So, in a few days, my husband and I will be married for 8 months. I love being married to him and am so thankful for our marriage.
That said, we are struggling (and apparently even more so for him) with the epidemic of never having any time to do anything except work, work, work. He commutes 2+ hours each way almost every day, I work until 6:15 or 6:30, make dinner and we are ready to eat about 7:30 or 8, work around the house for about 2 hours, sit down for about an hour and go to sleep...repeat the next day and so forth. Weekends are packed as well with getting stuff done around the house. We planned on traveling, doing lots of fun things together, etc - and we haven't done much of that. Life is just so crazy.
How do all you handle this? Do you have any tips for how to keep life under control? For anyone who has commute time, how do you handle long term travel without extreme stress?
Replying to a few points I've seen in the thread so far.
Firstly, when you've got very little time to call your own don't get sucked into attending every single service at church. It's very easy to get into the mindset that if there's a service you need to be at it, and all it will do in your situation is leave you resenting church.
If his commute shifted from 30 minutes to 120 minutes when you married, is it an option for one of you to change jobs? It may involve a reduction in salary but if it gains 2-3 hours of time every day that might be an acceptable price to pay. I remember when I commuted over an hour each way to work (necessary when working in central London) and constantly being aware that I was spending the best part of two working days every week stuck on the train. If his commute drops from 2 hours to 30 minutes each way, that's three hours per day or 15 hours per week. That's effectively saving enough time to take on a part time job.
Sometimes people stay in jobs even though the job is more of a liability than an asset. Some years ago I knew a guy whose wife insisted she wanted to keep working after the children were born because she "wanted to keep her career". So she continued to go to work, earning less than it cost to commute and pay childminders, to stay in a job that had literally no future prospects. This couple would have had more money in their pockets had she quit working completely and raised her own kids, but they chose to effectively pay for her to go to work. It's their choice, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Is your husband commuting so far, spending a lot of money in gas and car-related costs, for a job that isn't worthwhile given the costs of getting there? If so, are the long-term prospects worth sticking it out, or would he be better off walking away even if it does involve a total life change?
Is the "stuff around the house" really necessary, and are you doing it efficiently? For many years my wife and I would periodically spend an entire day cleaning and tidying, but what it actually meant was that we'd take a lot of junk out of drawers, shuffle it around, throw maybe one or two items out, and put the rest back. So we'd spend a day "doing something useful" while actually achieving nothing at all. If you've gotten into that pattern, stop doing it because it takes up precious time and doesn't accomplish anything at all.
Work like mowing the lawn takes time but anyone can do it and you don't even need to be home. Is there a local teenager who might like a few extra bucks for running a mower over the lawn for you?
If you're spending two hours every day "doing stuff around the house" I'd suspect you're either hugely house-proud or using time inefficiently. Try taking a day off and not doing that stuff around the house, and see whether it actually makes a difference. You describe "sitting down for about an hour", so if you cut the "stuff around the house" and the "sitting down" one evening you'd have three hours. Throw in the time you take to cook a meal, and you've got maybe 4 hours. That's more than enough time to go out together. Let someone else do the cooking for once - even if you only go to the local pizza joint it's something you didn't have to cook yourself, and you can relax a bit (you also save the time washing dishes)
There are a few meals you can cook in bulk and reheat. Most things based around pasta can work - spaghetti bolognaise can be reheated at least once, as can a beef chilli or similar. You can also look for meals that are quick to throw together, or that don't need a lot of input from you (the kind of thing that might take 10 minutes to prepare and then 40 minutes in the oven) so you're not necessarily having to take a lot of time to prepare a meal every day.
Using disposable cutlery and crockery may not be particularly environmentally friendly but can save you some time. My wife and I often use a paper plate for sandwich-type lunches or if we have a piece of cake or something mid afternoon. It saves having to wash a proper plate, can be reused a few times (assuming you're not putting anything messy on it), and goes in the recycling when we're done with it.
