449 - When Life Demands Get in the Way of Love
Stressors and pressure
Sometimes we experience issues in our relationships that don’t have anything to do with emotional, communicative, or compatibility problems. When external stressors affect our relationships, we sometimes feel as though de-escalation is imminent, if only temporarily. There are plenty of factors that might play into these decisions, like:
Time pressures
A change in job schedule, or having a schedule of free time that doesn’t “fit nicely” with a partner’s schedule of free time.
Having to piece together multiple jobs or gigs in order to make ends meet. Having to favor trading one’s time for money.
Schedule rigidity, or difficulties in “making” time or shifting commitments around.
A rigorous travel or commute schedule.
A high-demand school schedule that takes up both time in classes as well as study and homework time at home.
Financial pressures
Cost of living, student loans, medical bills, and more can create money stressors.
Feeling mismatched with a partner regarding financial values, or experiencing the inability to afford dates/trips together.
Sudden loss of income or reduction in income.
Needing to support a family or chosen family, being a sole breadwinner.
Having competing financial goals such as wanting to get out of debt, wanting to save for a house, save for a vacation, or start a business.
Other commitments and obligations
The daily grind is different for everyone and may be more oppressive for some people – these are tasks that have to happen every day or most days, regardless of any other factor or influence.
Examples include: washing dishes, childcare, securing meals, grocery shopping, laundry, cleaning, dealing with bills, bathing, etc.
Caring for children or elderly parents.
Job stress or specialized job stress, such as serving in the military or pursuing demanding career opportunities like med school.
Major life changes can pull focus away from the relationship for a period.
Polysaturation.
Health or disability
Chronic illness or disability.
Dealing with medical issues or unpredictable flare ups often become priority number one, regardless of other commitments.
Mental health issues, chronic or acute, can make it difficult to show up fully and consistently for a relationship.
Medication side effects can produce sleepiness, nausea, a drop in libido, irritability, etc.
Before you take action
Before you make the decision to de-escalate a relationship temporarily to relieve pressure caused by one of these outside factors, it’s important to ask yourself a few questions.
Be real with yourself. Is it actually life circumstances? Or is it an excuse to pull away from the relationship?
Imagine if your most egregious obligation or time sink suddenly disappeared. Would you be excited to reconnect to this relationship? If you imagined that you had 50% more capacity (time, energy, money) would you still be excited about this relationship?
Is this a temporary increase in life pressure or does this seem like it could be long-lasting or permanent?
What counts as temporary versus permanent could be subjective. If it’s temporary, how long do you think this will last? On the short end versus long end?
Is this a breakup, a de-escalation, or a taking a break situation? Is the solution always to de-escalate? What even counts as a de-escalation?
What can we do?
Remember to communicate early and often. Make a shared decision to change the status or functioning of the relationship, rather than ending it abruptly. Be intentional about a plan moving forward: what factors will you experiment with changing? When will you check in with each other? At what point would either of you be ready to try something different with the relationship or try re-escalating? If it truly is about life circumstances, offer reassurance that this is about external factors, rather than flaws in the relationship.
Specifically, for the scenarios discussed above, try:
Time pressures
Focus on quality of time over quantity of time (i.e. time together without distractions or trying to be productive, which happens less often).
Or go for small chunks of time (i.e. phone calls when commuting to work every day, even if you aren’t seeing each other in person as often).
Financial pressures
Practice getting comfortable discussing money frankly.
Collaborate on what a reduced budget for time together would actually look like.
Listen to MA 421 - Infla-dating episode for getting creative with low-cost time together.
Other obligations and commitments
Experiment with intentionally setting aside time for each other, whether it’s a 5 minute phone call before bed each night or making a set date night. Sometimes adding it to a calendar instead of seeing when you can squeeze it in at the end of a busy week can help.
Seek support from loved ones or services around you to reduce or change caregiving obligations or schedule.
Get an outside perspective, friend or professional, to help you take inventory of all of your ongoing obligations and commitments to see if any of them can be changed, shifted, or dropped in order to free up capacity for the relationship.
Health challenges
Be frank about limitations and expectations (This can be hard if you don’t want there to be any limitations or reduced expectations).
Be flexible. Adjust expectations or what’s on the plate for the day based on spoons.
Seek community support and education, whether it’s formal support groups, online groups, or educational resources like books or podcasts (Also tailored resources directed towards partners of people with chronic illness, disabilities, mental health issues, etc.).
Above all, the main underlying of all of this is to collaborate, even if the solution is a de-escalation or a break. However, understand that the other person may not be on board with making any changes to the relationship and may not be interested in collaborating or being flexible. You also can’t convince someone they have more time or capacity than they think they do. They need to realize it on their own if it’s true. That’s all right; change is hard, and you can’t force someone to be ok with making changes. Breaking up is okay.
Transcript
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Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we're diving into what happens when life's demands get in the way of love. Even solid relationships can struggle when outside stressors like busy schedules, financial loads, health issues, or other obligations limit the time and energy that you have for the relationship. How do you cope when careers, family needs, chronic illness or just the daily grind threaten to swamp an otherwise happy partnership? Can de-escalating the relationship temporarily help relieve the pressure? Today we'll discuss strategies for collaborating through life's ups and downs, keeping communication strong, getting creative with quality time and more.
