Lack of support can lead to couples feeling isolated and unsatisfied in their relationship. Regardless of how strong your marriage or relationship guidelines appears, you and your partner can benefit from having a strong support network for your relationship. Find out why it’s so crucial to have a support system in place for your relationship guidelines.
Every relationship you have is interconnected. If a friend of yours is going through a difficult time, you may feel an emotional heaviness throughout the day, thinking and worrying about him/her. Since this affects your mood, your partner may notice that you are preoccupied and down lately. You can expect your partner’s behavior and interactions with others to change as a result of what your friend shared with you. Emotions are contagious.
Can it affect your relationship guidelines?
Your relationship exists within a larger social context, in which your friends, coworkers, family, and even society in which you live can directly or indirectly impact it. Consider your relationship as one link in a never-ending chain of connectedness.
Recently, I coached two couples who demonstrated this:
“A brief account of relationship guidelines isolation:
Tad and Wanda have lived together for a little over a year, and during a recent coaching session, Wanda complained that “all our friends are getting divorced or splitting up.”. That’s depressing and makes me think I’m doing something wrong for trying to make my relationship guidelines work. People tell me to ‘find someone better suited to you’ or ‘relationships are overrated anyway’ when I talk about a fight with Tad. The whole ‘there are lots of fish in the sea’ mindset doesn’t help when I’m trying to make my relationship work..”
Tad and Wanda do not have the couple-to-couple support that is necessary for a long-term, sustainable relationship guidelines. They both feel out of place in a sea of failed relationships (and neither has any single friends who are pro-relationship)-and they acknowledged that this was negatively impacting their relationship.
The story is as follows:
Jeff and Molly have been together for eleven years. These two retired people have been active in their local communities and volunteered for a variety of causes. Through this involvement, they have been able to form friendships and socialize with other couples.
During her marriage, Molly joked that her friends “saved our marriage on at least two occasions” because of their support. She shared, “If Jeff and I are going through a difficult time, for whatever reason, I don’t feel alone. It helps that I have a few friends who have suffered difficult times and are still happily married…I know that I’m not alone in my struggles and it really helps. I also have a few friends who are supportive of my relationship guidelines and committed relationships in general, even though they’re not in one now. All that encouragement among my friends really helps whenever I feel overwhelmed by a romantic relationship..”
Relationship support is essential
since couples enjoy hearing about successful relationship guidelines. When people learn a celebrity couple is in it for the long haul, they are happy to learn they are in it too? Many couples feel validated when they learn that their favorite movie star or musician has resisted the temptations that come with fame and is committed to one person. Next time you hear that someone you know or admire is splitting up, notice your reaction.
We root for each other – there’s an unspoken, cosmic connection, a sense of being in this together. When Brad and Angelina make their relationship work, as well as your neighbors and friends, you feel more optimistic that you can make your own relationship work.
