The common perception is that you can be super busy OR happily married. What we wanted to know is if you could be super busy AND happily married. Do you need to change your lifestyles, or are you good to go? No pressure!

A lot of research and marriage advice points to the importance of spending time together as a couple, but perhaps this is not the most important factor when it comes to a healthy marriage.

How Do You Treat Each Other When You Are Not Busy?

It turns out that how you treat each other when you do have time together is what actually matters.

In 2004, researchers looked at a particular type of marriage that tends to be particularly hectic – the medical marriage. These researchers wanted to analyze correlations between busyness, marital adjustments, and overall satisfaction with work/life balance in marriages in which husbands worked as physicians. (Stay tuned, we’ve got a wife-as-physician study next!)

What they discovered is “more than hours worked, it is how a couple treats each other when they are not working that most powerfully determines the quality of contemporary medical marriage.”[i]

How were these successful marriages treating each other? The researchers found these qualities in the marriages that self-identified as satisfying:

Husbands didn’t let work stress negatively affect their at-home behaviour (good job, guys!)

Husbands often indicated their concern about how their work/life balance and busyness required them to spend time away from family (that’s sweet)

Wives found ways to keep themselves busy when their husbands were working long hours. Wives who were satisfied with their marriages learned to “accept this role without rancor, to build their individual support systems, and to carry on with family activities during their husbands’ work-related absences.”[ii] (that’s wise)

Wives held specific perspectives about their husband’s work – that it was done for noble reasons (common mission!)

In summary, “these busy couples did not have marriages that were less satisfying than those of other people in general. Quite the contrary, despite the hectic nature of medical life, physician’s wives claim to be quite satisfied with their marriages.”[iii]

Even if you’re not a doctor, if you’re plain busy and you have these elements in your marriage, you should be good to go!

Let’s switch genders and see what happens. In 2013, researchers looked at medical marriages in which the wife was the physician. They interviewed spouses of internal medical resident and faculty physicians, as they wanted to know how these couples made their marriages work in the face of the inflexible schedules of doctors.

These three themes emerged from these interviews in terms of what these husbands of doctors felt was important to the health of their busy marriage:

Having a set time for synchronizing schedules: Couples in these hectic marriages would often set a specific time where they would sit down and do their best to synchronize their schedules. Often schedules revolved around the physician’s schedule out of necessity.

Frequent verbal support: This was important in both directions. Husband’s verbally supported their wives’ busy careers. Wives verbally supported the husband’s sacrifices, work, and willingness to take care of things at home when they were not able to.

Shared decision-making: “Joint decision-making within physician families serves to increase the personal agency of female physicians’ husbands and may reduce work-life stress for physician wives.”[iv]

So it looks like you CAN have a hectic life and be happily married!

The Importance of Mutuality and Intimate Partnership

Much of the advice from these two studies applies to marriages in which one spouse is extremely busy and the other spouse is not, but what about marriages in which both individuals are living hectic lives?

A study completed in 2003 pointed towards the importance of mutuality in dual-earner coup...