Being a caregiver can be an incredibly rewarding role, one that often allows you to give back to the people who once supported you, including your parents. Yet, caregiving can also be incredibly difficult and may come at a high price.
For some caregivers, that price is other relationships, including their marriage, connections with friends, and even their relationship with their children. In one survey, an incredible 80% of caregivers reported strains on their relationships, with 25% of divorced caregivers saying that being a caregiver played a serious role in their divorce.
So, what do you do about this? How can you be a caregiver for an aging parent, but still maintain a healthy relationship?
In this post, we’re taking a close look at how you can stop caregiving from ruining your marriage. Because, yes, doing so is possible.
It’s important to think about this topic as early as you can, even if caregiving doesn’t seem to be harming your relationship, right now – as the effects build slowly over time. You’ll see the most benefits by issues in the bud now.
In this particular post, we’re focusing on how caring for someone else can harm your marriage (i.e. caring for someone who isn’t your spouse). Being a spousal caregiver can have many relationship effects as well. However, that topic has its own complexities, so we’re covering it in a separate article.
Ways to Stop Caregiving from Ruining Your Marriage
- Make the Initial Decision Together
- Set Boundaries
- Make Time for Your Marriage
- Focus on What Your Parent Needs
- Communicate Often and Well
- Talk About Who Does What
- Give Each Other Alone Time
- Get Creative About Solutions
- Re-Examine the Situation Regularly
- Don’t be Idealistic
Make the Initial Decision Together
If you want your marriage to work well, then caregiving needs to be a joint decision.
After all, caregiving disrupts your life significantly. It can mean that you’re spending a lot of time supporting another person, perhaps even bringing them into your home.
It isn’t fair to force such a dramatic change on your partner. It’s even more unfair to expect them to be happy about it too. Remember, we all have different values and priorities.
If you can’t reach the point of agreeing about caregiving, then sooner or later, you might need to decide between your relationship and your support role.
Set Boundaries
Caregiving can easily overtake your life. You can get lost in the role, to the point that you’re constantly thinking about the person that you support and even lose your identity in the process.
Not surprisingly, this can have a dramatic toll on your marriage.
Even if the caregiving decision was mutual, your spouse doesn’t want to feel like they’re always in second place. Who would want that?
The situation is similar to when you have kids in that you can’t put your romantic relationship on hold because you are supporting others as well. For your marriage to withstand caregiving, you need to work on it.
Part of doing so involves creating boundaries.
For example, you might be willing to do whatever your parent needs (like pick up groceries, visit them, take them to the doctor’s appointment, or help them around the home), but not at the drop of the hat. You might say that they need to give you at least 24 hours notice – and that you might need to fit them in around other needs.
Some aging parents mightn’t like that idea at first.
That’s okay though. Your parent doesn’t need to understand what you’re doing and why for you to be right.
Make Time for Your Marriage
Caregiving takes a decent amount of time and energy, as do other parts of your life, including work, raising children, housework, cooking, leisure activities, and everything else.
It’s incredibly easy to focus on everything else, while your relationship slips into the background. To avoid that, you need to be intentional.
This will often mean taking the time to be romantic, to spend time with one another as a couple. Exactly what this looks like varies from one couple to the next.
Working out each other’s love languages can help here. Doing so should give you a better understanding of how to make the other person feel truly loved.
Focus on What Your Parent Needs
One good way to decide on priorities is to think about what your aging parent needs.
By this, I mean what they actually need to be okay, not what they want.
Aging parents sometimes get very demanding and want their children to help out constantly. Other times, it’s the adult child who goes over the top and is constantly trying to help, even with tasks the senior can do for themselves.
Regardless of whose idea it is, being over-involved in your parent’s life won’t help them, you, or your marriage. They’ll just become increasingly dependent, while you’ll burn out.
Communicate Often and Well
Good communication and good relationships go hand-in-hand. Talking helps you to know how the other person is doing and what they need. Doing so also helps you iron out any issues early on.
If you struggle with this, then I recommend picking up a book on communication, like this one here.
A good place to begin, however, is with the idea of curiosity – where you’re curious about the other person’s perspective and what they’re feeling. This is much more useful than assuming you know the other person’s point of view. Let’s face it, you don’t.
