It's 6 p.m.. I'm in the lab and my wife rings: “When will you be home?”

“Well,” I say, “I've got to finish some mini-preps, plate out some bacteria, set up a PCR and transfect some cells, so I should be there in a couple of hours. Maybe around 8 p.m. or so.”

At 10.15 p.m. I call my wife. She doesn't answer (probably annoyed that I'm so late). I leave a message on the answering machine and rush home.

After regularly repeating this episode, I have concluded that I am perhaps the worst-ever judge of ‘lab time’. I'm so bad that my wife automatically increases my estimated arrival time by a third. She has a ‘normal’ job with an eight-hour day, whereas I'm doing crazy trying-to-finish-my-thesis hours, which run from about 10 a.m. until whenever, every day. At times, we can go for days seeing each other only in passing.

When she told me that she was beginning to feel like a ‘lab widow’, I knew I had to do something. So now, I try to reserve at least one night every week for us.

It is hard for scientists to maintain relationships with partners who don't work in the lab. Maybe that is why inter- and intra-lab romances are so common. Passion for one's research is a good thing. But we should try to be at least equally passionate about those who have passion for us.