Hopes, fears and expectations around a forthcoming summer holiday are currently a common topic of conversations in my therapy sessions with couples. It’s an especially important time of the year for couples who often feel distant from each other.
Many Surrey families tend to have evolved into specialised roles for the partners, with one focussing on career and often under huge pressure to keep delivering, and the other concentrating on parenting, often alongside a career too. The pressures of maintaining a high specification lifestyle can mean little time is spent as a couple – the times that are spent together are frequently as parents, rather than as an adult couple with time to devote solely to each other.
Partners often complain they see little of each other, and the annual family holiday can present an opportunity to spend more time together.
However it’s often not that simple – the patterns of relating within the relationship might appear to be driven by circumstance, but often the difficulties of prioritising an intimate partner can run deeper than this.
The main income earner (let’s assume that it’s a man, just for simplicity), may find it genuinely difficult to switch off from work and turn towards his partner. Those in highly paid roles do have exceptionally high expectations put on them, and many organisations still have a culture of presentee-ism expectations to never say no. People in such roles may be driven by fear, especially in an economy which means finding a new role to move to might not be easy.
Some also bring their own life experiences, especially from childhood, to how they prioritise work over family and couple.
Some main income earners feel they have to keep proving their worth and feel scrutinised while others may be avoiding financial hardship that they experienced. Both partners may be replicating features of their parents, such as an absentee dad and a devoted, stay-at-home but unfulfilled and frustrated mum.
For the parent focused on the children (again let’s assume a woman), the specialisation of roles may have led to a loss of a sense of herself as anything other than a mum, perhaps going back to first having children. She is receiving much of the recognition and love she needs, but from the children rather than her husband, which is often not a substitute for intimate partner love.
So while on holiday old habits can die hard, and it’s not as simple as it sounds to reconnect. That’s probably why couples therapists like me find late summer and early autumn as peak times for enquiries from couples wanting to address the disconnect once and for all.
In most cases, one partner has been able to recognise the disconnect more readily than the other. It’s relatively rare that both simultaneously see that support is needed.