Ellie’s diary was full long before she met anyone. A relationship coach on the hours a new relationship really takes — and what has to go to make room for it.
Ellie, 34, from Reading, scrolls through next month in her calendar app and can’t find a single empty evening.
Netball on Mondays. Her sister on Tuesdays, because that’s when the childcare works. Gym, work drinks, a hen do in Bournemouth she agreed to back in March and has been quietly dreading ever since.
She’s been on four first dates this year. All of them were fine. None of them went anywhere.
“I keep telling everyone I want a relationship,” she says. “But I don’t actually think I’ve got anywhere to put one.”
It’s a more common problem than the dating advice industry admits. We talk constantly about finding the right person and almost never about the less romantic question underneath it — what are you planning to move out of the way when you do?
So we asked Nadia Fisher, a relationship coach who works with clients across the South East, to do the unglamorous maths.
“Most People Underestimate It by About Half”
What does a new relationship actually cost, in hours?
More than anyone wants to hear. In the first three months you’re realistically looking at six to ten hours a week of genuine contact — two dates, or one long one, plus the texting, plus the twenty minutes you spend deciding what to wear. Most people have budgeted for about four. Then they’re baffled when they feel stretched thin by week five.
That’s a big investment in something that might not work.
It is. And there’s no version where it isn’t. You can’t find out if something’s real without spending the time it takes to find out.
The people who struggle most are the ones trying to date at zero cost. Slotting someone into the gaps. Protecting every existing commitment. Hoping a relationship will politely arrange itself around netball.
Does it stay at ten hours?
No. It goes up, then it changes shape. Around month four it stops being scheduled time and becomes ordinary time — they’re just there while you do the shopping. That’s cheaper than the early stage.
The early stage is the expensive bit. That’s the part nobody warns you about.
The Diary Doesn’t Lie
How do you tell someone their life is too full?
I don’t. I ask them to open their calendar and read me the last fortnight out loud. They work it out themselves by about Thursday.
There’s usually a moment where they hear it. The three things they do purely out of habit. The Saturday they’ve given away to someone who wouldn’t notice if they didn’t come.
It’s not that they’re too busy. It’s that they’ve never once audited it.
Isn’t “I’m too busy” sometimes just an excuse?
Sometimes, yes. Busy is a very respectable way of not risking anything. Nobody questions it. Nobody says “are you sure you’re not just frightened?” when you tell them work’s mad at the moment.
But I’d be careful with it. Plenty of people genuinely do have full lives, and telling them it’s avoidance is just unkind. The question isn’t whether you’re busy. It’s whether you’ve ever decided what you’d drop.
What People Actually Give Up
So what goes, usually?
Scrolling, first. Most people find two or three hours a week they didn’t know they had just by not doing that.
After that it’s the low-grade social admin. The coffee with someone you don’t really like. The weekly catch-up that could be a text. I had a client in Exeter who finally quit a book club he’d hated for two years. He met someone six weeks later, and he’d tell you those two things aren’t related. I’d tell you they absolutely are.
And what shouldn’t go?
Your close friends. The exercise. The thing that makes you feel like yourself on a Sunday.
Those are what you’ll need if it doesn’t work out. They’re also the things that made you worth dating in the first place. People clear the wrong stuff constantly — they cancel the friends and keep the obligations.
Make the Room Before You Find the Person
So the advice is to clear space before you’ve even met anyone?
Yes. Not loads. Two evenings a week that are genuinely yours to give away.
Wisp data backs this up in a slightly unromantic way. Users who keep two properly free evenings a week go on around 40% more second dates than users whose availability is scattered across a fortnight. It isn’t that they’re more attractive. It’s that they can say yes to Thursday when someone asks on Tuesday.
Last one. What’s the sentence you’d give Ellie?
That she hasn’t got a dating problem. She’s got a diary problem — and diary problems are far easier to solve than people problems.
What Ellie Did
She pulled out of the hen do. Kept netball, because she likes it. Moved her sister to a fortnightly thing, which her sister had apparently wanted to suggest for months.
Two evenings, cleared. She hasn’t met anyone yet. But when she matched with someone last week and he asked if she was free Thursday, she didn’t have to check. She just said yes.
If you’re waiting for your life to calm down before you start dating properly, it’s worth asking which one is actually meant to come first — the space, or the person. One of them can’t turn up until the other one does.