Five Minutes a Night: What A Year of Us Did to Our Evenings

Glen and I spent a long time thinking we were fine. The kids were gone, the house was quiet, and we had settled into a rhythm that felt comfortable. But somewhere around year 24, I noticed that our evenings had turned into a logistics briefing. Who was picking up what, when the gutters needed cleaning, whether we should call his brother back. We were polite and efficient and we almost never actually talked.

The turning point came on a Sunday night at the kitchen table. We had the same argument we always had, about money and his long work weeks, and I remember thinking that we had said these exact sentences a hundred times before. We were not fighting about the dishes. We were fighting about not feeling heard. I told Glen I did not want to spend the next twenty years having the same conversation, and he said he did not either. That was the night we started a weekly check-in, and it was also the night I went looking for something that would help us do it without me turning into a lecture.

I found A Year of Us by Alicia Muñoz, a couples journal with one question a day. It sounded almost too simple. But I have been a librarian for thirty years, and I know that the right question at the right time can do more than a hundred lectures. We decided to try it for one week, five minutes a night, no pressure to be profound.

A year later, the journal is still on the nightstand, and the evenings are different. Not because a book of questions fixed us, but because it gave us a place to start. I want to tell you what that looked like, because I think a lot of couples are living on logistics and calling it connection.

We were not fighting about the dishes. We were fighting about not feeling heard.

The first week, we felt ridiculous. Glen would read the question out loud and then we would sit there like we were in a job interview. But by the second week, something shifted. The questions were not asking us to bare our souls. They were asking things like what we remembered about our first apartment, or what we would order if we could have dinner anywhere. And because the question was already on the page, neither of us had to be the one to start a conversation. We just answered.

Some nights we did it in bed with the lamp on. Some nights we did it at the kitchen table with tea. The format did not matter. What mattered was that we were showing up, five minutes at a time, and actually listening to each other. I noticed that Glen started asking me follow-up questions during the day, the kind that come from paying attention. And I started telling him things I would normally have saved for a scheduled 'talk'.

Alicia Muñoz wrote the questions in a way that assumes you like each other. That sounds small, but it changed the tone of our whole evening. We were not bracing for a difficult conversation. We were just two people learning something new about each other after thirty-one years. Some of the questions made us laugh. One made me cry, in a good way, because Glen answered it in a way I had never heard him say out loud.

I am not a counselor or a therapist, and I want to be clear about that. A journal is not a substitute for professional help, and if you are in a situation that feels unsafe or truly broken, please talk to a licensed professional. But for a marriage that is mostly good and a little tired, this was the right tool at the right time.

The other thing that surprised me was how much we started talking about the future. Some of the questions in A Year of Us point forward, and those were the ones that reminded us we were building something together instead of just maintaining it. We talked about where we wanted to travel, what we wanted our retirement to look like, and what we wanted to be true about our marriage in five years. That is not the kind of conversation you have when you are both staring at a grocery list.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you that five minutes is enough, but only if you actually do it. The journal does not work sitting in a drawer. I would tell you to read the question out loud, even if it feels silly, because hearing your own voice say something is different from reading it silently. I would tell you to answer honestly, even when the honest answer is 'I do not know.' And I would tell you that the goal is not to have a perfect conversation every night. The goal is to have a conversation at all.

Glen and I have been married for thirty-one years, and I can tell you that the hard part was never the big moments. It was the thousand ordinary evenings where we chose the TV over each other. A Year of Us by Alicia Muñoz gave us a reason to choose differently, and it was the best small habit we have picked up in years. If your evenings feel a little too quiet, a little too logistical, this is a gentle place to start.