RESEARCH NOTE
Couples Who Play Together: Do They Stay Together?
Couples who share more of their free time are somewhat less likely to split up. The studies that show this cannot say whether the shared time is the reason.
Couples are a separate question
The saying is about families. Most of the evidence on actually staying together is about couples. This page keeps the two apart.
For whole families there is no such study, which we cover on the page about whether play keeps a family together.
The best study: 4,255 Dutch couples
A Dutch panel followed 4,255 couples over four rounds of interviews. Of these, 3,537 were married and 718 lived together unmarried (Demographic Research, 2018). We read this paper in full.
The researchers scored each couple on a "joint lifestyle" with four questions: doing leisure activities together, having shared friends, visiting friends together and visiting family together. Then they watched who broke up.
The result is reported as a hazard ratio of 0.579. A hazard ratio compares the rate of breaking up between groups. Here it means that a couple scoring one point higher on the joint lifestyle scale had a roughly 42% lower rate of breaking up. The size was the same for married and unmarried couples.
In the authors' words: "We furthermore found that couples with joint lifestyles were less likely to dissolve their union than those with separate lifestyles."
What the authors say it does not prove
The same authors are plain about the limits. They write that "The present study is not aimed at strong causal inferences".
They also name the other way the result could arise: "Couples at high risk of separation might feel unsatisfied with their relationship and therefore withdraw from spending leisure time together."
In other words, a couple heading for a split may stop doing things together first. The lack of shared time would then be a sign of trouble, not its source.
Other limits:
- Part of the link is explained by how good the relationship already was.
- The sample "is selective in favor of stable unions of long duration".
- Only one partner in each couple answered.
An older US study
A 1988 paper tested whether shared time between spouses goes with a marriage lasting. We read the summary and not the full paper, so we did not see its sample or its numbers (Journal of Family Issues, 1988).
The summary says: "The empirical tests are supportive of the attachment hypothesis and suggest that, because couples with children have less shared leisure time, children can contribute to marital break-up as well as help prevent it."
That points the same way as the Dutch study. It also carries a twist for a saying about families: in this paper, having children cuts into the couple's shared leisure.
The study with the saying in its title
A 2023 paper is titled "Do couples who play together stay together?" It followed 1,382 newly married US couples over three rounds. We read the summary and not the full paper (Family Process, 2023).
Despite the title, it did not measure divorce. Its outcomes were satisfaction and commitment.
Its findings depend on money. For lower-income couples under financial distress, more shared leisure went with worse commitment outcomes. As we read the summary, the pattern showed up only at the far ends of both income and shared leisure.
The one experiment on time together
A survey cannot settle cause. An experiment can. We found one that tested simply adding shared time.
In 1993, 53 married couples were assigned at random to one of three groups for 10 weeks. One group spent 1.5 hours a week on activities they had rated exciting. One spent it on activities they had rated pleasant. One did no special activity. We read the summary and not the full paper (Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 1993).
Comparing the two activity groups with the no-activity group, the difference "was not significant and had a small effect size". The summary concludes that "the theory that any kind of activity enhances marital satisfaction was not supported".
There was one positive result. The exciting group ended up more satisfied than the pleasant group, "a difference that had a moderate effect size."
It is a small study, and it measured satisfaction only.
New parents
A study followed working-class couples expecting a first child, from late pregnancy to one year after the birth. It analyzed 127 couples who stayed together. We read the author's manuscript in full (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2008).
- "Overall, wives who reported more shared leisure prenatally also reported more marital love and less conflict 1 year later."
- "Husbands with more independent leisure prenatally reported less love and more conflict 1 year later."
The outcome was love and conflict. Couples who split were dropped from the analysis, so this study cannot speak to staying together. The authors also note that "this study did not examine the extent of the reciprocal causal relationship".
What is missing
- We found no pooled analysis of shared leisure and couples splitting up.
- No experiment has measured whether changing a couple's shared leisure changes whether they separate.
Both are statements about our search, not proof that none exists.
What this does and does not say
- Couples who shared more free time were less likely to split, in the one large study we read in full.
- That does not show that adding shared time will keep a couple together. The one experiment on added time found no overall gain in satisfaction.
- None of this is about families. Only a couple's shared time has been tracked against breaking up.
The full picture
This page covers one question. The whole verdict on the saying, with its history and every source, is in our research paper: A family that plays together stays together: is it true?