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Working on your mental and emotional health will benefit you and your relationships. Keep reading to learn more.
You May Be Feeling More Anxious or Depressed During COVID
If the COVID pandemic has brought out mental and emotional problems you weren’t aware you were dealing with, you’re not alone. According to multiple recent studies, rates of anxiety and depression have skyrocketed. In comparison to last year at this same time, people were twice as likely to be displaying signs of anxiety or depression. When mental struggles arise, it can be hard to deal with basic everyday needs, let alone seek out a new relationship or work on your love life.
Making the first steps of seeking help for anxiety, relationship problems, depression, grief counseling, or generalized social anxiety is hard, but it’s also the most important thing you can do for yourself and your partner or future partner.
When is it time to find outside help?
If you have found yourself struggling with emotional or mental problems and are unsure if it’s time to seek counselling therapy, ask yourself the following questions:
- Have I really tried to do things to improve my life or mental stability, but haven’t found any reprieve from symptoms?
- Do I constantly think that life could get better if just the next positive thing happened? (For example, “If I just get a raise, my depression will go away.)
- Do I suddenly want to retreat from my social life with no apparent reason? (If you’re making excuses for every social interaction, this is a sign you may need to seek help.)
Your Mental & Emotional Health Can Affect Your Relationships
What are the ways that these mental or emotional problems affect your relationships?
When you suffer from exhausting emotional difficulties or mental disorders that are left untreated, your sacrifice not only yourself but your relationships as well. Here are ways that various disorders or mental illnesses may impact your love life:
- Self-isolation. If your social anxiety is causing you to feel isolated, you’re likelier to automatically self-isolate further. When you suffer from social anxiety, the time you need people most, you may in fact be withdrawing more.
- If you have anxiety about your relationship that you did not have before, constantly seeking reassurance will actually create barriers between you rather than bring your closer. Self-doubt is often associated with depression and anxiety.
- Depression brings negatives to light and shrinks the positives. This may mean you’re criticizing your partner in ways you wouldn’t have otherwise done, pushing them further away, and creating arguments unnecessarily.
- Anxiety does not always appear the same for everyone. Those who suffer from anxiety may find themselves lashing out, lacking patience, or even having impaired communication from stress.
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Are you struggling in your marriage? Read on to learn marriage building tips which may help your marriage work better for both of you.
What are the most important qualities of a marriage? Sticking with each other, through thick and thin? Loving each other no matter what? Never being someone they can’t count on, etc? Well, that’s all quite Disney fairytale stuff but in reality, it's actually, just the simple human qualities we all want to receive. Respect and perseverance are the two top things you need. Respect comes in many forms. Respect for their body, their space, their property, their personal life that doesn’t include you, their style, their side of the bed, etc. perseverance is needed because you have to accept, they aren’t perfect, and neither are you!. You’re going to want to strangle each other at some point. You will get into arguments, you will feel slighted and jaded. But you have to remember, they aren’t a robot, they are a human being with flaws. Strap yourself in because this read is going to be illuminating.
All-important, integrity
Integrity isn’t just about telling the truth, it's about upholding some unwritten rules. This is what makes marriage so holy and so precious, because we don’t just follow the standard rules everyone knows about like ‘don’t sleep with anyone else’, but we follow those that we can’t see and haven’t technically agreed. The foundation of integrity is self-respect. You know right from wrong, and you shouldn’t want to degrade yourself by doing something morally wrong.
Integrity in marriage means, showing up at a time you said you would. If your spouse’s car is broken down, and they call you to be picked up, don’t tell them you’re on your way and then catch 5 more minutes of the football game. Integrity means doing the right thing, even when your spouse isn’t watching. Each word has to be met with action. If you say you’re going to do something, you stick to your word. It's about being ethical for yourself and your partner. The crucial aspect is, only you can uphold good standards, only you can be a good person, your spouse cannot make you into these things.
Don’t close the doors
Openness is something that can fade over time and that can lead to you going from a married couple to just a couple. Those rings on your fingers don’t mean much if you aren’t sharing your deepest darkest secrets, insecurities, and desires with your spouse. But why then, would openness in a marriage deteriorate?
It's usually because of over-critique. If you’re playing whack-a-mole with your partner’s feelings and desires, you are going to burn them eventually. They won’t want to share with you because they know what is going to follow if they do. So, what you need to stop doing is, belittling their feelings, saying that they’re making a mountain out of a molehill when they are clearly seeing and feeling a situation through a different lens. If you need help understanding when they are being serious and when they are over-thinking something, read a body language book or watch a few videos on the subject. Without saying a word, you can look at your spouse and know when they are emotionally fragile when they have experienced something very troubling. It's good to try and bolster their confidence by sometimes showing they are worrying over nothing, but other times, you should be sensitive to their needs.
