Are Women Enemies of Our Own Free Time? Old-timers, counseling the young on investments, used to advise buying land. "They're not making any more of it," went the refrain. Maybe that's one reason we're so perpetually interested in talking about time: how we spend it and how it slips away. Not only aren't "they" not making any more of it (you get what you get, even if you do get upset), but it can't be bought at any price. Kristin van Ogtrop, the editor of Real Simple magazine, told me last week that she and her staff have realized over the years that the one thing that unites their readers - parents or not, working or not - is "a feeling of time crunch." One result is a huge cover article for the April issue: Women & Time. "Got a minute?" it asks. No, we know you don't. Real Simple readers skew heavily toward women, but men, particularly fathers, share the sense of being constantly pressed for time. For fathers, though, the pressure is different. They feel caught between work and home, with 60 percent of men in dual-earner couples telling the Families and Work Institute that their work got in the way of family time, and vice versa. For women, our fraught relationship with time is often different, and maybe even (this is bad and good news) somewhat self-imposed. Women's free time, the sociologist Marybeth Mattingly told Ruth Davis Konigsberg, who wrote the bulk of Real Simple's article about women and time, is often "contaminated." She analyzed 2003 time diary data and found that women were more likely than men to accommodate household chores and children's needs during their "free time." "We've got this platonic ideal of how we need to manage the household," Ms. van Ogtrop says, and when it comes to free time, women are "getting in our own way." Of course, much of the time, someone needs to accommodate the needs of the children or the dishes piled in the sink. But accommodate is one thing, and replace is is another, and when we replace doing the things we love with doing the things we believe must get done, most of us don't end up happier as a result. My husband, at least, is far more ready than I am to sit down with his back to the messy kitchen and read for an hour. He chooses workouts that can't be postponed (hockey in a team league), while I let mine slide (I can pick you up at your friend's house if I just skip yoga class). I've been known to resent this apparently very intelligent and self-protective behavior on his part (cleaning the kitchen very loudly behind him), but why? Maybe because I'm mistaking getting things done my way and on my schedule for something that would really make me happy, like planning a bike ride with a friend, and replacing my view of the cluttered kitchen with one of rolling hills and open land. After all, they're not making any more of it.