15 hours a week

A friend of mine mentioned this suggestion from a marriage encounter weekend. In order to have a healthy marriage, you should spend 15 hours a week of alone time with your spouse.

Sounds like a brilliant idea to me. I love my husband, I want to make my marriage a priority, let's just figure how that will work.

Let's see, 15 hours -- should be easy to come by, after all there are 168 hours a week, so that's less than 10 percent. Let's say miracles happen and we get the kids to bed at a decent hour every night -- and still have energy after that. Well, let's say at a stretch we could get in one hour each weeknight. (Of course, that's assuming nobody has to work on a night or we don't have any meetings or classes). That leaves only 10 hours for the weekend. That would be 5 hours each weekend day. Shouldn't be a problem at all.

Of course, that means that we probably won't be able to do any of that extra nonsensical stuff around the house, like dishes or laundry or dusting. But who really needs to do that anyway. Oh and the dog doesn't really need to be walked now, does he? And of course, we really don't need to do anything with the kids like spend time with them.

Oh yeah -- but there is the matter of the children -- they are only 10 and 5 so we really can't leave them alone while we go off .... hmmmm well we'll just hire a sitter. Let's see at say $7 an hour times 10 hours a weekend that's only $70 per week times 4 weeks a month. Maybe that's a stretch on the budget. OH yeah - there's always Grandma -- but depending on the situation some grandparents aren't healthy enough to keep up with kids for too long. My folks are both deceased so they're not really all that great in the babysitting department. Now my husband's folks are around and mostly healthy. Just because they've already raised a couple of kids that's no reason to avoid dropping off the grandkids every weekend I mean do they really need a social life.

Okay - I can see the grandparent thing isn't going to work at 10 hours a weekend. Hmmm maybe we'll find another couple that needs to have their own alone time. So we can watch their kids 10 hours every weekend, and they can watch our kids 10 hours every weekend.

It sort of reminds me of all the political campaign ads. "GREAT IDEA!!! Now tell me how you plan to make it work on THIS planet"