When life gets chaotic, is it possible to still make room for romance? Stay with us to find out. If you're interested in learning about our fundamental communication tools that we reference on this show all the time, then check out our book, Multiamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships, which covers our most used communication tools for all types of relationships. You can find links to buy it at multiamory.com/book, or wherever fine books are sold, or you can check out the first nine episodes of this podcast, where we also go over some of our most widely used and shared communication tools.
Dedeker: Okay, here's a question for the group, for the room. Have you ever had a relationship end not because there were emotional issues or compatibility issues or communication issues, but any other factor?
Emily: I feel like time is the big one, meaning I simply don't have enough time to contribute to the relationship in the way that I want to. I feel like that happened more when I was younger and dating a ton of people at once, even before I was non-monogamous.
Dedeker: Your time was taken up by other people?
Emily: Yes. So much so that I was like, you know what, I can't add another person to this pile kind of thing.
Dedeker: Sure.
Jase: Yes. I have had relationships end because we got into other relationships and were not polyamorous, were not non-monogamous at the time. It was this, we've got a really good thing going on, but with the understanding that if we get into other relationships, that we'll deescalate this to just a friendship if that happens, and then that did happen, and I still think very fondly about that relationship and kind of wish I knew then what I know now, and maybe could have had that continue as a different type of relationship instead of thinking, "Oh, well, all this has to end."
Dedeker: How did that go? I think in traditional dating parlance, I don't know, that doesn't seem like it's a good conversation to have.
Jase: No, it was actually remarkably super chill. One of the things that is why I think so fondly of that relationship, because we said that going into it, we both understood that, and I think also good timing-wise, we both met people around the same time, so it wasn't just one. It all just worked out, but also just, I don't know, from the start, it was just very chill, good communication, understanding, but also not so enmeshed or super intertwined. I think that combination was just enough that that worked out to deescalate that, and then still stayed friends, and I would go see the shows that she directed or wrote or other things, and still are in touch to this day, and that was, I don't even know, 15 years ago or something now?
Dedeker: Wow.
Emily: That's the thing that I think is specific to what Jase and I went through, is that neither of us were particularly enmeshed with the people that maybe we ended up saying goodbye to for one reason or another. I think if you are super enmeshed, then that becomes a question of, why are we de-escalating, or is there something more to this equation that just I don't have enough time, or I don't have the emotional or mental bandwidth to continue this relationship in the capacity that I'm in? If we're spending a ton of time together and we like each other, I don't know when it's okay or when it makes the most sense to say goodbye to that relationship or deescalate it, if everything else is going okay.
Dedeker: I had someone break up with me because I was traveling, and they were just very clear that they don't do long-distance relationships, and so it wasn't that there was anything they had wrong with me or the relationship necessarily. In retrospect, I could look back on that relationship and be like, "Yes, probably wouldn't have worked out anyway because of X, Y and Z factors," but at least at the time, I don't know, I was sad about that, but I wasn't necessarily really painfully hurt or wounded by it. It also wasn't a casual relationship, it wasn't just a casual dating relationship necessarily.
Jase: I have had that happen with someone moving, where it was just like, "We're not going to do long-distance so we're just going to end this and we know that and it's okay, even if it's sad and difficult," but yes, it wasn't that devastating, betrayal or heartbreak or anything like that.
Emily: I think of one of your family members, Jase, who I think I've referenced before, who went to couples counseling before getting married to a person and they discovered because one of them was going to be traveling a lot and the other didn't necessarily want that kind of lifestyle, then maybe they weren't as compatible as they thought that they were previously. Yes, I don't know, if there are different things that can show maybe we aren't made for each other in the way that we once thought we were, et cetera, etcetera.
Dedeker: Yes. The reason why I wrote this episode is because I have a couple of clients who, they're facing the choice to have to either take a break from the relationship or have to deescalate the relationship in some way due to there being a combination of school stress, one of them is in school right now, financial pressure, there's an income differential between the two of them, also work schedules. One of them had a work schedule increase quite dramatically and unexpectedly, and then also their long-distance on top of it.
I think there is just so many of these factors layered on top of each other that they realize, "Ooh, we may not be able to continue with the relationship in the same way that we have because of these factors." They reached out to me asking if there are any Multiamory episodes that I would recommend, that would help with figuring out how to set expectations around making this change, timelines around making this change, and I was like, "Nope. Actually, there's not."
We've spent a fair amount of time on this show talking about de-escalating and breaking up, and when you might decide to do that, or how you might transition a relationship in that way, and I have seen people in our Patreon groups post about these issues as well. Someone realizing, "Oh my God, I am just at my schedule capacity and I'm realizing that something's got to give, and it may be this particular relationship, and so how do I deal with that? How do I deal with that in a way that isn't just destructive to the relationship or really hurtful to the person?"
I spent a lot of time chewing on that and thinking about that. I just wanted to explore this particular situation, about the way that life demands can sometimes get in the way of our romantic relationships. I don't think this is something that gets discussed very often, I think because we all carry that assumption of love conquers all, and so, if you really love the person, you're going to find a way to make it work, or if you really love the person, there's no cost too high for being in the relationship. I think that this is not a subject that at least in the mainstream gets a lot of play. Do you get that impression also?
