When "We" Eats "I": Losing Yourself in a Good Marriage

Behind a wedding invitation in the folder, the anonymous woman had written one line: Ask them separately what they like to do.

I took it for another of her tests, which had the irritating habit of looking childish until you actually tried to answer them.

The question at dinner

I'll call them Sara and Benjamin. Still married, one child, nothing dramatic. Years earlier, at a dinner, someone had asked them what they liked to do, and they answered together: travel, restaurants, cooking, skiing, films, Italy. Then Sara was asked what she liked to do without Benjamin, and she couldn't think of anything. Everyone laughed, including her.

It bothered her four years later, when Benjamin went abroad for work for six weeks. On the first Friday she stood in front of the open fridge with no idea what she wanted to eat. Nearly every decision had become a joint one. She ordered sushi and hated being alone with herself.

"I'd outsourced preference," she told me. "To us."

Nobody forbade anything

Before Benjamin, she went to the cinema alone, took a ceramics class for nearly three years, ran badly and spent whole Saturdays walking with no plan. Nothing was banned. The ceramics class was on Thursdays, which became dinner with another couple. Runs became gym sessions together. Saturdays filled with errands and visits.

"I couldn't remember which things I'd stopped because I didn't want them anymore," she said, "and which because we had become better at being us than I was at being me."

His answers, and the baby

I asked Benjamin the same question in a pub. He answered straight away: football, golf, music, cooking. Then he stopped. "She's right, isn't she? I kept more of my stuff."

He hadn't taken anything from her. What made the difference was their baby. Benjamin went back to football first because football had a fixed time, a team and people waiting. Sara's free time had no structure at all. A run could wait, a book could wait, and because she worked from home, gaps in childcare fell to her. His annual golf trip cost about what ten months of a ceramics studio would have, and nobody had ever compared the two.

One Tuesday he came downstairs in his football kit while she was feeding their daughter. "When is my football?" she asked. He asked what she wanted to do. That, she told him, in stronger words than I'll print, was exactly the problem.

He meant it kindly. He thought he was handing her the pen. She was being asked to invent a hobby while tired and already guilty about the time it would take.

Keeping an "I" inside the "we"

• Ask each other the dinner question, separately.
• Give each person's free time a fixed slot, like a match, so it doesn't depend on finding time.
• Compare what each person's time costs, in hours and money.
• When one of you says "when is my football?", don't ask them to design it on the spot.

The research side of this is in The Leisure Gap and Whose Time Counts. Sara and Benjamin's story is chapter twenty of Become My Papi.

Questions people ask

Is it normal to lose yourself in a relationship?

It is common. Couples build shared routines and preferences, and individual interests can fade without anyone deciding they should.

Why do men often keep their hobbies after children and women don't?

In Become My Papi, the husband's football had a fixed time and a team waiting, while his wife's free time had no structure and gave way to childcare.

Where is Sara and Benjamin's story from?

It is chapter twenty of Become My Papi by Nora Vellick.