Relationships are as complex as life can get. Establish and maintaining a long-lasting and harmonic relationship is a challenging task and requires a lot of effort, attentiveness, compassion, and self-sacrifice. Even with all this effort, relationships sometimes get stressful. We get into fights, have negative emotions, or feel misunderstood. But where does this stress really come from?
While it is sometimes difficult to pin down the reasons for stress in a relationship, these top 3 stress sources might provide a differentiated picture. In our view, most relationship stress can be attributed to these stress sources and knowing them will help you with coping with stress in your relationship.
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Coping with Stress – The Long-Term Solution
Stress Symptoms – The 33 Signs of Stress
1. Change in values
Over time, your and your partner’s values can change. It is not uncommon for people to change their views about things like religion, family plans, or their spiritual orientation. In fact, the classical midlife crisis usually triggers such changes. Coping with stress in a relationship means to understand and acknowledge that your and your partner’s values can change over the course of a relationship.
2. Bad communication
Without doubt, misunderstandings are a relationship’s #1 stress source. Though we heavily try to make ourselves clear, we often fail at doing so. As a result, our partner assumes the wrong facts and gets irritated, frustrated or angry. Especially in our Social Media heavy world, a message with no context can mean a totally different thing on the other end. So how can we deal with it? Well, coping with stress in a relationship sometimes means to work on your own communication, frequently share your thoughts, and clarify what you think.
3. Personality changes
Sometimes, our partner starts to feel like a different person to us. In fact, all of us change and we develop as a person. This development becomes a mighty stress source if the partner is detached from the change. Remember, a healthy relationship is a constant process of learning and adapting. If one growths and the other stays where they are, relationship stress will increase. Also, personality changes can occur due to sickness, especially mind related obstacles such as depression or even burnout. These developments have a high impact on the mood, emotions, and the behavior of a person
While there may be other sources for relationship stress, these seem to be the big ones. However, knowing the sources only helps if they affect our own relationship. It is important to identify the signs of stress early on, so that coping with stress becomes easier.
We hope that this information was useful to you. If so, then please leave your comment in the comment section below!