Jase: Yes, it's definitely not a thing that gets discussed very often, and I think this is something that can apply in any type of relationship. This doesn't have to be non-monogamous. Anyone could go through something like this. I think we do naturally have ups and downs in terms of how much time we have to spend together or to go on dates or whatever in longer-term relationships, but it sounds like this is when it crosses that threshold into a more significant change in that relationship.
Emily: Maybe this is something that we're going to talk about throughout the episode, but I'm curious as to whether or not a person decides to deescalate a relationship and then if their circumstances change, they turn to a re-escalation potentially.
Jase: It sounds like that's the idea here. How do you set it up with that hope and expectation? Rather than, I think usually when we talk about a de-escalation, we talk about it more like a permanent thing.
Emily: It's very final.
Jase: More of we've shifted to something else and that's just what it is until maybe we change it again, in some way. It's interesting because just last week or the week before when we had our Q&A episode there was someone who was talking about re-escalating a relationship they had previously deescalated, but that was more because something went wrong. It's like we had a problem and so we deescalated and now it's been some time a couple of years and we're thinking about becoming more entwined again. Whereas again, that's different than this. It's so fascinating to me that there's this whole area that, I think, we will all experience in our long-term relationships, at least on a small scale, if not on as big a scale that we haven't talked about. That's amazing. After almost 450 episodes.
Emily: 450 years of doing this.
Jase: Props to your clients. I don't know who they are, but thank you to you for bringing this up and also for giving us permission to talk about this on this episode.
Emily: All righty. Let's talk about what all of this may look like in real life in terms of questioning. What's going to cause a person to want to deescalate or change how the relationship looks with the hopes of maybe changing it back at some point in time? Something that I talked about just recently with this is time pressure. That can look like a change in job schedule or having a schedule of free time that doesn't really fit nicely with a partner schedule of free time.
I feel there are those memes out there that are like, "Okay, I am free on these days and a friend is free on these days and they're totally opposite days." It's like, "It was nice knowing you. I'm never going to see you ever again." If that's the case for you and your partner, yikes, that can be really difficult.
We have a finite amount of time on this planet, and we have a finite amount of time in our day and a finite amount of time in our week, and it just simply isn't always going to work out nicely with a partner. Also, something else that I've had to deal with a lot is having to piece together multiple jobs or gigs in order to make ends meet and having to favor trading one's time for money. If you're working three or four gigs at once, or you maybe have one gig that just takes up an insane amount of time. If you are a lawyer or a doctor or doing multiple podcasts or something and it just takes up a huge amount of time, then maybe you just don't have a lot of time for other things.
Additionally, there may be a really rigid schedule that you're holding down, so you may have a lot of difficulty switching things around or making time for someone, shifting around commitments that could be based off of your coworker's schedules for example, or just in general. I always have to be on or available at these hours. That just never really works with somebody else's schedule. You also may be traveling a lot like Dedeker did at one point in her life and still does. That may make you not able to be proximal to your partner ever, or maybe only a couple times a year, for instance. That just may not work with the type of partnership that the two of you want. You may have a huge commute schedule. I live in Los Angeles, and I have got to run to a thing after this and it's going to take me over an hour just to get there. That commute schedule may be nuts for a person in a specific part of the country or part of the world.
Then also something that the three of us don't have to deal with anymore, but that we did at some point is having a really demanding school schedule that takes up both time and classes, as well as study extracurriculars, any homework time, all of that. If you're in a PhD program, those things come up throughout the course of our lives.
Jase: It's funny now that you've mentioned some of those out loud, I'm just realizing, actually I have gone through some of these. If I think about my relationship with Dedeker, that when she did decide to start traveling, that was at a time where I was not able to travel as much because of my job at the time. There was, I guess you could call it some kind of de-escalation or at least changing of how we did our relationship, even though it's not like we called it that or thought about it that way, but it did just practically change from seeing each other once or twice a week to not seeing each other for several months at a time and then trying to figure out when we could. This is probably more common than I realized, now I'm even more surprised we haven't done an episode about it before.
Emily: There's always going to be something that we've missed, thank goodness.
Jase: That's why we can keep going with this show. Another category of thing that we wanted to talk about are financial pressures. There were time pressures before, and these are financial pressures. These are stressors that come about just from cost of living or student loans or medical bills that have just come up. Those could be for yourself or for a child or family member that can create this extra level of stress and also a scarcity of that resource, right, of money. Feeling mismatched with a partner regarding financial values or experiencing just that you can't afford to go on dates or go on trips. With Dedeker, at that time, I was able to save up and go take a trip and see her for a month somewhere else and then come back.
If I had had medical bills at that time or something, I wouldn't have been able to do that. If I just hadn't had the job I had at that time, might not have been able to do that. Also sudden loss of income or reduction in income because of changing the shift or just things scaling down or downsizing or losing a job or needing to change a job. Any reason could significantly change your financial situation. Needing to support a family member, like I mentioned, for medical reasons, but also could just be, I need to support this person financially being the breadwinner for this person or helping to pay for living expenses.
