Every so often an assessment reveals something a couple already feels but has never said out loud.
We built an assessment to go along with The Creation of Us. It measures three things: who you are as an individual, who you are as a couple, and how well you are supporting the person your spouse is becoming. Thousands of people have now taken it.
And of every statement on that assessment, one scores lower than all the rest:
“We protect daily and weekly moments to disconnect from distractions, and focus purely on each other.”
Not “we never fight.” Not “we always agree.” This one. The daily one. (Take the assessment HERE)
Here’s what I find fascinating: most couples don’t score low here because they don’t love each other. They score low because the word daily feels impossible.
The myth of the hour
When people read that statement, most picture the same thing: an uninterrupted hour of eye contact. No phones. No kids. Just the two of you, sitting across from each other, gazing lovingly into one another’s souls.
On a Monday.
Between work and school drop-off and dinner and bedtime.
No wonder the score is low. If that’s the standard, almost none of us are meeting it. An hour of undistracted, face-to-face connection every single day sounds less like romance and more like a scheduling crisis.
But that’s the myth. A connected marriage was never built on one big, uninterrupted hour. It’s built on small, protected moments, often five minutes or less.
What five minutes actually looks like
Between me and Jenny, connection rarely looks impressive. She’s had her 30 minutes drinking coffee alone on the porch while I’ve been getting ready. She makes breakfast and when I come downstairs we stand there as I eat. In the time it takes me to eat one egg, a piece of bacon, and toast, that’s the extent of our morning connection.
That’s it. Five minutes. But it counts, because it’s consistent.
Here are the kinds of small, repeatable moments that keep a marriage connected:
1. Never leave without a kiss. Thirty seconds. I’ve made it a rule that I don’t walk out the door without finding Jenny and kissing her goodbye. It can be inconvenient; sometimes I have to walk back upstairs to do it. Do it anyway.
2. Share a small meal. Not a production. Half a breakfast sandwich in the kitchen. Coffee before the day starts. The point isn’t the food; it’s the shared moment.
3. Check in during the day. A text counts. “Things aren’t going well with the kids, nothing you can do, just wanted you to know.” Sometimes half of connection is simply being known. Your spouse doesn’t need you to fix it. They need you to know it.
4. Protect the reunion. When I come home, I try not to walk in on my phone. Some days I’ll sit in the driveway an extra five minutes to finish a call so that when I walk through the door, I’m actually present. Then I go find Jenny, not to interrupt her day, but to reconnect.
String a few of those together and suddenly you are connecting more than the couple who has an entire day off and no responsibilities.
Why this matters more than you think
When couples don’t protect these moments, they usually aren’t making a dramatic decision to drift apart. They’re just assuming connection will happen on its own.
It won’t.
Left to nature, we don’t drift toward each other. We drift apart. We begin living parallel lives — two good people running two busy schedules under the same roof, coordinating logistics but not actually connecting. Over time you can start to feel more like roommates than partners.
I’m convinced the number one cause of divorce isn’t adultery or finances. It’s apathy. Most marriages don’t end in a screaming match. They end in silence: two people who slowly stopped feeling anything toward each other. And apathy is never chosen in a single moment. It’s arrived at through a thousand unprotected ones.
Here’s the good news: small, consistent connection is the antidote. And it does something surprising.
When you feel regularly connected, the pressure comes off the big moments.
A date night that flops isn’t a crisis; there’s another one coming. A quiet anniversary doesn’t spiral into a fight. You’re not asking one evening to make up for a year of distance. But when a couple is running on empty, every big moment has to carry impossible weight, and no anniversary, vacation, or gift can bear that load.
I noticed this around Valentine’s Day years ago. The bigger the gesture a parent sent to their kid at school — the bigger the balloons, the bigger the bear — the less connected that parent often was the rest of the year. The grand gesture was trying to make up for the missing daily ones. Marriages work the same way. Stay connected in the small things, and the big things stop having to prove anything.
Your challenge this week
You don’t need an hour. You need a rhythm.
In Chapter 6 of The Creation of Us, I lay out dozens of these small rhythms — how you leave the house, how you return, how you start the morning, how you end the night. The goal isn’t to do all of them. The goal is to protect a few.
So here’s my challenge: pick one. Just one small rhythm you’re not currently doing, and protect it for seven days. Maybe it’s not leaving without a kiss. Maybe it’s five minutes of coffee before the chaos starts. Maybe it’s a single check-in text every afternoon.
Try it for a week and watch what it does.
Because if you start heading in the right direction, you’ll naturally want to add the next thing. And if you stay stuck in neutral, you’re not holding steady; you’re drifting.
A marriage requires almost nothing spectacular. But it requires intention. Apathy will quietly erode a marriage. Intention will just as quietly rebuild it. And it happens five minutes at a time.