Between long office days, late dinners and endless to-dos, many working couples slip into a routine of coexisting instead of really connecting. The excuses feel valid: “We’re exhausted,” or, “We’ll catch up this weekend.” The problem is that they both end up missing the everyday moments that keep a relationship alive.

As a psychologist who studies couples and as a husband, I’ve found that people in the happiest, most resilient relationships treat their weeknights as opportunities that don’t go wasted.

Here are the seven things these couples consistently do before bedtime.

You can’t always expect your partner to walk through the door ready to cook, talk, or be cheerful. Healthy couples build in 15 to 30 minutes of guilt-free alone time for each partner — one decompresses while the other handles a light task, then they switch.

It’s not glamorous, but it’s a huge kindness. By protecting each other’s battery early in the evening, they preserve the bandwidth they’ll need to connect later on.

Some nights, even after a decompression session, you may still feel drained. Happy couples don’t force it. They start their evening together, but quietly: sitting on the balcony, lying side by side, taking a slow walk.

In psychological research, this is a form of co-regulation: the process of two people syncing up emotionally, allowing the emotions of the day to rise and fall until they feel like themselves again. A few minutes of shared quiet can reset your rhythm better than a forced conversation.

Not every weeknight has room for deep emotional check-ins. So the happiest couples keep it simple: each person shares one thing about their day, good or bad.

It could be venting some frustration, sharing a little win they had at the office or even just something funny that happened. No advice. No solutions. Just listening. This light, consistent sharing keeps them emotionally updated without draining what’s left of their workweek energy.

Even on nights when both partners want to zone out, they stick to one small shared ritual they never skip.

For most, it’s something ridiculously simple: eating dinner together without their phones, making a nightly cup of tea, or doing a word game together. The ritual becomes a daily anchor — something predictable, comforting, and theirs alone.

If I had to choose just one nightly habit to keep, this would be it. Research shows that partners who cuddle regularly report higher relationship satisfaction and commitment, even compared with couples who emphasize “quality time” together.

Cuddling triggers oxytocin (the bonding hormone) and lowers cortisol (the stress hormone). It’s the easiest, fastest biological boost your relationship can get.

Even the happiest couples feel the low-level resentment of uneven household work. That’s why they end the evening with 5 to 10 minutes of shared tidying, wiping counters, packing tomorrow’s lunches, loading the dishwasher.

The point isn’t actually about cleaning, but rather to prove that they’re committed to keeping things fair.

Instead of rehashing the day, heathy and happy couples look ahead. They share one small thing they’re looking forward to tomorrow, or even one small thing they’re dreading.

This is a brief, gentle way for working couples to stay in sync without needing to fully rehash the emotional weight of their day. You get a sense of what your partner might need tomorrow, whether it’s encouragement, space, or just a little extra support. And they get the same from you.

Mark Travers, PhD, is a psychologist who specializes in relationships. He holds degrees from Cornell University and the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the lead psychologist at Awake Therapy, a telehealth company that provides online psychotherapy, counseling, and coaching. He is also the curator of the popular mental health and wellness website, Therapytips.org.

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In 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Aspen Tucker was working as a staff nurse at a hospital in his native Spartanburg, South Carolina, making roughly $2,000 per biweekly paycheck. When he saw a posting for a travel-nursing job in Amarillo, Texas, paying $6,700 a week, he was practically on the next flight.

“I hate to say this, but I didn’t give notice. I got my stuff, went to Texas, and told my manager when I got there, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to go. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,’” Tucker told CNBC Make It.

Tucker, now 29, has been on the road ever since, picking up travel-nursing contracts that range from four to 13 weeks long. While on contract, he typically works 48- to 60-hour weeks, putting in long shifts to maximize overtime pay.

The goal behind all that overtime is downtime. Tucker works only nine months out of the year and spends the rest of his time back in South Carolina or on vacation. His 2022 income: $187,000.

“I absolutely love living in Spartanburg and being a travel nurse. Spartanburg has a small-town feel. I know everyone here. I have family here,” he says. “The big benefit is the low cost of living in South Carolina. I’m able to have a high salary as a travel nurse, but come back to where the cost of living is low.”

For someone like Tucker, who says he has dreamed of traveling since childhood, travel nursing offers some obvious appeal. His jobs have taken him all over, from Rhode Island to California.

As a profession, it’s a no-doubt price performer. Tucker began his career as a travel nurse after earning an associate’s degree. On average, a four-year undergraduate degree will cost about $29,000 per year, compared with just over $11,000 for two-year degrees, according to the latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

A more expensive education often coincides with a higher salary. The median annual pay among American workers with a bachelor’s degree is about $69,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those with an associate’s degree average just over $50,000.

