One of the most meaningful parts of being in a relationship is that you can support each other through difficult times or personal crises — but this doesn’t mean it’s not challenging to take on. Whether it’s an illness, family emergency, loss of a loved one, career problem, or something else, it can feel overwhelming to figure out how to support a partner through something really big. Here’s what I recommend:
Manage your own emotions and work on self-regulation
You may have heard the expression about “putting your own oxygen mask on before assisting others.” This is true in a literal plane crash scenario, but also true when it comes to our interpersonal relationships. Any healthy relationship is a constant exchange of support and care — maybe you make breakfast for your partner because they’re in a rush leaving the house, and in the afternoon they set you up with tea and Advil in a dark room because you’re having a migraine. This is the kind of appropriate interdependency that we should all strive for.
However, when someone is going through crisis, whatever that looks like, relationships may be temporarily less balanced — and this, counterintuitively, can be healthy too. A great way to support your partner during a challenging time is to shore up your own forms of support, investing in your practices of self-regulation and reaching out to your wider network for co-regulation, so that you can focus on taking care of them more sustainably. Crises and extended periods of difficulty are very stressful, especially as they (often) extend beyond the initial moments or days of emergency into a long-term problem. Taking care of yourself intentionally — making sure you’re eating and sleeping, getting your social and emotional needs met, and managing your own emotions — means you’re more likely to be able to support your partner in meaningful ways, and less likely to snap at them or lose patience when they are regrettably, but understandably, difficult to be with or less than their best selves.
This is part of why it’s so important to work on maintaining an active social network and meaningful relationships outside your partner — keeping up friendships, making new ones (including friends that you and your partner don’t share!), and maintaining connections to family if you and your family are on good terms. Over the course of any long-term relationship, there will be times when your partner doesn’t have the bandwidth to serve as your only source of emotional support — and times when you need to talk about and process things that are going on with your partner with someone who isn’t them. Investing in a strong network of friendships means that you have the social support to keep going even when your partner can’t always be there for you, and they can support you in supporting them when necessary. (Ideally, your partner also has a network of friends and family that you can coordinate with on supporting them, like organizing their loved ones into a meal train.)
Learn & respect what support and care look like for them
Many of us are enthusiastic about rising to the occasion of caring for a partner: prepping meals to batch and freeze, going with them to doctor’s appointments, or arranging cute date nights and self-care evenings to sooth them. The problem arises when your partner doesn’t find these things supportive or caring, or they want other forms of support you are less interested in offering: a scenario that can leave both of you feeling frustrated and hurt.
Just like anxiously attached people often end up dating avoidant ones, or tops often end up dating bottoms, it’s very normal to end up in a relationship with someone who experiences care or emotional support very differently than you. Maybe you’ve experienced trying to offer someone solutions or problem-solving when they really wanted affirmation and active listening; the same principle applies here. Your vision of how to support your partner through this tough time might be extensive processing and talking through their feelings, growing more emotionally intimate through the crisis. But this might sound excruciating to your partner, who’s just trying to get through each day as they come; they may want help with dishes and laundry, or even to have one place where they don’t need to talk about the issue or where they can pretend it isn’t happening.
How to know how to care for your partner? It’s easiest to talk about these things when there isn’t an active, ongoing crisis. Ideally, you can talk through what makes both of you feel cared for early in your relationship when there isn’t anything major happening in either of your lives. What do they find hardest to bear when they’re going through it? Do they really struggle with feeding themselves or getting out of bed? What are things people have done for them in the past that they’ve experienced as enormously helpful — or that have made it worse?
During a crisis, it can be difficult to have these wide-ranging conversations, but you can still try to have lightweight, concrete check-ins. It can be difficult to answer big, abstract questions like “What do you need right now?” when you’re very emotionally activated or exhausted. Instead, try more concrete questions focused on the immediate moment, or offer options: “Is there anything that would make today easier?” “Would you like for me to order dinner, or handle the maintenance guy when he comes tomorrow, or call your mom to update her on what the doctor said?”
Remember support is a marathon, not a sprint
Some people actually find it surprisingly gratifying to care for a partner at the outset of a crisis: it feels good to get to be useful and make a difference in the life of someone we care about, and we may feel that it’s bringing us closer to our partner.
The difficulty often comes weeks or months in, when you and your partner are both fatigued and things still haven’t returned to normal. Many life changes — the death of a loved one, job loss or unemployment, major illness or injury — have a long-lasting impact on your shared life together. Some crises may mean that things never “go back to normal” — your partner may be forever changed, and your relationship by association. This doesn’t need to be a bad thing, necessarily, but it does require an adjustment of perspective.
It’s important to prioritize patience with your partner, with yourself, and with the situation. The goal isn’t to be the perfect partner or support person in every single instant — that’s not possible! — but to remain a consistent, steady presence who remains mostly reliable and comforting over all of the instants that make up your shared experience of this crisis.
Recommended Books:
The Art of Showing Up: How to Be There for Yourself and Your People
The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence
Rising Strong: How the Ability to Reset Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
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