photo by bensonkua
Bad relationships don’t just take a toll on your mental health, they do damage to your heart and metabolic processes as well.
While both men and women in “strained” unions, those marked by arguing and being angry, were more likely to feel depressed than happier partners, the women in the contentious relationships were more likely to develop high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar and other markers of what’s known as “metabolic syndrome,” said study author Nancy Henry, a doctoral candidate in clinical healthy psychology at the University of Utah.
Metabolic syndrome is known to boost the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes.
If your relationship isn’t headed in a direction you’re happy with, you have yet another reason to ask, is it worth it?
Alternately, a new study draws into question previous conclusions about marriage and relationships. Previously, biological anthropologists like Helen Fisher concluded that early in a relationship heightened hormones drove passion and lust, which leveled off after 2-4 years to a more level attachment that kept many relationships together.
In a just published study in the Review of General Psychology, researchers looked at couples from college and middle-age brackets who experienced romantic, passionate, or friendship based love in short and long-term relationships. Couples who kept the romance going had the most satisfaction in both types of relationships. Couples in more obsessive relationships were happier in the short-term, than long. Since it’s just a handful of couples, much more research needs to be done, which could shift our understanding of human partnerships.
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For a moment there (when I read the post title) I thought you were going to give us an overview of your personal intimate happenings during March.
Code words like relationship and closure make it hard to believe that a real person is really discussing what goes on between people. These words suggest a point of view that, it seems to me, block us from looking at ourselves and the others in our lives. My partner and I are extremely different and totally unrelated in numerous ways. Yet we love each other and somehow match each other.
I actually found her by accident. I was in a marriage that was failing and, without too much hope, I scheduled us some counselling. The person we met with suggested a method whereby we might find out what our “relationship” was all about. Her theory was that we grow up looking for the kind of “caregiving” love that we received as a child. So she suggested that we make a list of the goods and bads that we remembered from those early years. And then, and here was the hard part, ask ourselves if the person we were with fit the descriptors.
My answer was two fold. No to my then wife and a very surprising yes to someone who I had up till then thought of as only a friend. We have been together in love and, yes Zak, sex for the last 14 years. I am amazed, “maybe I’m amazed” at how simple it all was once I took the time to look at what I was looking for.
Who came up on your then-wife’s list; was the outcome of therapy satisfyign to her too?
That therapist’s exercise would only seem to work if you grew up in a nurturing family. For those from more abusive households, one shouldn’t be trying to recreate that early experience of “love,” which is difficult because some researchers believe our early experiences with family and friends create a sort of psychic map by which we judge future relationships. And if you filled your map with experiences of abuse, it’s hard to break the cycle.
Each person came up with their own list. In the ensuing discussions, we both discovered that we really had a great chance for a friendship, which exists to this day. But very little real reason to think that our marriage had a chance. We had come together because of feelings but a life based just on those initial feelings was never going to work.
Meanwhile, this therapy worked for us. We had different kinds of nuturing. Her parents doted. Mine set each of us seven brothers and sisters on the road to independence from the start. Her parents were calm Canadian, mine firey Italian. “Nurturing” is another code word. But, here’s the point. I spent a large part of my young life just finding love/lust/sex. Until I took the time to use this exercise, I don’t think I ever really thought seriously about what I really wanted or needed. I took them as they were, which is one thing I learned from my caregivers, and treated them with respect, which was another.
Doing this list showed me how to look at myself and then at my life and then at whether what I grew up loving and needing and expecting from those who cared about me was actually in my life. As I said, for the past 14 years, it has been.