You Can’t Buy Love—But You Can Buy Quality Time
Money can’t buy happiness, but spending to enable quality time together can.
Charlie Huntington M.A., Ph.D., LPCC
June 29, 2025
Even with technology purporting to simplify our lives more each day, having enough time for friends, family, and partners remains a challenge for most of the people I know. In my therapy practice, I have met many couples for whom quality time together routinely gets pushed down to the bottom of the priority list. In a world where working adults have only about an hour daily of quality time available to spend with loved ones (Hur et al., 2021), parenting often takes precedence, but work demands and household chores also squeeze out time together as a couple.
Research tells us that we experience greater well-being when we have more resources available to us, relative to the demands that are made of us (Hobfoll, 2001). That seems simple enough: surely people with more money are happier in their intimate relationships?
Alas, I know too many well-off but overworked people whose intimacy needs are going unmet. Simply having resources isn’t sufficient—in fact, new research suggests it’s how we allocate those resources, exchanging one kind for another, that stands to benefit our romantic relationships directly.
New Study: The Busiest Couples Benefit the Most From “Buying Time”
In a series of seven studies published in a prestigious social psychology journal, Ashley Whillans and colleagues (2025) explored how time-saving purchases, such as paying for housecleaning or getting meals delivered to your house, can predict relationship satisfaction for couples. Particularly for couples that are highly stressed, they found that when people make purchases that free up some of their time, they are then more satisfied with their relationships—if they repurpose that freed-up time to have quality time together. Even more specifically, couples who spend that quality time together providing each other support and sharing positive feelings are the ones most likely to see improvements in their relationship satisfaction.
In other words, the authors collected evidence for a pathway to greater relationship happiness: spend money in ways that give you back time, allowing you to manage household chores more effectively and spend more quality time together, and you can expect your relationship to become more satisfying. They noted that this is especially true for the busiest and most stressed-out couples.
In their research, Whillans and colleagues found that only 48 percent of their participants who could reasonably afford to make these time-saving purchases were actually doing it. This suggests that many other couples could potentially benefit from this lifestyle shift. They also emphasized that which forms of time-saving and subsequent quality time together couples choose are not as important as committing to the process and recognizing it for what it is.
What Does This Mean for Busy People in Romantic Relationships?
It means you stand to gain the most if you follow these steps intentionally. Which time-saving purchases are most available to you and most helpful? And what kinds of time together do each of you agree constitutes “quality” time?
You want to be in agreement on each of these questions. For example, if there’s a Saturday morning pickleball league you and your partner are both excited about, getting your groceries delivered on the weekend might save you a time-consuming shopping trip and make getting down to the courts seem that much easier.
As always with any substantial change in a relationship, I would encourage you to start slow and communicate proactively about taking a step like this. I know I have my own hangups about spending money on something I can do myself, and you or your partner might, too. Sometimes we can lose sight of what feeling closer to and happy with our partners empowers us to do (Apostolou et al., 2023)—it’s well worth a little less money in the bank to access more of the benefits of a satisfying relationship.
And if there isn’t much money in the account in the first place, relying on any social capital you possess, such as calling in childcare favors you are owed by friends or relatives, might also be a way to buy yourself more quality time with your partner.
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