Dedeker: Both big and little people as well.
Jase: Absolutely. These could be little people, little children type people, or these could be parents, these could be friends, chosen family, whatever it is. Also, you could find that you have, sounds bad to say, competing financial goals. I would say maybe mismatched financial goals.
Dedeker: I would pick competing, honestly.
Jase: Competing.
Dedeker: Yes.
Jase: That could be something like wanting to get out of debt or save for a house or save for a vacation or start a business. Something that is a different goal where it's like, it's not that I don't have money, but that I'm putting it toward this other thing that may be competing with spending money on doing dates or traveling or whatever.
Dedeker: Or all those things are competing with each other. I both want to get out of debt and want to save for a vacation next year, or I want to save for starting a business and I want to save for a down payment on a house. This is a problem, I think, a lot of people face financially is this like-- Actually, there's a lot of places where I could put my money that isn't just about the things that I buy on a day-to-day basis. It's literally about my bigger goals. How do I pick just one goal?
Jase: There was a 2012 study by Dew Britt and Huston called Examining the Relationship Between Financial Issues and Divorce that was published in Family Relation. They found unsurprisingly that financial problems in a relationship predict lower relationship quality and higher risk of breakup. Financial issues were one of the strongest predictors of relationship trouble. I feel like this is a statistic that I've heard many, many times in different places from different studies. Financial challenges are just a really difficult thing and financial mismatches are a particularly challenging thing to deal with.
I like the idea that in this episode we can get into some ways to proactively see that and take steps to see how we can modify our relationship around it rather than letting it be the thing you never talk about until it causes a breakup. Which is, I think, how most people handle money in relationships.
Dedeker: We'll dive more into that later. Another area where life demands can just really cause some obstacles for being able to show up for a relationship is just having other commitments and obligations. There's a very wide spectrum on this. Maybe on the more, I guess quotidian end of the spectrum is maybe what I like to call the daily grind. What I mean by the daily grind is these tasks that have to happen either every day or most days, regardless of any other factor or influence. These may be different for different people. They may be more oppressive for different people. Some examples include things like childcare, washing dishes, securing meals, grocery shopping, doing the laundry, cleaning your house, dealing with the bills, taking care of your body, getting exercise, bathing. All of these things that go into just having a life where even if there's no other factor that's sapping away your energy, this still may be a lot, especially if you're caring for multiple people or caring for a family. This may take up a lot of your time and energy.
Then if you're also layering in other time pressures, other financial pressures, any chronic health issues, that even just the daily grind can take up a lot of energy. Within that is, of course, if you're someone who has to care for children or care for elderly parents, or care for partners who need help in some kind of way, that's a major responsibility. Now, specifically with the children piece. I found this study that was published in Journal of Family Issues by Huss and Pollmann-Schult.
They found that specifically couples who are parenting together, experience a drop in relationship satisfaction and also an increase in conflict behaviors after their first child is born. Now, good news being that with subsequent children, it pretty much stays about the same. With the first child, there's this big increase in conflict and a decrease in relationship satisfaction, which again, is yet another thing that takes up more of your energy and time, outside of even just everything that goes into caring for and feeding and cleaning a child.
Other commitments include just your job. We've talked about that a little bit. Having a demanding job, whether that's demands in the sense that if you're a low wage worker where you're constantly under time pressure and it's constantly just like go, go, go. Or you could be a white-collar worker who is also having a lot of responsibility and expectation piled onto them, that definitely feeds into this. There may also be specialized job stress. Things like having a partner who serves the military, or if you're someone who's pursuing some demanding career opportunity like med school or doing a residency. That's going to sap away a lot of your energy here.
Then there may also be major life changes that can pull focus away from the relationship for a period. I think a big one that a lot of people struggle with is if someone suddenly has to do a geographic relocation, which means, "Oh, suddenly our relationship is long distance," and then that's going to add in all new layers of logistics and pressure to have to deal with
Jase: Related to the school thing, I think also the decision to go back to school while still keeping a job. Both my mom and my stepdad have done that at different times where they're still working, but they're going back to school. That's a sudden big time commitment that they're taking on that's limited in scope, but still a few years often. That's quite a bit extra to take on and can really affect the amount of time that you have for your other commitments.
Dedeker: Yes, definitely. Then of course, the one that comes up often, specifically within the non-monogamous community is polysaturation. Is if you have overcommitted yourself to too many other partners, to too many dates in the calendar that, is this the number one area where I see people kind of go awry? I don't think it's the number one area, but I do think it's a common newbie mistake to just immediately hop into 600 different relationships or set up 600 different dates right away. Yes. I do think someone who doesn't have a good sense of boundaries around their time and energy and a realistic sense of how much time and energy their existing relationships take, may be more likely to acquire new commitments and new obligations often at the expense of everyone, including that new relationship. They just don't know it yet.
Jase: Boy. I've done this one so much in the past.
Emily: Dedeker alluded to this a little bit before, but if there are any health or disability issues, that can definitely limit the amount of time or the amount of capacity that you have emotionally, physically, mentally on other relationships. Anything like chronic illness or disability can reduce emotional time and financial capacity for a relationship. Also, dealing with medical issues or unpredictable flareups often become just priority number one regardless of any other commitments that you have.
