Building a Strong Relationship: Finding Time
Time management is a common difficulty in everyone's life nowadays. As people accumulate a greater number of roles, interests, and goals, it becomes less easy to balance them all while still reaching satisfaction in all of the areas they would like to. Intimate relationships are one of these valued roles, and that can take different forms: dating, being in a relationship or longtime committed partnership, cohabiting couples, or spouses in a traditional marriage.
One theory for understanding relational satisfaction is the self-expansion model.1 It suggests that human beings are not static and fundamentally need to grow and look for opportunities to learn new knowledge and become a new and more complex version of the self. According to this model, relationships can prove to be a mutually fulfilling way to develop the self in its expansion tendency, by facilitating growth. In new relationships, the passion from early stages of love involves learning about the other in a very intense way. Therefore, couples engage in new shared activities, try to present themselves in their best light, share long, passionate talks regarding their life experiences, and feel their selves expanding in such opportunities.
As time takes its toll, the passion fades and the relationship develops routines and habits that offer fewer challenges to expand the self. According to this theory, an effective way to keep satisfaction in long-term relationships is to engage in original and exciting activities as a couple, thus creating opportunities to self-expand.
Moreover, to maintain an effective partnership, as in many other kinds of teamwork, the partners need to develop their skills in efficiently defining difficulties and obstacles in their lives, negotiating strategies to tackle them, and assigning responsibilities that please both members as individuals as well as a couple.2
The most common conflict issues that a couple may encounter include the division of labor, children's upbringing, sexuality, financial issues, and wider family relations (e.g., relatives, or previous families in the case of reconstructed families). It is essential to communicate regarding difficulties or problems in these areas and be willing to negotiate a balanced decision for each subject and situation. An honest and open conversation, as in the early times of courtship, regarding life roles, emotional needs, and desired behaviors is very useful to make some decisions that strengthen the relationship satisfaction. That can include accepting that loving partners can also enjoy individual time autonomously for either social leisure, personal development, or inevitable needs. It is constructive to define priorities of roles and to compare personal and couple's priorities: from work and career to social needs, relations with extended family, child-rearing, household tasks, and financial strengths and weaknesses. It is important to decide as a team what tasks to share at home and when to do them, and to be accountable for keeping such decisions (from cooking to cleaning or clearing up).
Reinforcing that being a couple is also a priority in the individuals' lives is more about finding the right moments to be lovers again and enjoying them together, than it is having the desired amount of time available. No matter how many conflicting priorities, couples need to find moments in their busy agendas for intimacy and couple's time, for dating again and experiencing the well-known relationship as a renewed one. An exercise that can be helpful is to create a list of wishes to do as a couple, as concrete as possible (e.g., going out, taking tango lessons, reliving a honeymoon weekend together), first individually and then comparing it as a pair. Planning achievable activities or creating a new, combined list can offer new paths to rediscover love and passionate moments, and to find the growth that a fulfilling relationship can provide.
References
- Aron, E.N., & Aron, A. (1996). Love and expansion of the self: The state of the model. Personal Relationships, 3, 45–58.
- Beck., A.T. (1988). Love is never enough: How couples can overcome misunderstandings, resolve conflicts, and solve relationship problems through cognitive therapy. New York: Harper & Row.
Workplace Options. (Reviewed 2024). Building a strong relationship: Finding time. Raleigh, NC: Author.