The first thing to suffer during a pandemic, besides your health, is your close relationships – particularly, your romantic relationship.
While the outside world shuts down, it’s easy for us to slip into destructive patterns and habits as a means to cope and comfort ourselves. Combine this with being cooped up together with your significant other in a single home or apartment with nowhere to go, increased feelings of claustrophobia, crowdedness, and anxious panic can become overbearing. Given the circumstances, this is unfortunately quite common.
So what can you do to keep your relationship healthy and strong through the pandemic?
The foundation for a healthy and happy relationship is self-esteem. Strong men and strong women form strong relationships.
Your mental health, and by extension your self-esteem, will be one of the first things that are challenged during a pandemic.
The feeling of being “stuck” at home, frustrated by the limiting circumstances, restrictive rules and the uncertainty of it all, our inner strengths and core selves are bound to be out of balance unless we maintain a grounded foundation of self-esteem and focused perspective.
Patterns directed to the outside world as well as directed to your inner world, meaning your thoughts and feelings and/or your actions towards your partner, should be as clear and intentional as possible.
It’s easy to act out your frustration on your partner. Getting angry with him or her over insignificant differences or projections, can turn into a damaging pattern if you do not recognize and put it to a stop.
Pent up anger and negative feelings can explode into destructive fights and arguments that can cause long term harm to your relationship if you are not careful. It is in these situations of extreme discomfort and challenge that our relationships are tested the most.
One important practice to keep constant in your relationship during a pandemic is to concentrate – not on your partner or your relationship itself – but on your mental health and your self-esteem.
If you’re feeling anxious or depressed, occupied with worries, fears and negative thoughts, you won’t be able to support your partner through these hard times. You cannot put the burden of your struggles wholly on your partner, as your partner is likely struggling as well.
It is best to keep a regular exercise of self-reflection and inner diagnosis at signs of frustration, anger and discomfort. If you feel any of the above starting to occur, it is best to step back and look inward to find the root of what is happening inside. In many cases, we project our frustrations onto our partners because we are ill equipped to take the responsibility of working through the pain of the moment, so it manifests into an argument or a bickering match of little to no significance. These types of occurrences tend to continue to happen until we do the work of looking inward and dissecting our issue(s) rather than reacting.
Learning how to overcome your mental struggles and manage your own mental health is responsible and empowering. It allows you and your partner to lead a strong and bonding relationship through the pandemic, as well as through other challenging circumstances. The ability to stand together and support each other as a couple is a powerful force to continually nurture and maintain.
As they say, relationships are work, but when they do work and they are healthy and strong, outside circumstances stand little to no chance of harming them through even the toughest battles.
This pandemic has been a challenging battle to say the least. Many couples have broken apart, and divorce rates have increased significantly. Depression, anxiety, insecurity and panic have all been commonplace since the pandemic began and they continue to increase. Your relationship is being thoroughly tested and is at stake of bonding or breaking. This is where you and your partner need each other most.
To support and strengthen each other and your relationship requires a great deal of self-strength, self-support and self-management.
There are many practical ways you can start managing your mental health and nurturing your inner strength, your passion and your purpose that will lead you and your partner through this pandemic.
Part of my e-book “Lose Your Story, Live Your Life” is instilling basic principles and actionable practices to help you guide through this.
Get your free copy now by clicking here.