The Have a Quickie Blog

Trust in a relationship is tricky. Trust requires some risks. Trust also requires time that is measured in months and years instead of minutes.

You may trust your partner completely around money, fidelity or keeping quiet about your cravings for Fluffernutter on Wonder Bread with an Ovaltine chaser, but you may have found that you do not feel as comfortable as you once did letting the other person into your head and heart. Do you feel they won’t understand? Are you afraid of rocking the boat in some way? Is it that there isn’t time to really talk? Or is time an excuse for the real issue - that it all feels futile and for all your attempts to get closer, nothing really changes?

 This kind of thing often happens in a long-term relationship. Once a sweet spot to be yourself, to dream and create, the relationship can become a place where the self gets subjugated and other priorities take over. In other cases, the day to day of being with someone takes the freshness out of the relationship.

So, here’s what we want you to do - sit down with your partner for 10 minutes (5 minutes each talking) tonight and bring back that early tendency to let your partner know who you really are. What new interest has grabbed your attention? Have you been toying with the idea of taking guitar lessons? Do you want to start cooking Sunday meals together again? What’s going on in your head? Tell them.

 And then sit back and listen as they tell you who they have become.

Since our partners can’t read our minds, they might not know when we’re stressed about something. Which (darn it!) means they might not respond to our needs in the way we’d like. So forget about psychic communication for the time being. You’re going to have to find a different approach to letting your needs be known.

How about this? Next time that you’re having a quickie (the talking kind) think about what might be bothering you at work, at school, in life, around the neighborhood (remember to keep your relationship out of this for now). Then think about what kind of support you could use.

Here are THREE KINDS OF SUPPORT worth thinking about:

STRATEGIC SUPPORT - getting help planning how to approach a problem. For example, let’s look at taxes, a real stressor. This year, how are you going to go about doing them? Are you going to tackle them yourself, buy special tax software, unload them on an accountant, move to Canada and not worry about it for the time being? Asking for strategic support from your partner probably means you’d sit down together and talk through your options, determining the best one.

INSTRUMENTAL SUPPORT - getting someone to actually do something in order to relieve some of your stress. If we’re talking about taxes again, this could mean asking your partner to help organize receipts, or maybe they could watch the children while you spend the afternoon on a fold-out table in the basement cursing at your 1030 EZ form.

EMOTIONAL SUPPORT - is just what you think. It could take the form of your partner listening to you as you vent or cry. Maybe you need your partner to appreciate what you’ve done, so try asking for that–some appreciation. Maybe you need them to let you be grumpy because that’s how you feel when a nice weekend day is spent inside with small print. 

Basically we’re saying that you’re in a partnership, so you shouldn’t have to to it alone. But you might have to learn to ask for what you need.

Welcome to the relationship self-help blog for people in relationships who don’t have time for self-help.

My Ph.D. psychologist husband Mark and I have created the site HaveAQuickie.net to help you and your partner get started on a new kind of communication that will take no more time than you need to cook vermicelli. 

Why so fast? Well, we’re living in the age of the quick fix. From instant gourmet meals to cut abs, we not only want them, but we want them in the next ten minutes. Mark and I think that includes relationship cures. I mean when you’re done siphoning the guts out of each busy day, how much time do you and your partner have left for each other? A few minutes? A half hour?

And do you use the time well or do ambitious strategies to talk about “issues” get waylaid by American Idol or old episodes of The Bachelor in which women find true love with a hunky stranger in less than two weeks?

Well, here is your chance to tranform your limited couple time into communication magic. By following our plan, you will absolutely change your relationship for the better from the ground up.

Check in at HaveAQuickie.net and stay tuned.