Taking the curiosity approach takes you away from the whole right versus wrong trap, leaving you open to finding good solutions.
After all, most problems aren’t a matter of right and wrong. The goal is to find solutions that work for that situation. Doing so well will involve considering your perspective and that of your partner.
Talk About Who Does What
Caregiving can breed resentment when the work is uneven. For example, a wife doing most of the caregiving work for her husband’s mother could easily be a recipe for disaster.
Issues like this are another reason why it’s so important to talk honestly with one another. Again, it helps to come into the conversation with curiosity, rather than right versus wrong. Rather than trying to convince the other person that they should be doing more, work together to find the best approaches that support both of you.
What the solutions are will depend on your situation. For example:
- You might take turns visiting the senior and providing support
- You might be responsible for different tasks, like one person helping with bathing and food prep, while another does home maintenance
- One person might be solely responsible for caregiving, while the other takes on the lion’s share of other tasks, like earning money, cleaning the house, etc.
The important thing is to decide together.
Doing so does involve being honest. If one partner agrees to something they’re not really happy with, resentment is likely to build in the future.
It’s also important to remember that you are a team. Even if one person is doing the bulk of the caregiving work, the other is important. You are supporting each other.
Give Each Other Alone Time
We’ve talked about spending time with one another and keeping the romance alive. That’s an important approach, but having time alone is just as important.
By this, we mean that both you and your partner need time to yourselves. Time where you can focus on your own wants, needs, and interests, without needing to think about anyone else.
Independent time is often undervalued, yet it can make a huge difference to your strength as a couple.
Finding time to do this while caregiving can be difficult, but it’s far from impossible. The trick is to look for approaches that work within your situation.
For example, a married couple might choose to sleep apart some nights (or even most nights). Some go as far as to intentionally have separate bedrooms. Doing so isn’t a sign of a bad relationship. Instead, when it is planned well and matches the couple’s needs, sleeping apart can be incredibly healthy.
Get Creative About Solutions
It’s easy to get stuck in ideas about what life and relationships should look like, such as that idea that sleeping in different rooms means that something is wrong.
In practice, though, healthy relationships come in plenty of shapes and sizes. The most important thing is to find approaches that work for you.
Please, please, don’t stick to the expected model just because that’s how you think it should go.
Instead, look closely at what works, what doesn’t, and how you can make things better. For example, perhaps spending some quality time together involves ignoring the dishes for one night. Or, perhaps you can have a special meal at home, rather than going out to a restaurant.
Moments of connection don’t need to be large and dramatic either. Sometimes the small and simple ones are just as special. They’re also easier to achieve.
Re-Examine the Situation Regularly
Caregiving is often harder than you first imagined it, sometimes because the role can wear you down, sometimes because there isn’t enough time for your needs, and sometimes because the senior’s health gets worse over time.
Such changes mean that it’s important to check in with each other regularly.
Talk about things like:
- Whether the tasks are balanced well between the two of you
- Whether there’s enough time left for the marriage
- How you can find more time for one another
- If it is time for changes, like changes in the amount of time spent providing care or where the senior lives
- How you can make things better
- How you can support the other person more
Don’t Be Idealistic
The final thing is to be realistic about your life and your relationship.
Things won’t ever be perfect. No relationship is. There will always be difficult moments and disagreements. After all, people have individual wants, needs, and values – and sometimes these clash.
Caregiving could easily increase the number of disagreements, as you may have very different ideas about the best approaches to take.
Remember this though, the measure of a relationship isn’t whether you disagree or even whether you fight. It’s how you come back together afterward.
Final Thoughts
Caregiving often causes marital strive or makes current problems worse. Thankfully, you can stop caregiving from ruining your marriage. The approaches we’ve discussed in this article are all important ways to do just that.
You’ve probably noticed though, that they all revolve around the themes of communication, supporting one another, and making decisions together. This isn’t so surprising, as these themes form the bedrock of any good marriage.
Looking For Answers?
There’s only so much we can cover in a single blog post (or even a series!). Sometimes you need to do a deep delve, which is where the right book can be powerful.
Click the button to check out our favorite books for caregivers and why these stand out.
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