A relationship deserves conversations that are not squeezed between tasks and sleep.

Closeness tends to run on whatever attention is left over, which means the real conversations land at eleven at night between a dishwasher and an alarm clock. Nobody chose that. It happens because everything else came with a time attached and this did not, so it drifts to the end of the day where both of you are least able to be generous. The talk is not going badly. It is being held at the worst available hour.

Move one of them. A walk on Saturday morning, or twenty minutes before dinner, will carry a subject that would have gone sideways at midnight.