Serious One-On-One Quality Time: How to Achieve It

My fiancé and I love to spend quality time together. We don’t always get to during the week because of work and because of our hobbies (except for board games and writing) don’t often intersect.

However, we do schedule time every week to play a game together. We also try to schedule an episode on Netflix often. Every now and then, we just get busy though. I’ve got deadlines to keep. He’s got a club to keep organized. During November, our spare time is spent participating in NaNoWriMo (a worldwide writing program). December is our time to decorate for the holidays. So by the time January rolls around, we’ve made our New Year’s resolutions of “spending more time together”.

So when we get too busy, we take an hour to sit and plan for some quality time together – true quality time. Not just time that we spend in the same room together, but periods of time that we spend with each other: enjoying each other’s company and doing activities together.

Have an “unplugged” weekend. To ensure that we’re truly unplugged, my fiancé and I normally pack up some things and go camping. We’ll leave on a Thursday night and we’re normally gone until Sunday afternoon so that we can unpack and recoup when we get home. We’ll go hiking and cook together but we’ll also have our quiet alone time as well (he brings a book and I bring my notebook or some needlework).

We go car camping so we usually leave our phones in the truck. If we’re really itching for some electronic time, the only things allowed are podcasts. I usually download a couple writing podcasts (since he dabbles in writing as well) and a couple scary podcasts (Inner Sanctum – a horror radio broadcast from the 1940’s and ‘50s) for us to listen to at night when we’re in the tent.

Act like kids again. Sometimes we forget about “the important things” after we become adults. We forget about the wonderful things that made being a kid fun. We get bombarded with responsibilities and lose that sense of wonder that we had as kids.

But just because we don’t live our lives as kids, doesn’t mean that we can’t revisit it. Have a Nerf gun fight. Have a pillow fight. Spend the day at the park. Have a YouTube or Netflix night where you watch movies or TV shows from your childhood.

Remember that being a kid means that you don’t have the responsibilities of having a job so don’t check your work e-mail or your phone that whole day.

Being an adult can be a drag some days but at least you have each other to help you power through it.

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Image by aletuzzi (http://pixabay.com/en/whisper-secret-mystery-stealth-408482/)