Power and Humility
The power dynamic in a marriage is just like the one in a normal relationship without a holy bond. Here’s what you may know already about this dynamic.
Men:
- They feel like they’re in control of the marriage when they earn more money.
- They feel in control when they’re the leader of the household
- They are in charge of the family’s security, i.e. picking out and installing CCTV cameras, fingerprint door locks, etc.
Women:
- They feel like they’re in control when they control life in the bedroom.
- They feel in charge when they can show financial independence to their husband.
- They feel secure in their leadership role when the children obey her more than the father.
Humility in this regard goes a long way. Admitting that you have some kind of power over your spouse is the first step to breaking down invisible barriers. Otherwise, couples can get into a Cold War-type of a situation where no one acknowledges they have the power that scares the other person, and they both end up trying to one-up each other. Husband and wife, have to honestly talk about these things if you are to have a balance of some sort.
Do you enable each other?
Do you do things such as cover-up or make excuses for your spouse’s bad behavior? This might seem like something a ‘loyal’ husband or wife would do, but when you know they are doing something harmful, you’re just enabling them. With your silence or even, the backing of some kind, they feel emboldened to do it again and again. This can result in both spouses becoming locked in a descending spiral where nobody will win. If you find that both of you or just one person, in the marriage is experiencing substance abuse of any kind, call the couples rehabs center. They have been delivering incredible services to married couples that have addiction concerns.
They have both inpatient and outpatient services. They believe that when couples are addicted to drugs or alcohol, their behavior progresses together. In other words, you both enable each other. With their rehab services, both of you can turn from enablers to solid rocks of self-belief and direction. You can help each other become sober and look after one another. This is why the success rate among couples is so much higher than individuals because you stop each other from falling back into the cycle. Check out their cognitive behavioral therapy program which helps couples to understand their thoughts and feelings may be counteracting their need to overcome addiction.
Become fitter together
Couples that workout together and exercise in unison, are far healthier both mentally and physically than those that don’t. Married couples might think they need time alone and working out is a good thing they do by themselves. However, it can like having a workout buddy that knows your every limit.
Go running together, through the countryside. Or you can both get up at the same time each morning, and perform yoga in your living room together. Meditate side by side and really become comfortable with each other, on a deeper philosophical level. Both of your energies and human beings will merge and something amazing will happen. You will see each other’s true nature when you’re pushed physically. The gritting of teeth, sharing of pain, and exhaustion is something that will build camaraderie.
Sex is the end-all-be-all
You can only connect with each other on a romantic level if you’re both physically attracted to one another. The union of bodies is something that cannot be replaced by anything else. Loving each other is very noble, but you cannot underestimate the value of being sexually fulfilled in a marriage; especially for the man.
So learn how to get better! You are with the last person you will ever be intimate with, so you have free reign to be as wild as you want. Do you have any sexual fantasies? Why are they still fantasies only!? You should be doing them with your spouse. Be brave and don’t hold back, tell him or her, exactly what you like. Be very detailed and even, demanding. This kind of sexual fulfilment keeps marriages alive but also, keeps them spicy!
Sex shouldn’t even be a chore either, you should want to do it. So instead of going purely for quality, try to focus on quantity too. Don’t have some kind of end-of-the-week sex engagement, you should be doing it throughout the week. Even if it's for 5 minutes, release that sexual urge before you go to work in the morning. And most importantly, don’t ever use the withholding of sex as a weapon. Your spouse will resent you and feel like a prisoner.
Learn to cook
For any marriage, cooking great meals is another cornerstone of a healthy relationship. When you come home from work, you shouldn’t be diving into a pre-cooked store-bought meal. You deserve better. You both do.
So, pick out a cuisine and then buy a recipe book online in the one you have chosen. Next, you need to buy the ingredients for one of the meals and cook together in the kitchen. Once you become comfortable cooking great meals at home, it's going to make dinner dates and dinner parties so much more fun. It allows you to wow each other and not always go to a restaurant for a candle-lit dining experience. You can also become hosts for your guests, work as a team to impress your in-laws or friends.
There’s almost no chance that you have tried everything to make your marriage work. There’s always something that you have yet to experience together. These are just some of the things that will make your bond stronger than ever before.
