Your Job Doesn’t Just Affect Your Money, It Is Most Likely Affecting Your Relationship!

Everyone knows how their job affects his or her money flow or finances directly, it is self-explanatory. But have you ever thought about how much your job affects your relationship? People on average spend about 40% of their waking time at one place, their place of employment. What happens at this place of employment? Many things, you experience praise and self-satisfaction, you get reprimanded, promoted, passed over for a promotion, appreciated, not appreciated, you laugh or you cry, it depends on the day. Since many people measure their own personal success through their job and how well they are doing at that job (without even realizing it), it certainly has an affect on your mood. Will your mood affect your relationship? Um....I hope that is self-explanatory also, if it isn't, your job is the least of your worries as far as relationships go. 

Now this works both ways, if you are very happy with your job and you enjoy going to work every day, if you enjoy what you are doing, you are probably quite a pleasant person to be around when you come home. When you are in a happy state and feeling good about what you have accomplished that day, you will look for more things to feel good about. It is human nature to want to spread happiness around when you are in the midst of it. However, if you hate your job and what you do every single day, you can begin to feel like you are plagued with unhappiness. When this happens, the lines many times will become blurred between what is actually causing the unhappiness and what is an easy target for the unhappiness. If you wake up cranky at the thought of going to work and you are ticked off at the world when you come home, you may not be the easiest person to be around. In fact, you may be a little bit snippy (understandably) to your significant other, and when couples start being less then kind to one another, fighting is on the horizon.  Many times this will become a routine before you even recognizing what is happening. You may think working at a place you don’t like is just what people do, your parents did it, your friends do it, it is just what you do to pay the bills. If you are one of these people you probably do not realize how much of an impact working somewhere you hate has on your being, in fact, it is safe to assume that you have greatly underestimated it. Unless it is of course affecting your health and even then, many people will try and stick it out until the bitter end, or until they end up in a doctor's office (If only people were so committed to their happiness or their relationships). So they think that the unhappiness they feel on a day to day basis when they come home is stemming from somewhere else and they unconsciously look for an easy target, and if you are fighting with your significant other...presto...easy target! 

I recently read a story about a woman who had issues with her husband. He had a really good job and had been supporting the family for quite some time, when his job suddenly took a turn for the worst. He began struggling with money issues in combination with having a new identity crisis redefining who he was. This, in turn, caused him a lot of unhappiness. Well, this particular gentleman decided that the cause of his unhappiness was his marriage and he told his wife that he wanted to move out. His wife knew him well enough, and she was strong enough, to put her initial feelings aside and recognize that it really had nothing to do with her or their marriage, but that he was struggling with other issues. To make a long story short, he did not move out and they did not get a divorce. After about six months of giving him distance and allowing him to work through his issues, without her help (now that is very hard for a woman, so kudos to her), they are happily married now. He finally came around and realized that the marriage really had nothing to do with it, however, the marriage was an easy target to blame for feeling unhappy.

I have a friend whose husband has a very stressful job, and for the most part, he handles it pretty well. But on occasion, the stress becomes overwhelming for him and he becomes very unhappy. He becomes depressed and starts talking about all of the reasons that he is not happy, none of which seem to be the job. But my friend is smart enough to realize that his happiness level tends to move up and down according to what is happening with his work. Then she allows him to work through it, which he always does.

This scenario is actually a very common occurrence, common enough that you should give it some serious thought. I personally know many, many people whose job affected their relationship and not in the manner that you might think. Not because of an affair or anything like that, but because of how big of an impact a job has on your personal happiness. I know that many of these people do not and have not made the connection between how their job affects their relationship. You could very well be one of these people! I am sure you realize how your job affects your money flow and even your health, but most likely you are overlooking another obvious issue, your job affects your personal happiness...which in turn affects your relationship. Your personal happiness level affects everything in your life, but relationships are very sensitive to it. So take a moment to think about it, how do you feel about your job? Does it make you feel happy, satisfied, unhappy, inadequate, how is it affecting your personal happiness? Or maybe you should think backwards, how is your relationship? Is it worth keeping your job or is it maybe time to find a new one?