People are conditioned to believe that they need relationships to be happy. This narrative is finally being challenged, with more women happier being single than ever. It doesn’t erase the joy people get from romances. However, the state of your relationship can significantly affect your quality of life. A great relationship can help you thrive in other parts of your life, like friendships and your career. Your love life should add value to your life.
A romantic partnership can ensure that you live your best life. However, a bad love life can affect your career. You don’t even have to be working with your spouse to experience this. But having a healthy home life can equip you better to thrive when you go out into the world. Even if you’re able to compartmentalize, it can be brutal for your mental health to have to constantly put on different faces because of a bad love life.
Why a great love life is a good thing for your career
Realistically, you can’t always put equal time into your life. You need time to maintain a healthy relationship, working friendships, a great career, and your health. Depending on where you are in your life, certain aspects will require more energy. When your love life is healthy, it’s easier to focus on other parts of your life.
A great partner will help pick up the slack when you have to focus on other things. For example, if you have busy days coming up, your partner takes over chores to ensure you can focus. They also support you when you’re having a bad work day. If your job is stressful, a great partner helps you manage the emotional overwhelm that accompanies it. They make it easier to wake up every day to go face off with a job that you need but aren’t thriving at. Relationships: Things Happy Couples Do For Each Other Without Being Asked
In addition to providing support, a great partner doesn’t make you feel like you have to choose between your career and your love life. Ordinarily, relationships end up being an extra job that partners have to work at. But a healthy relationship should feel like an extension of yourself. Like a friendship, a partnership should be a source of comfort and homecoming. A great love life means celebrating your work wins, mourning over any losses, and providing unconditional support through any rough patches. 7 Signs You Are In A Healthy Relationship
11 Green Flags To Look Out For In A Relationship
How a poor love life ruins your career
When you have a love life that requires too much energy, it can leave you without enough to focus on your career. This applies to whether the relationship is negative or positive. When you’re in the honeymoon phase of a new relationship, it can feel difficult to focus on what’s more important at that time. You want to put your energy into spending time and getting to know your new partner. This is why it’s not recommended to start or pursue relationships during high-pressure times in your life. Having an obsession over a relationship to the point where you struggle to focus on work can easily lead to mental burnout. Yellow Flags In Relationships: Examples And How To Handle Them
A poor love life can also lead to other mental health issues. If you’re dating an emotionally unavailable person, they make you feel paranoid. As a result, you can end up trying to figure them out rather than focusing on your ambitions. It can also lead to anxiety, depression, avoidance, and compulsive behaviours. You can end up feeling alien in your skin and like you can’t trust yourself anymore. This makes it difficult to focus on what you need to do for your career.
In addition, being in a relationship with a user can jeopardise your plans. A partner who wastes your money can affect your business, steal your money, or even turn off your customers. They can also try to manipulate you to get into schemes that cost you money. Other draining love life situations include dating someone with substance abuse issues, excessive debt from being financially irresponsible or someone who refuses to invest in themselves. Negative people can also make it difficult to focus on your ambitions and they can also make you self-sabotage. Avoid These 10 Toxic Habits Of People With Chronic Unhappiness
The Red Flags To Watch For That Show Your Partner Is Using You
Bad relationships and safety
Outside of emotions, a poor love life can be extremely harmful. A partner can force you to give up your ambitions to take care of the home when they contribute nothing but finances to the home. This is more common in heteronormative relationships where the male partner believes in patriarchal family structures. It increases the risk of financial and physical abuse and increases the risk of cheating. In addition, it adds undue financial pressure on the relationship because it now relies on a single income to survive. With the volatility of the economy, it can be irresponsible to only rely on one income when you can have two. 5 Signs You Are Experiencing Financial Abuse In Your Relationship
A bad love life can deplete your mental and physical energy. It can also directly impact your career if you have a controlling partner who feels jealous every time you need to go the extra mile for your career. For instance, if you need to travel and you have an insecure partner, you may be forced to keep constantly reassuring them instead of focusing on your duties. Conversely, if you are insecure in your relationship and your partner travels, you may be unable to focus on your job because you’re letting yourself imagine the worst.
Can you fix your love life to help your career?
Sometimes a relationship can be detrimental to your career because of a lack of balance. If you and your partner truly love each other and realise you need to fix things, there are steps you can take to redress the harmony. However, if your partner is possessive, abusive or disrespectful, it may be better for your health to end the relationship.
Here are a few steps you can take to better balance your love life and your career.
1. Establish boundaries
If your partner doesn’t understand where work ends and home starts, establish boundaries. Your partner should know that they’re just as important as your career but just like work doesn’t take over the relationship, the relationship shouldn’t take career time. If you work from home, your partner shouldn’t interrupt you unless necessary. If you have an overwhelming work schedule, your partner shouldn’t make you feel guilty about it. They’re allowed to express their frustrations but they shouldn’t villainise you because you need to work harder.
How To Set Healthy Relationship Boundaries And Benefits
2. Make time
When work or school is overwhelming, you can find extra time to spend together. For instance, you can run errands together. If you work near each other, you can meet on lunch breaks or commute home with each other. Running errands together is also a great way to still make time for each other without having to focus less on your ambitions.
3. Don’t make sacrifices
The problem with sacrificial language is that the relationship becomes transactional. If you sacrifice your current ambitions for your love life, it can easily lead to resentment and dissatisfaction. In addition, if you make sacrifices without first having an honest discussion with your partner you can feel unappreciated if your partner encounters a similar situation and doesn’t make the same sacrifices. It’s also important not to defer your schooling for a relationship because there are no guarantees that you’ll be able to easily re-enroll.
It can also be unclear when the relationship is supposed to take a step back for your career. With how society tends to force people to focus more on how they contribute to the nuclear family, you could easily be pressured to abandon your career plans for your relationship. If you’re in a place where it’s an either/or to have a functional relationship, it may be bad timing for you and your partner.
Important Questions To Ask Yourself When Your Partner Asks You To Become A Housewife
4. Outline your values from the beginning
When starting your relationship, make it clear that you’re career-oriented. Your career or education may be the most important thing to you and you can only be with someone who is similarly inclined or is compatible with such a lifestyle. They don’t have to be equally ambitious but they need to understand how to balance having a partner who has a demanding career. When you understand each other from the beginning, you’re less likely to have extreme differences down the line. In addition, it makes it easier to navigate what to do if your partner changes their mind about what they want to focus on rather than being surprised that people grew within the relationship. Relationships: Dating Red Flags You Should Look Out For
Common Relationship Deal Breakers And How To Figure Out Yours
5. Use resources
Rely on friends, mental health counsellors, or therapists when you feel under pressure. A relationship shouldn’t implode because one partner is career-focused. However, when you can’t fix it yourselves even with healthy dialogue, you can still use resources to ensure that your love life remains healthy and you establish a work-life balance.
Check out:
Green, Yellow And Red Flags Women Need To Look Out For In Relationships When Working For Success
Relationships And A Tolerable Level Of Permanent Unhappiness
Relationships: On Men Hating Their Partners And Signs Your Man Hates You
9 Mistakes To Avoid When Pursuing Your Dreams
Couple Finances: Joint Accounts – Benefits And Pitfalls
Opinion: There Is Nothing Equal About Going 50-50 In A Relationship
