By Sarah Murnane
We are constantly measuring relationships in our life. We have best-friends, acquaintances, work colleagues, romantic partners, casual romances; all with their own specific rules and regulations of how much we care about that person. Our relationships are regularly valued not only by the quality but the quantity, the more friends you have the better. A controversial study indicated that the maximum number of friendships a person could have is around a hundred and fifty. A fairly big number, but what do our relationships actually do for us?
An interesting place to start is how much time we spend with each other throughout out lives. The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) attempts to measure how the population of America splits time amongst activities, excluding sleeping. This could be as broad as “cooking meals”, to detailed observations like “playing basketball”. The data is obtained annually through household surveys contracted and distributed from the federally funded organisation. The ATUS survey various large scale sample groups and infer population wide estimates, so we can take some of their data with a pinch of salt. However, as they have been conducting these survey’s annually for over twenty years, the aggregate is still useful.
From this, researchers concluded who exactly we spend the most time with throughout our lives in relation to our age. The highest category is, of course, alone. The second notably is our partner, which increases dramatically the older we get. All other categories of relationship, friends, family or children all experience a peak and then decline. The two people you will spend the most individual time with throughout your life are yourself, and your romantic partner.
Pressure, huh? You certainly don’t want to choose wrong. Whatever about your own personality, but introducing a whole other person into the equation can get testy. One definitely would want to be absolutely positive about their choice.
Here is where it gets even more fun, although we will spend the most time with our romantic partner through our life, people generally report negative emotion when seeing their romantic partner regularly. A 2021 study examined the instances that people feel positive emotion in their lives on both an immediate and long-term scale. They found, that in the immediate picture, our romantic relationships make us consistently unhappy. Further from this, they found that even close friendships can make people have worse life conditions in the short term.
Despite this, across the board, those who have a long-term partner and many close friendships report overall life-satisfaction compared to those who do not have these relationships. This is partly a reflective exercise, as the older we get the less relationships we have overall. It is also about the social optics of relationships, from this study people derive greater momentary and life-satisfaction from simply being able to claim they are married than they do from spending time with their partner.
There we have it: we dislike spending time with each other, but we regret it ultimately if we do not. Not exactly the outcome we were hoping for. Maybe this is the final nail in the modern dating nihilistic coffin to conclude that we should all give up on the idea of monogamy forever. Or take a long term practical approach and know that one day it will all finally pay off. The choice is yours.