Am I spending too much time with my partner?
Something I often tell my client’s in couples therapy is that we want to strive for a balance between “we-ness and me-ness.” I like to think of most things on a continuum, and I often share that dependence is on a continuum. Sometimes childhood traumas can impact how a person shows up in their adult relationships, sometimes past relationships give us messages that aren’t healthy, and sometimes people genuinely struggle with adjusting to having someone in their life- specially after they move in together. In my therapy practice, I work with people all over California who are unsure about whether they are spending too much time with their spouse or partner. Keep on reading to hopefully decide if you are spending too much time with your partner and how you can love to create some much needed space.
Here is a quick little questionnaire to determine if you are spending too much time with your partner. It is just a quiz and I hope you discuss your results with a therapist. Also it is a quiz I made up and use informally when I assess. So once again check in with a therapist to get a more formal assessment.
Am I spending too much time with my partner?
Do you have all the same friends? Or do you have your own friends?
Do you feel FOMO when your partner goes out or maybe you struggle to go out on your own?
Do you find yourself blinding agreeing to what your partner thinks?
Do you find yourself doing hobbies on your own? Do you even have your own hobbies?
Do you ever feel like there are not enough hours in the day to do the things that you want to do?
Again this isn’t a scientific or very rigorous assessment, but usually after a few questions to assess friends, hobbies, and differences in ideas, couples that work with me in therapy can’t start to see that they don’t need to do more together to be happy, they actually might need to do less together to be happy. I know this sounds a bit backwards thinking at first, but think about the joy we have we get to date someone for the first time. They are not carbon copies of us, but instead they have their own uniqueness that seems to pull us in and keep us curious. If we spend too much time with our partners, there runs a risk of being able to have your own identify outside of the relationship.
Here is a story about Becky.
It’s time to go out to dinner, yay date night! Becky has been craving sushi all week and has already scoped out a yummy place. As she is getting ready to leave with her partner, her partner says they want Indian food instead. And without a second thought Becky says “sure!” Though deep down Becky really wants sushi. At dinner the couple talks about the day they had and the plans they have for the weekend. Becky was hoping to go hiking and to check out a new local gallery exhibit. Her partner wants to stay in and back a new recipe and work on the garden. To Becky this sounds like fun and she decides not to go out after all. Lately Becky feels like she never has enough time on her weekends to do her hobbies and has been more irritable. She isn’t sure where her time goes. She also notices that she has not been able to hang out with her own friends in months, something that is quite unusual for her.
Maybe you can relate to Becky a bit? And you know what, lots of people can relate to Becky. There is nothing that bad about her partner or their relationship, after all they don’t fight constantly, and they aren’t on the brink of a breakup up. But there is lack of “me-ness.” If this is not address. Becky, might find herself struggling lost sense of who the heck she is outside of her relationship.
I want you to take a moment here to think about all the identities that you hold as a human. For example, I am a dog mom, wife, daughter, sister, Latina, therapist, and lover of the outdoors. None of these identities are so important that I could only be one of them if I had to choose. They all contribute to who I am as a human.
Now I want you to think about any areas of you that you have not engaged in lately and have not engaged in very much since starting your relationship. Maybe you find yourself doing less of your stuff so that you can do more stuff with your partner. Which in theory is okay but sometimes people go all their way to the other side of that dependence continuum. And then they might find themselves struggling with who they are outside of their relationship.
How therapy can help with when you feel like you spend too much time with your partner.
In therapy with my couples, we often work on identifying how they can have more of a balance when it comes to “we-ness” and “me-ness.” It is so refreshing to work with couples who finally get why they feel like the relationship is stagnant or feel like they have lost who they are outside of the relationship. Often this is something that I work with people in individual therapy as well, because people will find themselves struggling with depression or anxiety. When we start talking about what their identities are, I see light bulbs go off, because they realize that they have been pouring too much into just one facet of who they are.
In therapy we might explore why this happens. And honestly it could be a million different reasons. Some of the more common reason are past exposures to what a relationship looks like either in that person's family of origin or a past romantic relationship that did not have balance. As a latina I saw first hand an interesting and frankly unfair division of roles in some of the relationships in my family and close friends. Even if the woman in the home worked outside the home, the amount of home duties was greatly skewed to be the responsibility of the woman. In this setup there is less time to feed into other identities that a person might have.
All in all the question of, am I spending too much time with my partner is not always an easy one to answer. Something you could try is to make a bubble map of all your identities and see how strongly you feel to those other aspects of you. And I encourage you to spend more quality time with your partner. Doing a shared activity where both of you can connect does far more good for your relationship that spending hours binge watching shows every weekend.
I hope you found this blog useful and take care until next time!
Warmly,
Elisa