Your career might be killing your most prized relationship. Here are 6 tips to lessen those 6 degrees of separation.
Everyone’s life is often one long quest to figure out how to get paid for doing something you like and how to then spend time with people you love. Despite the simplicity of this equation, reality couldn’t be more different or difficult.
According to one study, researchers found that the likelihood of reporting stress within the family increased by 74 per cent when things at work got strenuous. An increased spillover from family to work sometimes meant that the likelihood to report stress at work increased by 47 per cent. It comes as no surprise that the perfect work-life balance is hard to find, but often enough, it is your partner that has to bear the largest brunt of your life’s imbalance. If there are cracks that are beginning to show in your important relationships, you’re perhaps ignoring the tell-tale signs
YOU ENDLESSLY COMPLAIN ABOUT WORK
Everyone wants to vent after a long or difficult day at work. It’s important not to bottle that up, but you’ve got to make time for other conversations. If you catch yourself having nothing else to talk about, you’re going to bore and annoy your partner right out of the relationship. Take up an interest that you may have been neglecting. Take a few minutes to vent, but spend the rest of the evening doing or talking about anything but work.
YOU HAVE STOPPED GOING OUT ALTOGETHER
Whether you’ve married for 15 years or been dating for 6 months, you’ve got to make plans to get out. If you’re spending too much time thinking about work, you probably haven’t planned a date night in a while. It sounds corny, but you should still “date” your wife or girlfriend.
YOU CANNOT BE AWAY FROM YOUR PHONE
Whether you’re checking work emails or just scanning Twitter, it’s pretty common to have your phone on the table during a night out. If you feel apprehensive about leaving your phone at home for two hours, you’re probably worrying too much about potential emails. So just try going out to dinner for two hours, having left your phone at home.After the first half-hour, you can maybe enjoy that mini-vacation.
THE RELATIONSHIP IS BECOMING COMPETITIVE
If you’re a workaholic, then there’s a good chance you’re also dating a workaholic. When that relationship is at its best, both are supportive and understanding of the other’s career goals and the time dedicated to achieving them. At worst, you’re both trying to gain dominance in the relationship the way you’re trying to dominate your profession. If that’s happening, all you can do is have a conversation and talk about how to fix that. You both will have to figure out a way to decrease the amount of time you spend on work.
YOU HAVE STOPPED HAVING SEX
Happy couples have more sex than unhappy couples. Is all that sex making them happy? Or are they having all that sex because they are already happy? It’s probably a little bit of both. There are plenty of reasons why couples might have sex less frequently, and being overworked could be one of them. So if you’re not having as much sex as you used to, make plans to have more sex. It might take a while to get back into your old schedule. But chances are it will make you happy, which will lead to more sex, which will lead to more happiness.
YOU USE BUSINESS SLANG IN YOUR PERSONAL LIFE
IN YOUR PERSONAL LIFE A quick scan through your text messages may reveal if you’re neglecting your relationship.Answering dozens of work emails every day can permanently alter the way you communicate via text. You’re in trouble if you’ve sent your partner any texts that resemble, “Just following up on a confirmation RE: dinner tonight.” Try and make sure that you don’t reduce yourself to an autoreply email response.