Travel nursing bucks that trend — but it isn’t for everyone. It comes with drawbacks both personal and financial.

Time away from family

Life on the road means time away from your usual support system. “I’m away from home, I’m away from family, I’m away from my dog,” says Tucker. “I’m way outside my comfort zone — usually in different cities or different states. It does have its challenges.”

A tricky work environment

Hospitals bring in travel nurses when they need extra staff pronto, so there’s no time to ease into things.

“As a staff nurse you may get eight, 10, even 13 weeks to get [integrated] working there, but as a travel nurse, you get a day,” Tucker says. That may mean learning new workflows amid language barriers or with staff that’s less than delighted you’re there.

It’s not unusual for staff nurses to ask him about his pay, Tucker says.

“In their mind they’re thinking, ‘This company doesn’t want to pay us, but they’re willing to pay somebody to come here for a short period of time to make this kind of money.’ It creates a little bit of animosity there,” he says.

Spotty health care

What’s more, travel nurses pay premiums for health insurance when they’re under contract but aren’t covered between jobs. “I try to think smart and get everything done while I’m under that contract,” Tucker says.

Recently, that meant getting aching wisdom teeth pulled while working in California.

That also means when he’s on break, he’s learned to live cautiously. “I used to play a lot of basketball and stuff. And now I’m like, ‘If I don’t have health insurance, I can’t go ahead and break my leg.’”

Complicated finances

If you’re not willing to live a completely nomadic lifestyle, being on the road means paying for a lot of things twice.

In December 2022, while working in Fresno, California, Tucker paid for a mortgage on his house in Spartanburg, plus the cost of a long-term stay in an Airbnb. He paid for a rental car for the month in addition to the payment on his truck. He also took care of his living expenses while paying friends to walk his dogs and keep an eye on his house and cars.

Tucker’s solution to defray the costs: earning extra income from real estate. He recently purchased a duplex in Spartanburg and rents half the home to a long-term renter while listing the other half on Airbnb. He’s planning to rent his primary residence too when he’s out of town.

In fact, that’s how Tucker hopes to use real estate income to replace or supplement his salary when he eventually stops travel nursing.

“I want to create more real estate opportunities for myself [so] that I can work less and less,” he says.

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CHECK OUT: 29-year-old travel nurse seized a chance to make $187,000 and only work 9 months a year: It’s ‘a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’

LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky sees a lot of career advice on the site every day, but he doesn’t always agree with every piece that’s shared.

One common tip that Roslansky said is “a little bit outdated” is that “you have to have a five-year plan,” he told content creator Erin McGoff in an interview for her YouTube channel AdviceWithErin.

In Roslansky’s view, having a five-year plan is “a little bit foolish,” he said: given how rapidly technology and the workplace are changing, it’s not realistic to “chart out what the next five years of your life are going to look like.”

Instead, Roslansky advised workers to focus on what they want to learn and what experiences they want to have.

“I think that’s the right mental model in this environment,” he said. “If you focus on those shorter steps, gaining learning, gaining experience, a lot of your career path will open up for you.”

According to Roslansky, having a linear career path isn’t realistic anymore.

Many people think “you graduate high school and then go to a certain college and then become a consultant and then get an MBA,” he said – but “that’s not how it happens at all for most people.”

Once you let go of that idea, “you can take your own career into your own hands,” he said. “No one is trying to figure this out for you. You have to take care of it yourself.”

His advice for young professionals

Roslansky also shared his best advice for young people navigating their careers right now.

His first tip is to “learn the tools” and experiment with using AI at work, he told McGoff.

“Try and figure out how to create a PowerPoint presentation out of chat,” he said. “You know, figure out how this can help you with a better marketing message.”

“Whether or not you like it, whether or not it’s a good fit for what you’re trying to do, that mental model – like, ‘I’m going to use this tool and learn it to help me do something’ – I think is the most important thing,” he continued.

Still, “it’s not just about the tools and technology,” Roslansky said: skills like empathy, judgment and communication are still “critical” in the modern workplace.

“In a world where everyone is kind of, you know, focused more on the technology, if you really work on a lot of those human skills, it can be a great differentiator for you,” he said.

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As the founder and CEO of Boll & Branch, Scott Tannen oversees the work of some 275 employees — most of whom he’s personally interviewed.

He estimates he’s interviewed upwards of 1,000 people and hired 400 to 500 over the course of his career.

Whether he’s interviewing a prospective intern or someone joining the C-suite, Tannen tells CNBC Make It he always asks one question first: What do you know about Boll & Branch?

It’s a straightforward question that sets the tone quickly and can help him uncover a big warning sign.

