The best ways to manage stress in your relationship

The road of love isn’t always easy. Here are some solid techniques that can help you both manage stress within your relationship.

by: E.B. Johnson

It doesn’t matter how hard we work to make our relationships perfect. Life isn’t perfect. It’s filled with challenges, adversity, and a range of decisions and difficulties and that can increase the pressure we feel within our partnerships. Some of us handle that pressure well, together. Some of us don’t. If your relationship is dealing with a lot of stress, you have to find release and you have to do it as a team.

Stop avoiding one another and stop allowing your relationship to become buried beneath the rubble of your chaotic life. By working together, you can get yourselves back into that place of love, compassion and understanding. It’s a process, however, and one which requires you both to dig deep and be honest about what’s going in inside and outside.

Stress can be a real relationship killer.

There are many reasons a relationship collapses, and stress is one of the most common causes. So many things can increase the pressure we feel in a partnership. When things go wrong at work, we bring it home to our spouses. When our friendships get challenged, so can our romantic relationships. Building a life someone means merging your inner and outer worlds. Therein lies the pressure.

Have things at work gotten to you lately? Is the reality of living in pandemic world completely eroding your happiness and optimism? All of these things cause stress in our relationships. When coupled with the mistakes we make as partners? Well, the damage can become quite serious.

Stress is a serious relationship killer. If you don’t want to lose your partner, you both have to find better ways to communicate and rescue yourselves from a cataclysmic break. Have you had enough of the emotional shut downs and the increased conflict? Then it’s time for you both to sit down and be brutally honest. What’s going wrong? What do you want to do to fix it? You have to come together to create a plan of action which works; and that starts with understanding.

Signs it’s time to deal with the pressure.

Stress eats away at our relationships, just as it eats away at our own sense of self and confidence. From emotional shut downs to complete lapses in communication — the longer you allow the stress to run amok, the harder it will be to heal your partnership.

Emotional shut down

Have you or your partner shut down emotionally? Do you struggle to open up with one another or be vulnerable? When things are hard, we should be able to rely on our partners to support us and give us their perspective and opinion. Stress doesn’t always make that possible, though. It encourages us to put up walls and pull back inside, away from the people who love us and need us most.

Loss of intimacy

Intimacy is an important part of romantic relationships, be that intimacy physical or emotional. When we stop wanting to be close to our partners, we pull away from them and in that lies the greatest divides. Rather than running from them, we have to learn to run toward one another when things get tough. Then, we can stand side-by-side and strengthen our relationships even while we strengthen ourselves.

Increased anxiety

Are you or your partner dealing with increased anxiety? When it comes to talking about the hard stuff, do you both disengage or avoid the topic altogether? These are also common signs that the stress you’re dealing with as a couple is beginning to take over. We get anxious because we know there are underlying issues that make us feel uncomfortable or somehow guilty. In order to get our relationships back on track, though, we have to work through this anxiety toward our common goals.

Little satisfaction

Do you find that you get little satisfaction or pleasure out of your relationship? The stress you’re dealing with might be to blame. Challenging times and emotions have a way of forcing us to focus only on the negative. When this happens, it’s hard to find things we love or the good things that inspire us. Within that, many of us can also lose our ability to take pleasure in the things we once enjoyed — like our intimate relationships and the partners we love.

Chaos or conflict

Increased chaos and conflict are a staple of the relationship plagued by stress. Perhaps you notice that your partner suddenly irritates you endlessly. Or, you start fighting over little stuff that never mattered before. All of these are outward manifestations of the stress we aren’t dealing with from within. Once we get honest about what’s going on, we can face it bravely as a couple.

Communication lapse

Communication is so important in any relationship, but it’s often one of the first things to go when things go wrong. This loss of communication leads to increased misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and even serious ruptures within your partnerships (and the way you view one another). We have to talk things out to be able to work through them, and this includes the pressure that threatens the connections we share.

Social easing

Do you find that you and your partner are avoiding one another? Do you spend all your time at work, or even socializing with your friends — just to avoid seeing your spouse or getting upset with them? This avoidance is dangerous, as it leads to bigger divides as well as resentment and contempt. Over time, this avoidance can lead to calamity and a complete breakdown in both connection and respect.

The best ways to handle stress in your relationship.

Is your relationship suffering from the above symptoms and divides? If you want to save it, you need to come together and address your issues as rational, mature adults. To do that, though, you both have to stop running away from the truth and learn how to comfort one another as friends and lovers.

1. Stop running away from it

Before you can fix anything you need to sit down and accept where you’re at on a personal level. What’s going on, and what’s going wrong? Are there reasons behind the recent breakdowns? Or is something more sinister lurking beneath the surface? You need to be clear on your end before you approach your partner looking for them to offer up solutions.

