Are You Too Busy to Maintain Your Relationship?

Complaints about the hectic pace of life are very commonplace these days. We have very little time to eat, sleep, go out or do anything else apart from work. In fact, it’s very normal to hear someone say that they are doing single-handedly what it would normally take two or three or even five people to accomplish.

Of course, all this overload of work means that we are often too tired and spent to work on our relationships as well. The last thing we want to do when we drag ourselves home after a 14-hour workday is to spend any more time working on anything else. It doesn’t help that thanks to modern technology, work intrudes more and more into our personal lives via texts, emails, and video calls.

Just recently, my neighbor broke up with her boyfriend of six months because she had started a new job with a designation that brought a lot of work responsibilities into her life. Suddenly, she found herself staying back in office to deal with mountains of work or prepare for the next day. The time she could give to her relationship with her boyfriend, much less the time spent with her friends, started decreasing. As the pressures of work and trying to maintain her relationship started making themselves felt, she knew something had to change or she would crumble. Eventually, after a lot of soul-searching, she broke up with her boyfriend. Today, she is single and maintains that she is simply too busy to date or work on a relationship.

Is this an isolated incident? What does this really mean? We at ShoutLo decided to take a look.

Your Significant Other is Not a Priority

When my neighbor broke up with her boyfriend, his friends advised him that saying ‘too busy’ was an excuse. ‘She’s just not that into you’ became a common refrain in the group. They aren’t alone in this attitude. People commonly believe that if we care enough for someone, we will make time for them, no matter how busy we are. There are plenty of advice columns and websites that will give you tips on how to maintain a relationship when your work life seems too busy for you. Therefore, the common assumption is that if you are ‘too busy’ to spend time with someone, you don’t care enough about them. Your career and your job are more important to you.

Life Isn’t Fair That Way

We do work hard to get ahead in life. We have goals and ambitions for ourselves which we would like to see realized. Therefore, it is only natural to concentrate on what you have worked hard for. When someone you are interested in comes into the picture, you might try to have your cake and eat it too by juggling work and time spent with them, but, eventually, you’ll realize that if you want the relationship to progress to the next level, you have to give it more time than you currently have.

Do You Truly Not Care Enough?

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t care enough for that person to make the effort. You may have recognized that the timing is bad. You simply don’t have the time and energy that a relationship requires, especially in the beginning, to make its foundations strong. You recognize this and let the other person go rather than have them stick around and have to deal with a lot of broken promises because you had to work and so broke dates or your crabby mood when you’ve done an 18 hour day and are just too tired to text or call much less meet. The sweet, romance novel and rom-com ideas of love and relationships have very little place in the real world.

In the case of my neighbor, she weighed up a job she had been working towards for two years and a relationship with a guy she had known for six months. She knew that she wouldn’t be able to give him the kind of relationship he deserved, so, instead of dragging it out to its painful and inevitable end, she made a quick and clean cut.

The notions of what we need to do to maintain a relationship in light of current lifestyles are changing. ‘Too busy’ is no longer something that can just be considered an excuse to cover up the lack of interest. It is a hard reality that affects our lives profoundly.

Do you think that people can be ‘too busy’ to maintain a relationship? Let us know in the comments section.