You make dinner while your partner runs the bath for your younger child. Your partner washes the dishes while you help your elder child practice lines for the school play. Then it’s bedtime — your partner watches funny cat videos with the oldest while you snuggle with the youngest.
It’s a well-oiled machine. After ten years of this, you’re finally starting to figure out how to get two high-needs kids the support and connection they need.
But when your heads hit the pillow — at different times, because your partner is a night owl and you’d better be asleep by 8:30 if you want that precious sliver of morning-alone-time that keeps you a modicum of sane — you notice something, just before you drift off.
You and your partner haven’t spoken a sentence to each other today that wasn’t a request or a directive.
Does she have her water bottle? Did the permission slip get signed. Your turn to take the kids to the dentist.
There’s a name for this, though it isn’t a clinical one. You might call it roommate mode — you live together, but you’re like ships passing in the night, never finding time to connect more deeply. And it’s worth saying plainly, because most of what’s written about it gets this backwards: you didn’t stop trying. You’re actually trying so hard. It’s just that all of that “trying” is aimed at things outside your romantic relationship, and your marriage only gets what’s left over.
Sometimes you wake in the night with a disturbing clarity: your parenting style is costing you your relationship.
But what can you do?
Something’s got to give — of this much you’re certain. And you also know this: what gives is not going to be your relationship with your kids. You’re an older parent. You waited a lifetime to bring these incredible humans into the world, and you’re not going to drop the ball on anything related to them.
Besides — aren’t you and your partner in this together? Didn’t you sign up for this, the two of you, as a team?
If you’re anything like a lot of the moms I work with, what I’ve described is not even the whole of the mental load. You might also be fermenting your own grains, making almond milk from scratch, limiting screens, reading three books on gentle discipline. You’re not doing this halfway. And the thing is, what works for your kids often comes at a real cost to your family system — specifically, to the two adults giving everything they have trying to hold it all together.
Roommate mode is what happens when you quietly lose touch with one another. There’s a louder version too — when the distance between you has smoldered into actual resentment and frustration, and criticism, contempt, defensiveness or shutting down have moved in. If that’s happening for you right now, start with the Gottman Four Horsemen and their nervous system antidotes instead. Those communication patterns need attention before any new ritual will hold.
5.5 — The Magic Number
John and Julie Gottman spent decades researching what separates couples who stay connected from couples who slowly drift into being very efficient co-parenting roommates. One of their most well-known findings has nothing to do with grand gestures or annual vacations. It’s a simple number: 5.5 hours a week.
That’s roughly what the Gottmans found was enough — not a full date night every night, not a second honeymoon, just 5.5 hours, spread across small, repeatable rituals — to keep a couple’s connection alive under the weight of ordinary life. Things like:
- A real goodbye each morning, with eye contact, not a distracted peck over putting away the school lunch ingredients
- A real reunion at the end of the day — even two minutes of actually looking at each other and asking how the day went, before diving into logistics
- Genuine appreciation, said out loud, at least once a day
- Physical affection — a hug that lasts long enough to register in your body, not just your calendar
- One weekly check-in about the state of the relationship itself
- One date, however small
- A little bit of real admiration and affection expressed between the two of you
None of it is complicated. That’s what makes it almost insulting when you can’t seem to make it happen.
(A quick note: you may also see this referred to as the “magic 6 hours” in some of the Gottman Institute’s more recent materials — the rituals are the same, the math just got rounded up slightly over the years. I’ll stick with 5.5, since that’s the number from the original research in The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work*.)*
Knowing Isn’t the Same as Doing
Here’s the problem: knowing this is a good idea doesn’t mean you’ve figured out how to build it into your week, let alone your day.
You and your partner are each so expertly delegated, task by task, to work, to home care, to the kids, nearly every hour of every day. It can feel like a zero-sum game. You’d genuinely like to give your relationship the time it deserves — but how? Something feels like it has to give, and nothing seems available to give it.
What’s Actually Got to Give
So here’s the reveal: something does need to give. Just maybe not in the way you’d expect.
To understand what, we have to look past the schedule to consider what’s happening beneath it, in the inner system of you, and of your partner.
So let’s focus on you for a second.
What’s the bind you feel, almost constantly? That sense of trying to do it all, to keep every ball in the air at once. It can feel like being strapped to a fast-moving train. Like being pulled in half — impossibly torn between too many things that all genuinely matter. Parenting. Work. The house. Your friendships. Your own sense of purpose or calling. And somewhere down near the bottom of the list, sitting there quietly, your spouse — simply because they’re always there.
Here’s a reframe worth sitting with: what if that zero-sum feeling isn’t actually zero-sum by design? What if it’s less about the math of your calendar, and more about competing certainties inside of you — parts of you that each hold something true and important, and that haven’t yet been able to sit at the same table?
Consider how differently people parent. Some people put their kids in front of a screen without a second thought and leave to go bowling. Some hire a babysitter for a week and fly to Tulum, no guilt, credit card be damned. If you’re not doing things like that, it’s not because you can’t. It’s because parts of you hold different values, different agendas — and when those parts are in conflict, it can feel like there’s no direction you can turn that doesn’t cost you something.
That feeling isn’t a personal failing, and it isn’t an unsolvable scheduling puzzle either. It’s a longstanding inner conflict. Different parts of you genuinely want different things. And the more you understand those parts — what they’re each trying to protect, what they’re each afraid will happen if they stand down — the more you can bring them into the same room, instead of letting them silently fight it out at 2am while you stare at the ceiling.
This is why the Gottmans’ 5.5 hours, as clear and well-researched as it is, so often doesn’t stick. It’s not a discipline problem. It’s not that you don’t care enough, or that you haven’t read enough parenting books or relationship how-tos. It’s that some part of you is dead set against it — for reasons that make complete sense once you actually listen to them.
That’s the work worth doing before you try to force a new routine into your week again. Not gritting your teeth and trying harder. Actually turning toward the parts of you that are in conflict, and finding out what they need.
In the next post, I want to show you exactly what that looks like — the specific IFS parts that show up in parents torn between their kids and their marriage — and how, through meeting those parts, you can prepare the ground for the 5.5 hours to become real.
If you’re reading this with a sinking feeling because it sounds a lot like your life, support is available! Working with the pattern on the surface and the parts underneath it at the same time is most of what I do in couples therapy. If you’re not based in California, where I practice, an IFS therapist or coach near you can help you with this work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is it so hard to find time for my marriage after having kids? It’s rarely just a scheduling issue. Often, different internal “parts” of you are in conflict — one part fiercely protective of your kids’ needs, another quietly tracking the cost to your relationship. Until those parts are understood, new routines tend not to stick, no matter how much you want them to.
Is it normal to feel disconnected from my partner while raising high-needs kids? Yes. Parents of high-needs or neurodivergent kids often pour so much of themselves into caregiving that connection with a partner quietly slides down the priority list. Noticing this isn’t a sign you’re failing — it’s usually the first step toward changing it.
Does spending time on my marriage take away from my kids? Not necessarily – not in practice. The Gottmans’ research points to small, repeatable rituals — a few minutes here and there — rather than large blocks of time. The bigger obstacle is usually internal: a part of you that believes any time given to the relationship is time stolen from your children.
What can I do if I know my relationship needs attention but can’t make it happen? Start by getting curious about what’s blocking it, rather than forcing a new routine through willpower alone. Understanding the internal parts involved — through journaling, therapy, or an approach like Internal Family Systems (IFS) — often does more than another calendar hack.
References
Gottman Institute. “6 Hours a Week to a Better Relationship.” The Gottman Institute Blog.
Gottman, J. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Harmony Books.