Paul Cockayne - Relationship Counsellor

Paul Cockayne – 07791 970406 – paulcockayne3@gmail.com
For more information about me click on a link on the right

Couples often tell me that they don’t seem to have time to spend on their relationship – with children and busy working lives, the relationship just gets “squeezed out” and when, at the end of the day, jobs are done and the kids are in bed (sometimes even asleep!) they are just too tired to give each other quality time.

Easily done – other things are always more urgent – but not necessarily more important in the long term – so what can be done?

It can be useful to understand where the time really goes and so I sometimes suggest to couples that they log their time for a week and draw up a pie chart to show themselves, and their partner, where their time really goes. That can help to see if there are things that maybe can be changed to free up more time.

Another idea to consider is to “ring fence” a time every day, or every week, that is designated as couple time, free from work and kids. It is useful and important to define when these times will happen and to protect them from interruptions so that the time you spend together can be genuinely quality time. In a way that is more important than what you do with the time; protecting it gives your partner the message that they are important, that you do care and keeps a mutual belief in the relationship, that otherwise can dwindle.

Polarisation

In relationships, we sometimes find ourselves caught in “vicious cirles” – patterns of behaviour that are destructive but difficult to change.  For example, suppose one of you tends to be stricter with your children than the other.  The strict parent may see their partner as “too soft” – and become a little stricter to compensate.  The more liberal partner, on the other hand, may well see their partner as being “too hard”, and be inclined to be softer with the kids to make up for it. If this pattern continues, you and your partner can become polarised, one becoming “nice parent” and the other the “nasty parent”.  And this can become difficult to shift because both of you can see the fault as lying with your partner – “I have to be strict because he/she is so soft” – and so this can become an area of conflict between you.

This sort of polarisation can happen in every area of a relationship – financially (spender and saver), socially (introvert and extrovert), in communications (talker/listener), sexually (initiator/responder) and so on. 

Counselling can help with this sort of pattern, firstly by helping you to identify that it is happening.  Once the pattern is identified, you can acknowledge that it is nobody’s fault, but just an unfortunate result of the interactions between you.  And with that comes the ability to change it, by both parties stepping away from their polarised positions to a more central position.  You will always be different, of course, but differences can be a source of great strength in a relationship, not a source of conflict.