know is “I love you”. I don’t have a problem with that. If I’m going to the shops after work I’ll call to see if there’s anything I need to buy. We very seldom email each other from work. We each have large sections of our day when we can’t be on the phone anyway, due to the nature of our work. If I’m out, I won’t call unless it’s to check on whether we’re eating together/to say I’m on my way with a kebab/to say I’m stopping out longer than expected. I wouldn’t call just to say hi while I was out with friends. That would be weird.
I didn’t enter into the poll because I am married but I call my spousal-unit when I have arrived here at the lab, once at lunch to make sure she has eaten and then again when I am on my way back home.
I probably fit the middle-aged category (what is the male equivalent for ‘biddy’), but the calls are done from my office on my cellphone and take all of 2 minutes a piece unless something of importance needs to be communicated. I call her when I get here in the morning because my commute is an hour long. I call her at lunch because she is bad about not eating lunch unless I remind her. And I call her when I am on my way home so she can know when to start worrying if I am late.
This doesn’t bother any of my colleagues, but I don’t share an office with anyone, and the calls are discrete. But we still use pet-names and ALWAYS say we love each other. Married for more than 25 years and that is one of the reasons why.
My oldest sister’s husband calls her umpteen times every day, too (I worked with her for a while, so I got to see it firsthand). He does it because he is a completely useless human being. Typical calls were things like, “There’s no brown bread for toast for the girls.” “Well, use the white bread then.” “Oh, okay.” GAH!
Um, once every two or three days we talk on the phone, and there’s usually an e-mail or an IM or something on the days we don’t talk. It’s a somewhat long distance relationship until this summer, and we’re both generally really busy. It works well for us.
(One other thing to keep in mind is that I am one of those people that would rather stab myself in the eye with a fork than speak on the phone for a minute more than I need to. That she can respect that and not push on the point is yet another item in the long list of reasons that we’re good for each other.)
We live together - might as well be married. Definitely once a day, usually more during the workday because I hear something he’d love, or vice versa. Plus I need to know if he’ll be home for dinner.
The SO is a co-worker, though we don’t work the same shift and I often don’t see him around the office. I see him after work 2-3 times per week.
We email each other nightly on weeknights, and usually email once over the weekend. Emails usually span 6-7 hours, but are not constantly flying back and forth. We text occasionally. We never chat on the phone or via IM, even if one of us is out of town.
Long distance relationship… it’s usually a couple of good morning texts, sometimes a text or two during the day if something interesting happened that we might want to share or just to see how the day is going. Text in the evening to see how the afternoon went, and update on plans (so we’ll know if we’ll both be online or not to chat) and then we’ll chat online (Skype or Facebook) and sometimes we’ll watch a movie together (pick a movie and turn it on at the same time then chat while watching… if we lived closer we’d do that sort of thing in person).
Text is handiest because it’s cheaper than phoning and if we are busy we can get back to each other when we get a chance. It’s not excessive IMO, though I suppose some might think that but calling every hour? That’s just crazy.
Well, I live with my sweetie and don’t have instant messaging at work, so…we connect at the end of the work day, by phone, typically figuring out who’s picking up what on the way home.
When we were long-distance <for a year>, I also had instant messaging at work, and we’d frequently trade goofy links or what-have-you.