Relationship Warning
A question I often consider when working with a couple is. . . “How much room is there for this couple’s relationship?”
Our life, and how we spend our time, is made up of so many parts, the list could be endless… i.e. Family / Friends / Fitness / Work / Relaxation etc. etc. etc. The parts that feel a priority tend to be the ones with a more obvious demand. . . Children, Work, Relaxation etc. However, the areas that seem to demand our attention the most, have the power to dominate our time and encourage us to neglect other aspects that are equally important but less demanding.
In my experience, a couple’s relationship can be one of our core priorities that can be put to one side and left unattended. Pressures force couples to concentrate on more immediate demands. . . “I’m going to spend some time working over the weekend to get ahead for next week” or “The kids have asked for a sleep-over on Saturday, so we’ll have to see that film at the cinema another time”.
I fully acknowledge things like work/children/health etc., understandably must take centre stage a lot of the time. However, what I sometimes experience is parts of couple’s lives dominating, to such an extent the relationship is ‘squeezed out’ and it’s difficult for them to describe when they have time to fit it in.
Boundaries
All the different elements of our lives have boundaries around them. By this I mean there’s rules that mean they’re organised, often to prevent overlapping or disrupting each other. For example, we are generally more difficult to contact while we are at work for sensible reasons, this is a boundary. The family evening meal might be the same time every night so everyone can be together. This family time could be seen a ‘protected’, to ensure it happens most of the time. If someone goes for a run, they’re expected not to have to answer their phone as they are allowed to focus on themselves, for the time they’re out.
When people come to couple’s counselling, they often present “communication” as a primary reason for looking for some support. As part of my support, I’ll ask “What does your average week look like?”. . . people might say…”Well, since I’ve had this new job, I’ve been working away and when I come back on the weekends we try to stay in contact with all our friends” or “We’ve a full week taking the kids to their various sports clubs and our little one is really into dancing, that can take up a lot of our time, taxiing them back and forth”. Of course these are just made-up examples but I can often listen to a couple describe their week and wonder “where do you have your time to talk to each other?”. . . and when I ask the couple, they also have difficulty being about to tell me.
An adult couple relationship needs to have similar boundaries. If a relationship doesn’t have boundaries, this means anything has the capacity to interrupt it or restrict even the possibility for couples to have any time together. Below is a simple representation of how our lives might be typically made up:
At this point some people might be reading this, shaking their heads saying “You can’t keep time aside with your partner all the time”. To this I reply “yep, your right. . . there’s often times in our lives other things have to take priority”. We’ll likely experience periods that the opportunity to connect with each other has to take a back seat. What I have experienced, however, is this can happen a large proportion of the time, even when there’s no apparent need for it.
So the reason this blog post comes with a WARNING … if we allow our relationship with our partners to go unattended for too long. . . this has the potential to cause problems that then turn into serious issues that, ironically, then require us to pay them attention. It is possible to reintroduce our relationship back into our lives again but sometimes this attempt may come to late.
