This is a seriously ironic article from Pass Notes in The Guardian this week.
It’s the latest couples’ hack for the online age and involves splitting the evening into chunks – including one full hour without phones!!
Rachel Higgins, a TikToker in San Diego, came up with the “three-hour night” to make good use of the time she and her husband have between putting their young kids to bed and going to sleep themselves. The first hour is “productive time”, when the couple tidy up or do chores, then the second hour, Higgins says, is a phone-free slot “solely dedicated to each other”. That might mean playing games or sharing a shower, she suggests. “Anything that’s gonna get you … talking and connecting.”
This already sounds exhausting right?! The good news is that the third hour is purely for yourself: you
can do “anything you want, without judgment”.
When she first posted about it, Higgins called the three-hour night “such a gamechanger” for their relationship. Her advice resurfaced recently as part of the latest wave of couples’ hacks for the online age. The New York Times recently suggested couples should have more fun together: send silly texts, play games, plan pranks and surprises. The writer of the article adds to this suggestion “I would rather go through a harrowing divorce”.
There is also a BBH relationship mentioned in the article. This is a “boring but happy” one. According to another piece of recent relationship advice, from the therapist Jean-Claude Chalmet, happy couples relish routine and doing mundane stuff together. So doing the dishes together is actually setting you on the road for your golden anniversary….hmmm 50 years of arguing about whose going to take out the bins.
End thoughts:
Do say: “Hey, let’s not look at our phones tonight, shall we?”
Don’t say: “Instead, we can have the blazing row we’ve been scrolling to avoid.”
www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/aug/11/three-hour-night-routine-save-struggling-relationship