BRITAIN: Forget romantic dinners - couples in the UK spend the greatest proportion of their time together watching television, a survey revealed yesterday.
Precious minutes are spent sharing housework and eating, while just 16 minutes of the day can be put down to a combined social life. But, when not at work or sleeping, couples appear to spend only a fifth of their time together. The Time Use Survey, carried out by the British Office for National Statistics (ONS), calculated that couples spend an average of two and a half hours - 150 minutes - a day together.
This can be roughly broken down into 55 minutes watching television, 30 minutes eating, 24 carrying out housework and 16 minutes on a social life.
Couple who live together but are not married spend 30 minutes less with each other than those who have walked up the aisle. Retired couples spend the most amount of time together each day - an average of four hours, the study found.
Couples aged between 35 and 44 spend the least amount of time together, clocking up just over one and a half hours a day.
Unsurprisingly, those couples without children spend more time together (three hours) than those who have to deal with the needs of their offspring, who spend just over one and a half hours together. The ONS survey found that, even when it came to the popular shared activities of eating and watching television, couples spent more time pursuing these activities separately. Men and women spent 60 per cent of their time viewing TV without their other half, while two-thirds of meals were not eaten with a partner.
The ONS carried out 11,700 interviews in 6,500 households.