Name: The three-hour night.
Age: Born on TikTok 18 months ago.
A three-hour night? I aim for seven: one hour plotting my enemies’ downfall, five poking my snoring partner, then one pressing “snooze” every eight minutes and cursing. But we’re talking about evenings, really.
What about them, exactly? 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.
So they spend evenings picking up plastic while eating cold fish fingers and abandoned crusts, then slump on the sofa staring at their phones, right? That’s precisely what they’re trying to avoid with this nightly routine.
OK, go on, let’s hear it. 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. The good news is that the third hour is purely for yourself: you can do “anything you want, without judgment”.
Even watching videos of men checking the transmission fluid on their Toyota Aygos? I don’t know what that means, but no judgment.
Categorising Ordnance Survey maps by latitude? No judgment.
And this works? 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. Because relationships have to compete with shiny rectangles full of rare minerals and distraction – and the phones are winning. Have you heard of phubbing?
Is that a sex thing? Quite the opposite: it’s snubbing your partner to look at your phone. It’s bad, too: research this year found “strong negative correlations between phubbing and emotional closeness”. People who thought their partners phubbed them regularly “were three times more likely to express disinterest in having children”.
That does sound disturbing. What other ideas are there for keeping the spark? The New York Times recently suggested couples should have more fun together: send silly texts, play games, plan pranks and surprises.
I would rather go through a harrowing divorce. Maybe you’re in a BBH relationship.
A what? 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.
Aha! We already do that – and not for three hours, but all the time. Just yesterday we cleaned the dishwasher sprinkler arm together. You guys are truly #couplegoals.
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.”