Relationships require quality and quantity time – 09/11/2023 – Vera Iaconelli

Contemporary legend has it that “quality time” would compensate for the lack of “quantity time”. This was the solution found to justify a life in which work and pragmatic relationships take up almost everything and we resign ourselves to being far from those we love. It would be just another adaptation required by individualist societies if it were not about time, the material from which life is made.

The time required by relationships differs depending on their nature. Friendships, unlike romantic love, are those relationships whose long periods of time cannot take away their shine. In them, intervals can work to recognize our transformations. Not infrequently, meetings with old friends refer to a common past that lends itself to both melancholy and subjective rectification. They remind us that time passes and force us to face whether we are doing well or not.

Love, on the other hand, is urgent, always at risk of being extinguished in the prolonged absence of the loved one. Intensity, urgency and short times, passion doesn’t wait. Nor does it support what is essential in friendship: away from the eyes, close to the heart. The death of a friend promotes this surprising delirium, we feel that at any moment he will look for us, it’s just a matter of time. In love, on the other hand, loss requires us to continue looking for other lovers. Even to do justice to lost love.

With children things get complicated, as there are many times at stake. There are beginnings, which do not always happen between parents and babies — children can arrive at any time in life. There is no epistolary relationship possible here, the hand-to-hand relationship is non-negotiable. It is about creating emotional bonds that do not arise by instinct, nor by the force of the law, nor by good intentions. The expectations and ambivalences are great and they test the most contingent of human affections: will we love this stranger who comes to us? It is a love that carries the promise of transmitting the name, of entering a lineage, a love that represents us narcissistically. This is the time of love.

Once we are irremediably in love with our children, we will have to sustain something different, typical of relationships between friends, those that are maintained even at a distance. The task here is to create a love that takes on the imminent separation. Although it is part of friendship, it is a mistake to believe that we will be friends with our children “stricto sensu”. Parents’ words are full of pride and recrimination that has no place among friends, as we have more or less unconfessed plans for the future of our children: that they be happy, that they have this or that career, that they have or not offspring… in short, expectations were created. Even though we may feel very close and accomplices to them over the years, we are figures to serve as an example to be surpassed.

Finally, we have the time of great separations from children, those of physical distances, migrations, sporadic, annual meetings. Virtuality creates the sensation of proximity, but it is not capable of producing the fortuitous encounter, in which the gaze “fishes” for the mood, the tone of voice.

Quality time is not just time for epiphany and play that seeks to compensate for the deprivation of company. It must include bad mood, fighting, frowning, crying, venting, boredom, silence, spontaneous hugs, complicit looks, foolishness. Time is only of quality when it aims at the intimate and includes disagreements and sadness.

Quality time does not dispense with quantity, as you never know when life will happen.

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