“I think when people have not done their homework, that is the biggest red flag,” Tannen says. “You don’t have to know every answer, but you have to have done your homework.”

Tannen says he can tell when a candidate has taken the opportunity to interview seriously and has spent a few hours reading and researching about the business.

“I’m looking for them to at least say, ‘I’ve learned this,’ or ‘I’ve been on your website, and I know you do business this way,’” Tannen says. “If they can’t at least give me back what’s on our Wikipedia page, we probably are not starting off on the best foot.”

The CEO is looking for something beyond the superficial.

“I’ve had people that don’t even know what products we make, within reason,” he says. “They’re like, ‘Oh, you make bedding.’”

A more researched answer might include mention that the company, which Tannen launched with his wife over a decade ago, makes luxury organic bedding as well as linens, sleepwear, furniture and home goods.

Tannen adds that good preparation means coming with questions for the interviewer, as well as confidence, enthusiasm for the role and curiosity about what you’ll accomplish by taking it.

“Tell me what you’re excited about that you think we can teach you, and vice versa, how you can contribute,” he says.

He recalls one memorable interview for a recent intern who applied to a role with the company as a merchandiser. The student didn’t have any merchandising experience, but discussed in her interview how she created her own brand while in college and wanted to learn how Boll & Branch works overall.

“It’s one of the best interviews I’ve ever done,” Tannen says, “because I just felt that she had this incredible desire to learn and this admiration for, at least from her view, how we had built our business.”

That intern is expected to return to the company for a full-time job once she graduates, Tannen says.

Ultimately, he says, showing up and demonstrating that you’re prepared for an interview is “really not a very hard thing to do, but it truly distances the great applicants from everybody else.”

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Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has unveiled the final tally for her 2025 charitable donations, which totaled $7.17 billion in gifts to roughly 225 organizations, she wrote in a blog post published on Tuesday.

“This dollar total will likely be reported in the news, but any dollar amount is a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care being shared into communities this year,” Scott wrote.

Scott’s 2025 giving brings her total donation amount since 2019 to $26.3 billion, based on her past public announcements of her charitable giving. This year’s donations went to a wide range of nonprofits including several historically Black colleges and universities, and organizations focused on issues including poverty, social injustice and climate change.

Scott’s updated philanthropic tally puts her behind only fellow billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in terms of lifetime giving, according to Forbes. Forbes still estimates a $29.9 billion net worth for Scott, who became one of the world’s wealthiest women following her 2019 divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

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Following her divorce, Scott signed The Giving Pledge, committing to giving away the bulk of her wealth in her lifetime. She tasked a team of advisors with helping her step up her philanthropic giving by identifying “organizations with strong leadership teams and results” across a wide range of areas of societal need, she wrote in a 2020 blog post.

Specifically, she wanted to pay “special attention to those operating in communities facing high projected food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates and low access to philanthropic capital,” she wrote.

In her Tuesday essay, Scott wrote about putting her giving into perspective, citing data from Giving USA, which reported in June that Americans donated more than $590 billion in charitable giving in 2024. Much of the country’s philanthropy — whether monetary or otherwise — happens on a relatively small scale, Scott wrote.

“Over 70% of Americans reported giving both labor and money to people they know, and half reported doing the same for strangers,” wrote Scott, adding: “It’s easy to focus on the methods of civic participation that make news, and hard to imagine the importance of the things we do each day with our own minds and hearts.”

Scott mentioned multiple examples of generosity she received before she became wealthy, helping inspire her more recent philanthropy. She wrote about a “local dentist who offered me free dental work when he saw me securing a broken tooth with denture glue in college,” and her college roommate at Princeton University “who found me crying, and acted on her urge to loan me a thousand dollars to keep me from having to drop out in my sophomore year.”

That roommate, Jeannie Ringo Tarkenton, went on to found Funding U, a student lender that offers loans to low-income students without requiring a co-signer, Scott noted.

Scott highlighted those examples while encouraging civic participation in myriad forms, from financial gifts to random acts of kindness: “Respect, understanding, insight, empathy, forgiveness, inspiration – all of these are meaningful contributions to others.”

Scott’s blog post did not break down how or why she chose any of the hundreds of organizations she supported in 2025. A long-standing aspect of her giving does stand out in contrast to many other billionaire philanthropists: Her donations typically come without any strings, meaning organizations are free to use the money however they see fit.

Her goal has been to “de-emphasize privileged voices” like her own, “and cede focus to others,” she wrote in a 2021 blog post.

“People struggling against inequities deserve center stage in stories about change they are creating,” Scott wrote in that post. “This is equally — perhaps especially — true when their work is funded by wealth.”

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