I know we have read of some people within our communities dealing with this and just talking about how difficult it is to live with chronic illness, for example, on a daily basis, and not really knowing whether or not you're going to have a flare up that day. I can imagine that it would be really, really difficult to be able to sustain multiple relationships or even maybe even one relationship if you don't always know how you're going to feel on a daily basis.
Things like mental health issues, chronic or acute can make it difficult to show up fully and consistently for a relationship. Then also things like medication side effects. They can produce things like sleepiness or nausea, a drop in libido, irritability, et cetera. Especially as people are trying to tailor and figure out what medication dose works well for them. That can really be a period of time in which they're not feeling their best or they're not feeling like they can engage in a new relationship, for example, or maybe a relationship that's not as established just because they're going through that period of not really knowing how they're feeling or where they stand.
Jase: We've definitely seen that there are a lot of different reasons, and you may have a combination of many of these, or even just one could be the thing that tips the scale to feel like something has to change, something needs to adjust here. When you're trying to evaluate, how do I want to handle that? How do I want to approach that? How can I do this in a way that's working together with my partner or partners rather than just feeling like I have to come up with a solution all on my own?
We're going to go through some questions that you can ask and some things that you can do to try to do that in a way that is still including healthy communication and being caring along with it. Before we get to that, we're going to take a quick break to talk about how you can support this show if you enjoy this content and appreciate being able to get this content every week and to share it with everyone out there for free. Just take a moment, check out our sponsors, if any are interesting, go check them out and use our promo codes that really does directly help support our show. Of course, you can support us directly by joining our community at multiamory.com/join.
Dedeker: Hello, folks, we're back. In this next section, first we're going to take you through three questions to ask yourself before taking action or before making a decision to take a break or deescalate the relationship. After we get through those three questions, then we're going to talk about some things to bear in mind, some things that you can do to help make this change a little bit smoother, a little bit gentler and kinder, and also some specific things that you might experiment with if you're experiencing, specifically you're not sure what to do about time pressures or financial pressures.
Emily: The first question to ask yourself is, do I want to deescalate because of my life circumstance, or do I want to deescalate because I just maybe don't want to be in this relationship anymore? Is this maybe just an excuse to pull away from the relationship? I think when we're looking at our life in general, and when we're looking at the possibility of deescalating or ending a relationship, we may see everything as like worse than it actually is, or see our obligations or commitments as more intense than they actually are. Do a thought experiment here.
Imagine that your most egregious obligation or time sank is just suddenly gone. Now if it were gone and you did have as much time as you wanted to engage in your relationship, would you still want to? Ask yourself that question, like, yes, I'd still be really excited about this relationship, or maybe I actually am just not interested in being in this relationship anymore. Now do the same thing. If you had 50% more capacity, more time, more energy, more money, whatever it is, would you still be excited about the relationship if you just had 50% more time?
deescalate: I think this is an important one because the reality is that if you need to come to a partner to say, "Hey, I'm realizing I may not actually have time to give to this relationship, and so I need to change our relationship in some way." Chances are high, the first place their brain is going to go is not believing you. I think chances are high, the place their brain is going to go is like, "Oh, this is actually an excuse because there's some other problem there." That's something that you can address. We'll talk about that later on.
I think before you even have that conversation, see if that's true for yourself. Are you in denial? Is it actually, I'm not that excited about this person, or there's parts of this relationship that I don't really enjoy and it just happens to be that, saying that it's because of time or money or stress or whatever is convenient, and maybe I think that it's going to make this person feel better when it probably won't. I think this is a good first filtration pass to put things through.
Jase: I've definitely done that before, where it's legitimately didn't have time or energy, but also was a good excuse to not keep doing a relationship. It's like not totally untrue, it's not a lie or an excuse, but also-- Yes. I guess if you do realize that that's the case, however you go about it, ending that relationship or pulling away from it does make sense, and that is what you should do.
In that case, I'd say maybe you don't have to worry as much about really convincing them, "No, it's just about this temporary thing," because even if they're like, "I don't know if that's really the whole answer," the result is still the same and maybe that's okay because maybe that isn't the whole answer. Does that make sense?
Emily: Yes.
Jase: Just being honest with yourself though can at least help give you some perspective. Just to be clear, all of that that we just said was question number one.
Dedeker: It's true.
Jase: That was five different ways of asking yourself the same question of, is it really just the circumstance, or is it this relationship? Then the second question is, is this a temporary increase in the pressures, or does this seem like something that could be long-lasting or permanent? I'm going to say maybe the word permanent is not a great one to use just because everything in life is impermanent, including us and the earth and the universe and everything. Maybe permanent is the wrong word, but long-term, potentially very long-term versus temporary. That might be relative. What counts as long-term or not, that's a little bit subjective. Something to consider.
Emily: It's interesting to me to look at the question of right now in our current time of after the pandemic and just being a little bit older in my life, my capacity for more people or my capacity for wanting to engage in a lot of social activity is diminished from maybe before the pandemic or when I was younger. I think that that's something to think about as well because we change throughout the course of our life.
