Consider a hypothetical couple: Cathy and Max. Cathy tells Max she feels like it’s been too long since they had sex, and Max responds that it seems to him like they just had sex. They look at a calendar to see who is right, and remember they had sex seven days earlier. Both feel justified: Cathy says, “See, it has been a long time!” Max replies: “I knew it was recently!”
The author John Updike once wrote: “Sex is like money; only too much is enough.” But in long-term relationships, couples often disagree about if they’re doing it too much or too little. Though it has been a week since Cathy and Max’s last sexy date night, they are respectively experiencing their own “subjective time”. Subjective time is a common but under-recognized source of strife between lovers, friends, co-workers and family members. In relationships of all kinds, when conflicts arise, ask yourself: are we living in the same timeline?
“You hear people say things like ‘That’s ancient history’ or ‘That feels like yesterday’,” says Anne Wilson, a psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University who studies time perception and identity. To different people, the way time passes doesn’t always feel the same.
An hour is 60 minutes and a week is seven days, but your experience of time can change dramatically based on your emotions, novelty and the events taking place. When waiting for bad news, time moves slowly. Time also feels longer when there is more change, more newness, around you. And if someone considers a past event similar to one in the present, it seems to be more recent.
Your subjective sense of time can affect your psychology. For example, people are more willing to forgive someone if a hurtful incident feels further away – no matter when it actually occurred. “If you think of the phrase ‘time heals all wounds’,” Wilson says, “‘subjective time heals all wounds’ is probably a better way to think about it.”
In relationships, all our memories and actions of our partners are filtered through subjective time, although we may not realize it. In a recent paper, sexual health and relationship psychologist Amy Muise and her colleagues looked at subjective time and how it might be influencing couples’ thinking about sexual frequency.
Muise asked couples to fill out diaries for 21 days; 121 couples submitted nearly 4,500 entries over three weeks. The diaries revealed that how quickly or slowly people experienced the passing of time since they had sex varied, and their perception could influence what they thought about their relationships. For instance, no matter how much time had actually passed, when people subjectively felt it had been a long time since they had sex, they often had lower sexual satisfaction and desire.
In turn, high levels of sexual satisfaction and desire also influenced a person’s experience of time. These people recorded that they felt time dragging on until the next time they could have sex again. When people are waiting eagerly for something, time moves slower, Muise says. Those with higher desire might find it harder to wait for sex, and see it as further away in the past or future.
Wilson’s previous work has documented even more ways that subjective time can affect our love lives. In a study from 2017, she found that satisfied partners felt that their happier moments were closer in time and bad times were further in the past, no matter when these events happened. Unhappy partners felt that those rosy memories were far away. “Reminiscences of a perfect day might continue to warmly represent ‘us as we really are’ long after it has passed or could come to be seen as ‘that used to be us’,” Wilson has written.
Relationship psychologists and couples therapists use the term “kitchen sinking” to describe bringing up past events into a fight with a partner – that is, referencing “everything but the kitchen sink”. Wilson calls the subjective time version of this “kitchen thinking”: when negative events feel like they occurred closer together. For example, when your partner doesn’t take out the trash, you might recall all the other times this has happened, which feel recent and relevant. Those memories come hurtling to the present, even if they didn’t happen that long ago. Couples with higher satisfaction use kitchen thinking too – but for positive memories.
Subjective time comes up in other research projects in Muise’s lab, like one on sexual savoring, or how to keep a positive sexual experience in your mind for longer, which could make a sexual memory feel subjectively closer in time. She’s also working on a project about how long ago a couple feels their “honeymoon” period was and how that relates to current relationship happiness.
For sex frequency, it’s important how people explain the passage of time too, Muise says. If you feel like it’s been a long time since you had sex because your partner lives far away or has been busy with a project, or because of illness, that’s different from considering how long it feels a reflection of waning interest in you. External circumstances can make time feel stretched out, but they might not lead to as much strife between a pair.
But tethering good times to the present and banishing the bad to the distant past isn’t always beneficial. In toxic or abusive relationships, this can keep a relationship going that should, in fact, end, Wilson says.
Subjective time exists in all relationships, not just romantic ones. Abbie Shipp, professor of management at Texas Christian University, has studied subjective time in the workplace, finding that burnout and strife in the office can often come from people having different ideas about the passage of time when it comes to working hours, deadlines, productivity or output.
“I believe subjective time is the time,” she said. “Objective time is just our measure of how we coordinate with other people, how we all kind of use the same language. But subjective time is very much an individual experience.”
If you and your partner, boss or sister run into similar disagreements, your internal timekeepers might not sync up. It’s not always possible to perfectly align your subjective time to another’s, but when it comes to sex, talking about expectations and how long the gaps feel can help partners begin to understand their respective time zones. “It’s good to talk about how the same experience could feel different to each person,” Muise said.
