How much time should couples spend together?

Hours are only half the story, so the next question is how that time feels. In some years the same survey asked people how they felt during three moments of their day, picked at random. Flood and Genadek compared each person’s moments with and without their spouse present. With a spouse, people rated themselves happier, found what they were doing more meaningful, and felt less stress.

Men rated their happiness 4.62 out of six with their wives and 4.19 without. Women rated it 4.64 and 4.26. Any stress showed up in 42% of moments with a spouse, against 53% without.

Couples aged 50 to 79 showed the same: happier and less stressed with a spouse (Genadek, Flood and Moen, 2019). A separate national phone survey, run by the economist Alan Krueger and colleagues, measured how much of people’s time was spent in a bad mood, meaning stress, sadness or pain outweighed happiness. A bad mood took 15.8% of men’s time with a spouse, against 18.3% alone (Krueger and colleagues, 2009).

Dedicated time, such as a regular date night, has its own survey. The National Marriage Project, a research group at the University of Virginia that studies marriage, asked 2,000 married Americans aged 18 to 55 how often they go on date nights (the National Marriage Project, 2023). 52% said never or only a few times a year.

Among couples with date nights once or twice a month or more, 83% of wives and 84% of husbands said they were very happy in their marriage. Without them, the shares were 68% and 70%.

Two cautions apply to all of this. These studies show that hours together go with feeling better, not which causes which: happier couples may simply choose more time together. And the date-night report comes from groups that promote marriage, so read it as a survey result, not a prescription.

A figure travels around social media and marriage blogs: married couples spend only 35 minutes a week talking to each other. It is usually credited to “a study”, sometimes to a university. We could not find the study, and the pages that repeat it give no author, year or journal.

What we can find is the time-use data above: about 3h 22m together on a weekday and 6h 53m on a weekend day. Those hours are not all conversation, and the survey does not measure talk. But a figure so far below the measured time together should not be quoted without a source.

Friendship has an hours answer of a different kind: how many it takes to build one. Jeffrey Hall, a researcher who studies how people form relationships, asked adults who had recently moved to a new home, and first-year students, how many hours they had spent with new people and how close they had become. His two studies put it at about 40 to 60 hours together for a casual friend. A friend took 80 to 100, and a close one more than 200 (Hall, 2019).

The national clock for friends is small. Americans spent 35 minutes a day socializing and communicating in 2025, down from 41 in 2015 (the BLS). Time with friends in person fell from 60 minutes a day in 2003 to 20 in 2020 (Kannan and Veazie, 2023).

A couple’s week and a friend’s week come out of the same hours. If the calculator shows a lot of time together and very little with anyone else, that is worth a look too. More on this in How to deal with loneliness.

A good way to run this test counts your time together from what you already write or say about the day, with no timer to start at dinner. Most journaling apps keep how the evening felt. They do not add up the hours, so neither of you can see the week as it was.

One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in.

You write or say your day in your own words, as it happens or all at once. The app reads what you wrote and counts the hours that went to each part of it: time together, time with family and friends, your phone, and the time you never mentioned (shown as unaccounted). Then it shows those hours over days and weeks. A target holds the week against the number you agreed, and a weekly habit with a reminder can keep the evening on the calendar.

Write my first day

Download on the App StoreGet it on Google Play

Or scan with your phone's camera.

For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.

Agree on a number together first: the hours a week you want just the two of you, and one block of at least two hours. Then count for four weeks. Each week, each of you also gives it a score from zero to ten. It is working if you hit the number in three weeks of four and the scores hold or rise.

Couples tend to remember a week by its last argument or its one good evening. A count settles what actually happened.

Every figure on this page links to one of these. The weekly totals are our arithmetic from the published daily minutes. More on the hours that feel good in How to be happier.

1. Flood, S. M. and Genadek, K. R. (2016). Time for each other: work and family constraints among couples. Journal of Marriage and Family, 78(1), 142 to 164.
2. Genadek, K. R., Flood, S. M. and Moen, P. (2019). For better or worse? Couples' time together in encore adulthood. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 74(2), 329 to 338.
3. Krueger, A. B., Kahneman, D., Schkade, D., Schwarz, N. and Stone, A. A. (2009). National time accounting: the currency of life. In Measuring the Subjective Well-Being of Nations, NBER and University of Chicago Press, 9 to 86.
4. Wilcox, W. B. and Dew, J. (2023). The Date Night Opportunity, second edition. National Marriage Project, University of Virginia, and the Wheatley Institute.
5. Hall, J. A. (2019). How many hours does it take to make a friend? Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 36(4), 1278 to 1296.
6. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (read October 1, 2026). American Time Use Survey, 2025 results.
7. Kannan, V. D. and Veazie, P. J. (2023). US trends in social isolation, social engagement, and companionship, nationally and by age, sex, race/ethnicity, family income, and work hours, 2003-2020. SSM - Population Health, 21, 101331.