Even though we may feel as though, "Okay, the really intense pressure of whatever this thing is that's causing me to want to deescalate is gone, do I as a person feel like, yes, I can incorporate this lover back into my life or these people back into my life in the same way as maybe before this all started, I felt like I could?" Just yet another thing to throw out there because I feel like my capacity for all that has diminished greatly since the pandemic. That's something we've talked about before.
Jase: Yes, I do feel like I've seen that trend in a lot of people that just their capacity and energy level for certain things is just lower than it was, but with all of this, the point though is to just get honest and evaluate, "Is this actually temporary, and if so, how temporary?" Is this temporary like, "Oh, just the next month, I have a big deadline coming up, and so I've got a lot of extra stuff going on, or is this the next four years I'm going to be working on this PhD, or is it the next who knows how many years I need to take care of my mom who's sick," or something?
Whatever it is, getting a sense of how temporary versus how long term can help influence the types of solutions or the types of things that you might come up with when adjusting your relationships around this.
Dedeker: I think that can feed back into the first question where if your example is, "I need to move to a new city and I need to have that whole process complete within two months or so," and if you imagine, "We fast-forwarded to two months and that's done, do I feel excited about being able to reconnect to this relationship and being able to give it more time, or does it feel like, I don't know about that?" Also getting clear on those specific timeframes is important as well.
The third question, is this a situation where it's appropriate to do a full breakup? Is it appropriate to do a de-escalation or maybe a renegotiation of the functioning of the relationship? Or is this a let's take a break situation and then circle around back in X amount of time?
Now, this question opened up a whole tesseract of philosophical questions for me because after this section, we're going to get into some specific things that you can try in a relationship that that's in the de-escalation zone of maybe spending less time, spending less energy, spending less money or spending those resources in a different way.
Then I was like, "Okay, but what even counts as a de-escalation? What's a de-escalation as in, "Oh, we're deciding to de-prioritize this relationship," versus, "Oh, we're just going to experiment with a different way of doing this relationship." That seems highly subjective to me that I think that if you asked 100 people on the street, one person might think, "Oh, if my partner came to me and told me actually, I can only see you once a month instead of once every week, I would consider that like a major downgrade," versus someone else might be like, "Oh, I think if my partner and I were collaborating, then I could get through six months of only seeing them once a month if I knew it was going to change."
I guess it's just to say that get clear on when you think about de-escalation what you actually mean by that or what that actually specifically looks like to you. Is it important to you to make sure that the relationship maintains the same status of being maybe very emotionally entangled or very important to you or an attachment figure to you, or is that less important to you? Because I think that's going to influence how you decide to go about this. Am I making any sense whatsoever to the two of you?
Emily: Yes, absolutely.
Jase: Yes.
Emily: I think it's really tough because our relationships in general and how we view what we are to a person or what non-monogamy is, for example, or monogamy, your definition of de-escalation or breakup is going to be different from one person to another.
Jase: And the language that you use also affects that. Again, to go back to the example of Dedeker traveling, the fact that our relationship would change was pretty obvious by just that that's something she was going to start doing and I was not doing that with her. If that had come along with her saying, "We should deescalate our relationship for this purpose?" that probably would have landed more as a, "Oh, you don't want to do this relationship anymore."
I'd say it's important to just be aware of how that might land for your partner as well as what you mean by it so that you can then clarify and get into this. Maybe using the word de-escalation is a little intense for some people, but for others, they might go, "Oh yes, no, that's not what this is, that makes sense. We're both on the same team about this." Just be aware of that and realize that even if the result was the same, calling it something different might make it feel very different.
Emily: What can we do about all of this? Let's talk about some tactics for figuring out how to maneuver and go through a change in a relationship due to outside circumstances like the ones that we've talked about. Guess what, everyone, we should communicate. We should communicate early and often.
Dedeker: What?
Emily: Yes, I know.
Dedeker: No.
Emily: Amazing. I don't know what that means. It's really important to make a shared decision to change the status or functioning of the relationship rather than just ending it abruptly. I know that that sometimes does happen in breakups, that it's one party member saying, "I'm done with this. I don't want to do this anymore," and unilaterally deciding that the relationship is over, but ideally, if you do want to continue the relationship in some capacity, it's really important to come to a consensus together about what the relationship is going to look like.
It's important to put on your scientist pants and be intentional about a plan moving forward. You can ask yourself what factors will you experiment with changing in terms of time, just as Dedeker talked about, or the idea of, I'm only going to see this person once a month or twice a month as opposed to twice a week," for example, or "Maybe I'll talk on the phone with them a couple of times a week, but I will only see them once a month," for example.
Also, are you going to be checking in with one another? Are you going to be discussing with that other person, "I want to keep these parts of the relationship going," as opposed to just a clean break or a clean time away from one another maybe? I know, Dedeker, you've taken breaks in your relationships. That's not something I really do, but you've had breaks in-between relationships saying, "We're going to come back to the relationship eventually, but we're going to take a month off or whatever from each other."
Dedeker: I can't brag that it's been extremely successful or anything. It is something I have done, yes.
Emily: Yes, you've taken more breaks in your relationships than I have.
Dedeker: Okay, sure, yes.
