Seems that parallel play isn’t limited to toddlers. Marriage, too, can feature parallel play: spouses busying themselves with work and hobbies and their own particular to-do lists, without a lot of overlapping interaction. It’s the marriage where spouses spend more time with friends — shopping or golfing, fitness class or book club — than with each other. Or the marriage where the children’s needs and wants always trump couple time. Or where date night sounds like a good idea but gets sacrificed to whatever else comes along.
Studies have found that interaction between husbands and wives, such as eating dinner or participating in leisure activities together, declined significantly from 1980 to 2000.1 It seems, too, that the increasing presence of technology has facilitated being “alone together,"2 each spouse on a computer or device, reading email, posting on Facebook, or playing a game with an online partner (rarely the spouse). We’re in the same house, but, like those toddlers, we’re in parallel play.
Compared to generations past, people expect a high level of satisfaction from marriage nowadays. But they also expect a high level of personal life satisfaction and fulfillment — from the pursuit of activities and work and friendship and more. Often, the pursuit of personal happiness — what I do with my time — conflicts with the pursuit of marital satisfaction — what we do as a couple to strengthen and enjoy our bond.
There’s a balancing act here, sometimes requiring us to sacrifice, for the moment, the pursuit of one of these goals in order to promote the other. It may mean forgoing an evening at the gym to commit to regular date night. It may mean taking a walk with my partner instead of watching my son’s every soccer game. It may mean leaving work early to meet for dinner and a show.
Parallel play rarely leads to a strong and satisfying marriage. If it describes your relationship, find ways to increase your interactive time together — through establishing a ritual of an after-dinner walk or a Sunday morning coffee chat, through shared sports or hobbies, through taking a class together, even through socializing with others. Couples can slip into parallel play accidentally, through the gradual pull of multiple demands in busy lives, and sometimes all it takes is a shared awareness to trigger a beneficial course correction.
- Amato, Paul R., et al. “Continuity and Change in Marital Quality Between 1980 and 2000.” Journal of Marriage and Family, 65:1 (1-22). February 2003.
- Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Basic Books (New York: 2011).