Spend time taking a detached look at your relationship. For the next 5–7 days, spend a few minutes journalling about your partnership in the morning or at night. Think about how your relationship makes you feel and then look at your actions and behaviors within it.

What are you doing to contribute to the stress? Is your partner showing a change in their behavior? Imagine you’re looking (from a detached perspective) at the relationship of a friend. How would you feel then? What would you recommend as a course of resolution? Figure out how you’re feeling and what you want your relationship to look like, so you can get on the same page about putting things right.

2. Comfort one another

So often, when conflict or hardship happens in our relationships, we rush to confrontation or the use of our negative emotions. It can seem easier to fight or aggravate than it can be to be vulnerable with one another. This vulnerability, however, is what makes or breaks a true relationship. Rather than seeking to get-even with one another, we need to learn to comfort one another when things get hard.

Once you’ve acknowledged that things are tense, take some time to comfort one another. You don’t need to rush into the hard talks, you can still yourselves for a moment and find your center together before moving into action. Spend some time together relaxing and put the serious stuff to bed for a moment or two.

It’s better to approach the hard work when you’ve both had space to process and soothe. Get grounded and centered back in your relationship, knowing there’s plenty of time to problem solve and work out the next parts of the process. Stop running from the tension for just a few minutes a day (if that’s all you have). Be vulnerable and know that it’s okay to cry on each other’s shoulders.

3. Talk things through

After all the initial discomfort and hard thinking is worked through, you and your partner will be free (and better equipped) to sit down and talk things through. If the stress in your relationship is based in the partnership itself — this can be a challenging talk full of tough emotions. If most of your stress is outward based, though, it will be easier to stay focused on one another and detached from the negativity.

Start the conversation off by expressing your concerns or what seems to be going “wrong” from your angle. Avoid any blaming language (such as, “you did this…you did that…”) and stay focused on the facts. If there are any recent positives you can name, include those as a show of understanding.

Once you’ve been able to express yourself, leave room for your partner to do the same. Don’t talk over them and don’t interject. Give them just as much space as you made for yourself and ensure that they’re safe to communicate candidly with you. Really work through what’s going wrong and compromise on your image of correcting things. Find paths that suit you both and stick to them.

4. Create de-stressing rituals

De-stressing rituals are important when it comes to maintaining our inner peace and that of our relationship. These rituals help us to master the art of self-soothing, or calming our emotional states when things get challenging. That way, we are better equipped to think rationally and come up with logical solutions that help us to alleviate the pressure and find calm.

Think up some de-stressing rituals that can help to steady your mind when the pressure grows. Be creative. What makes you feel a sense of peace or “inner quiet” when things get chaotic? Maybe you like to meditate, journal, or even paint, read, and draw. There’s no right or wrong answer.

Once you’ve both figured out some self-soothing rituals that help to reground you as individuals, look to create some rituals you can share together. Maybe you like to have a scary movie marathon, or go on a hike out in the countryside. Whatever it is, look for low-pressure activities that don’t require a lot of prep or a lot of financial and physical commitment. The simpler the ritual is, the easier it is to jump into when stress comes calling unexpectedly.

5. Get something to look forward to

How often do you and your partner have something really exciting to look forward to as a couple? Whether this is a (socially distanced) vacation of your dreams, or just a weekly date night that allows you to mix things up — what are you doing to keep your relationship exciting? We need to give ourselves something to look forward to, especially if we’re dealing with a lot of outside pressure in our partnerships.

Make a conscious effort to give yourselves something to get excited about. Create a weekly staple, like baking lessons or even just a simple nighttime walk around the block. Find something light and fun that allows you to talk and enjoy being near one another.

It’s a good idea too to make these nights as special as you can. When we get caught in the rut of doing the same old thing, our brains go into autopilot and we stop being truly present with our partners (and appreciating them). Get their beauty back in sight by mixing things up and doing the unexpected. Gussy yourselves up and head out for a night on the town. Remember what it felt like at the beginning and it will always feel new.

Putting it all together…

Even the ideal relationship struggles with stress from time-to-time. We all know what it means to deal with the pressure of modern life, but sometimes that pressure can turn inward. Have you and your partner begun to drift apart? Are you dealing with increased conflict and heartache? All of these can result from stress. How we deal with them, though, depends on our commitment to happiness as a couple.

Stop running away from the truth. If your relationship is buckling beneath stress, you need to take some time to process the truth and admit it. Figure out where your relationship is at and where you want to take it to. Then, find better ways to comfort one another — really allowing you both to get calm and centered before jumping into the problem solving stage. Once you’re both calm, you can sit down and talk things out. Avoid blame language though and stay focused on solutions. Create de-stressing rituals you can partake in alone and together, so that you don’t fall into the habit of taking your feelings out of one another. Life is stressful, but that stress doesn’t have to destroy our relationships. Give yourselves something to look forward to and remember what it was like to fall in love all over again.