Emily: Also, you can ask yourself, at what point would either of you be ready to try something different with the relationship or try re-escalating? If you find like, "Okay, I'm having a really intense six-month period of my PhD program. Once that's done, I feel like I could put more into this relationship than be upfront about that." Again, if it really truly is about life circumstances, offer reassurance to your partner that this is external. These are external factors that we're working out rather than fundamental flaws within the relationship. Like Jase said, that's really important to be able to use specific language about the reason behind why you're making this decision.
Jase: Something that I would just throw out there as a little piece of advice that I've learned myself is if it is something like this chunk of time, these three months, this six months, even just one month, whatever it is, is going to be really busy. Then let's revisit re-escalating things after that or spending more time together after that, is to give yourself a little bit more time after that. What I've found is that so often you're doing this same thing with so many other areas of your life where you're putting stuff off until after this chunk is done.
It might be I'm cleaning my house or taking my dog to get groomed or whatever it is. Just give yourself a little buffer so that you're not setting up disappointment when that date hits and you're not instantly back at full energy. Give yourself a little bit of recovery and reintegrating time.
The next category is time pressures, and that is if you are deciding to step back on the amount of time that you're spending together. Look at how you can focus on the quality of your time versus just the quantity of it. That means things like, how can we make sure that the time we do spend together, let's say it's less? Let's say we're only going to see each other every other week or once a month for the next few months while I'm working on this thing or while I'm recovering from an injury or something like that, is to say, "Okay, when we do have that time together, let's really consciously make it free from distractions. Let's agree to put our phones on do not disturb for those few hours that we're together. Or let's not try to get stuff done together. Let's just focus on enjoying each other's company for a little while." Something like that.
Look at for the two of you, what does that mean? What would make that time together feel special and meaningful and not just, "I'm in the same mental state as I always am. I just happen to be with you around." Which is fine if you've got a lot of time together, but if you don't, this can really help increase that quality of it. Then also going for small chunks of time could be another option. This could be say maybe we do only have that little bit of time to see each other once a month or something. Maybe there's other areas like talking on the phone while driving to work every day or sending each other voice memos or sending more selfies or video calls with each other.
Just something to intentionally add little bits of communication that maybe you didn't need to do as much before because you saw each other a few times a week. Or whatever it was is just being creative on either side, being more dedicated time or maybe finding little smaller ways to stay connected.
Dedeker: There are some things that you can experiment with as well for relieving some of the financial pressure. A big part of this is to practice getting comfortable discussing money, frankly and honestly. Yes, this is a muscle that gets built up over time and that you have to maintain as well. It really is like a muscle. I find that if it's been a while since I have very frankly discussed with a partner, for instance, how much is in my savings account or how much money I've made this year? It becomes harder to share that stuff again because I think our very American conditioning is quite strong about money being this extremely private thing.
Oh, God, I think if your partner is pressuring you to tell them all this information. You don't have to succumb to that pressure. When you're collaborating with someone and you're in a situation where you really do need to figure out how to make a relationship more financially sustainable. You have to be comfortable discussing money frankly, and not in weird euphemisms or suggestions.
It's so funny because money also like sex is this area where there's a lot of shame and vulnerability. It's also subject to these like "Ooh, I can't actually say this anatomical word or say the sex act out loud. I'm just going to talk around what I might like. It feels a little too embarrassing." I think the same thing happens with money. Just build up that muscle, take a deep breath. Hopefully, the person that you're with is also a safe person to discuss these things with and just discuss it frankly.
Collaborate together on what a reduced budget might look like for your dates or for your time together. This could look many different ways. It could be, "Hey, actually I can't really afford for us to be doing these weekend trips all the time. This maybe needs to be one weekend trip a year max, and the rest of our time needs to be more at-home dates or less expensive dates," something like that. If you go check out our episode 421, that was our inflating episode. We covered a lot of creative ideas for low-cost time together. It's funny that this is coming up now because Jase and I, I think, we've mentioned this on the show before. We have this vintage copy of Emily Post.
Your grandmothers copied Emily Post from the late '20s or early '30s that we read to each other sometimes. For those of you who don't know, Emily Post was a writer from the turn of the century who wrote a lot about manners and etiquette and how to do a perfect place setting on your dining room table and all these things. Mostly it's really, really fascinating and sometimes hilarious reading and a really interesting window into what it might be like to be in high society in the '20s and what might be expected of you. We just read this section. I forget what the actual title of the section was.
Essentially the question that was being posed was like, can a broke boy take a rich girl out? Something like that. Can a man who doesn't make a ton of money take out a woman who comes from a family with money and is used to a certain level of expense honestly, when she's going out? First of all, I love that Emily Post's response to this is she's just so flabbergasted that we still expect men to pay for everything because women are equals now here in 19 Yes, women are equals. It should be totally okay for a woman to pick up the check or to treat someone, and it shouldn't be a big embarrassment to the man.
