20 Minutes to a Great Marriage

The other day when Diana, an adult education teacher and the mother of four small children, found that her husband Michael has tossed a dirty knife in among the clean ones in the drawer, she felt like chasing him down the hall with it.

"That was my clue that we haven't been spending enough time together," she said.

Diana and her husband Michael both work, and they have four small kids. They drive to work, race home, get some exercise, deliver one kid to soccer and another to ballet, pick them up again, make dinner and then, Diana says, "I wonder why I sometimes feel lonely even though I'm married."

"It sneaks up on people," says Norman Epstein, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Maryland. "They're trying to be good parents, trying to do a good job at work, trying to be good citizens of the community, and unwittingly they let the marital relationship slip to the bottom of the list."

For most couples, just spending time together is enough to make them feel intimate and connected.

For some, this means bonding through shared work tasks, taking out the garbage, diapering the baby, going to Costco, doing the things that have to be done. "For them going to the movie and looking at the same screen is good time together," says David Schnarch, Ph.D., author of Passionate Marriage.

This can be called quantity time. It speaks of the dailiness of life: noticing he got a haircut, trying a new piece of furniture out in various rooms, sitting out on the steps after dinner together to watch the world go by.

This is not the same as just living in the same house. You're clocking the hours, true, but as Epstein says, "You can spend a lot of time with someone and not feel you're intimate." It has to be time spent connecting.