For couples without children who work 9-5, 5 days a week: how much time per day do you spend actually talking to your partner?

[Truly2435]

Eg in the evenings. Do you spend all evening talking to them each weekday and all weekends or more do the companiable silence where you both do different things separately but together (in the same room) rather than talk all evening?

Just curious to see how other people are :)

Esp if you live with them / in a long term relationship where you spend most evenings together

We eat dinner together every night (unless one of us it out) and then we usually talk for about an hour or so, sometimes until we go to bed (we eat late). However, at the weekend we often do our own thing (he works for part of the weekend anyway) and come to together for a coffee in the afternoon and chat, then later it will be dinner and chat as usual and maybe watch a film. We don’t often go out together at the weekend, unless I plan an outing. But it works fine.

Before lockdown we probably spent 4 evenings together spread out. We have a couple of evenings where we have planned activities to do together that might mean we spend the evening talking about what we're doing. We have rules for date night from the Gottman sound relationship course we did that helps you to set expectations for your relationship and agree how to manage conflict, foster and maintain intimacy etc. So on a date night different rules apply to just spending time together if that makes sense. Sometimes we will have a chat cooking together and then eat dinner for an hour talking some more, then both do different things for a couple of hours eg one is reading whilst the other playing piano in the same room. We don't talk all the time.

Totally different when his children are here mind.

We are both WFH now and are lucky enouh to have 2 spare bedrooms in which to do this. We sit at the kitchen table and drink coffee for half an hour every morning and talk then.
Then eat dinner together at the table in the evening and talk then.
Friday and Saturday nights we tend to spend most of the evening in the kitchen (with wine/beer) and listen to the radio. We talk then too.
Saturday and Sunday we go for a long walk...And talk then aswell.
Crikey, writing all that down has made me realise that we talk a LOT!!

Watching with interest.

We're both working from home. We have a conversation in bed about what's on today and who's going to get up to make the coffee. We then have a chat/moan about colleagues/tea break about every hour. A walk to the shops together at lunchtime gives us a long talk, mostly about what are we having for tea. After tea it's normally TV or books and then bed, by which point we've pretty much run out of things to say to each other. We talk more in the evening if one of us has managed to find an office to work in!

Thanks everyone so far

We pretty much chat all the time. We don't sit in separate rooms but we do separate activities in the same room. While we are doing that we will chat though eg one of us will read out a bit from the book we are reading or rewind a bit of the TV to show the other, show off the completed lego or a cute photo on social media etc. If we are doing the same activity it depends what it is, if we are playing a game we chat through it, if we are watching TV we pause it to chat about it if its something substantial or just make quick comments over the top of it. When the activities pause for drinks/the loo/whatever we have a bit of a chat. We chat while we cook dinner, clean up and when we go to bed. Sometimes wake up in the night and chat as well. Morning chats depend how tired we are, sometimes we chat more but if we are tired we have a bit of campaniable silence as well.

I've used the word chat too much, I hardly ever use it in real life and now it looks like its not a real word!

We'd have tea together and would probably watch the soaps together but if we wanted to watch different things would go and sit in separate rooms perhaps about 9ish. Some times we might not speak if one of us was reading the paper or something. So I guess it was a mix of both.

Dp works away Monday to Friday so I get 4 evenings of peace and quiet! (Which i spend feeding the kids, getting them to bed, cleaning the house and back logged onto work).

We just give each other a quick call if anything comes up/we need to talk.