She goes off on that, which is progressive for her time. She shared this story where she said that if two people are dating and the man comes to his lady and is like, "Jove, I've saved $1.83. We can have a party." Emily Post is saying she should be as excited as if he told her that he's saved $100 for their date, that she should be like, "Oh, wonderful. We can go out to have luncheon at the cafeteria and then we can go see a film." I guess you could get that for $1.83 in the early '30s. The whole point being that she was saying even if she herself is used to a certain level of expense or prefers a certain level of fanciness on her dates, she essentially should take her partner's bid, is how I'm reading it.
Jase: I read it more as like she'll be excited because she's doing it with you, not because the thing is expensive.
Dedeker: That too. I really liked that. I know it can be disappointing if you need to downgrade your budget for anything. Whether that's just for yourself or if it's for your time together. I think if you bring the right attitude toward it of just trying to be more creative and still leaning into the fact that it's time together and it's really about how do we create a good quality, fun time together regardless of how much money is spent. I think that's the important piece.
Emily: In terms of having other obligations or commitments, it can be cool to experiment with that intentionality of setting aside some time for each other. That can look like a five-minute phone call before bed each night, or making a set date night even if that is once a month. Sometimes adding it to a calendar instead of seeing when you can squeeze it in at the end of the busy week can really help. That's that intentionality that we're talking about. Doing it ahead of schedule, ahead of like, "Oh shit, I haven't seen this person for the week and I am supposed to call them. Let me do that right now," when I think about it last minute.
If you are in a situation where, for instance, you have kids and you need to be able to have them taken care of on a certain day, maybe you can discuss with loved ones or find services that will help you reduce or change caregiving obligations. Or even schedule a different time to have the kids go somewhere else for an evening while you're able to go out on a date with your loved one. Look for outside ways of helping you in a scenario such as that. You can also get an outside perspective from a friend or a professional to help you really take inventory of all of your ongoing obligations and commitments to see if any of them can be changed, or if any of them can be shifted or dropped in order to free up capacity for the relationship. That's one that I really had to come to terms with over a period of time figuring out, do I really need to do all of these things. Why am I wanting to do all these things? What is it internally about me that causes me to feel like I'm less worthy if I'm not filling my schedule with a bunch of shit? Questioning stuff like that, and maybe an outside professional or even a friend, someone else can help you with those questions, and maybe make you realize, yes, I don't necessarily need to be filling my day to the absolute brim. If I don't, then I'll have more time for things that really matter to me.
Jase: If your relationship is finding challenges, because of health issues, health challenges, like we mentioned before, the first thing to do is to just be frank and be clear about your limitations and your expectations. This can be hard if you don't want this to change, if you don't want any of these limitations or reduced expectations to happen. Being honest and being clear and having that conversation is really important. In that, be flexible.
Adjust your expectations of what's on the plate will say for each day based on how you're feeling or how your partner's feeling depending on what's going on there. If they have a certain amount of spoons, or if they're feeling higher or lower energy that day, or if you are, just being flexible, and realizing that kind of like Emily Post said, with the high society woman being happy to go on a cheap date with the guy because she likes being with him. Remembering that too, that part of what can make your relationship special is being creative and flexible.
No matter what time we're going to spend together, it can be nice, right? That we can find ways to make that rewarding and to feel good for each other. Then to seek community support and education. Whether that's formal support groups, or it's online groups, or educational resources, like books, or podcasts, or maybe specific resources that are directed toward partners of people with chronic illness, or disabilities, or mental health issues. There's lots of books, or podcasts, or things like that out there, whatever resources seemed like they would fit the best for you go seek those out, they really do help and can make a big difference.
Dedeker: What underlies all of this is collaboration, even if the solution is a very intentional de-escalation or taking a break, collaborate. Do everything you can in your power to make it so that this is something that the two of us are coming to, together. We're getting creative together, we're brainstorming together, the ways that may help our relationship just be better, even in the midst of a very demanding life. However, know that the other person just may not be on board with collaborating. They may not be on board with making any changes to the relationship. They may not be interested in working together on a team or being flexible. That's okay.
Someone may realize they're like, no, if I'm going to be in this relationship, I want this particular amount of time, I want this particular amount of commitment and that's okay. Unfortunately, it may mean that the relationship can't continue but at least they're being clear with you about that. You can't force someone to be on board with making these changes.
If you're on the opposite side of this, if you have a partner coming to you saying they don't have the time, they don't have the capacity, they need to reduce time together because of this, know that you probably cannot convince someone that they actually have more time or energy or capacity or money than they're telling you or than they think that they do. They might because you're an outside perspective, it may be patently obvious to you. Like, well, if you stopped spending all your money on video games, or if you stop spending all your money on going out to restaurants or whatever, then we'd have money for a nice date so if we're going away or whatever. It may be so obvious to you, but it's unlikely that you're going to be the one to be able to deliver that message to this person, especially if they're not coming to you in a spirit of, hey, let's figure this out together.
This is stuff that someone may need to realize on their own. If it's true that from your perspective, no they have tons of time or they have tons of capacity. They're just don't want to give it to me. They're going to have to realize that on their own, if that's the thing that they think is holding them back from the relationship. Again, all of this is okay. Making changes to a relationship is hard. Change in general is hard. You can't force the other person to be okay with making changes. Just bear that in mind. Collaborate, try to collaborate as much as you can. Also, if the person's not on board with collaborating, that's okay. There may need to be a different solution to this.