Love Stress in the Work Place

Having worked my entire life, I’ve seen the impact of failed relationships on the job. Divorce, cheating, unhappiness, failure—very visible, palpable, and somewhat consuming of thought and action on the job.

While I have not yet found any concrete statistics on the extent of lost production time in dollars and cents from such relationship stresses, I’m sure it’s significant.

Our wedding invitation, 1987. Wedding featured horses, bales of hay, a country band, western dancing, and a preacher dressed in black, head to toe. Yeehaw!

It is extremely hard to separate out the various areas of one’s life and only think about individual issues when one is “in that realm.” “Oh, yes, I only think about how that ex of mine cheated on me all those years when I’m at home, never at work!” Right.

This is actually one of the reasons that I felt compelled to write my book and do this blog. I know that if people were happier in their relationships (which really means also happy within themselves), overall work-related productivity would improve, I’m quite certain. Never mind all the other things on which one could put his or her attention if said attention wasn’t fixated and consumed with love problems.

That doesn’t mean that having a loving and fulfilling interpersonal relationship will solve all work-related issues.  That would be silly to suggest. However, being happy and not carrying related stresses into work at least removes one issue from the mix. I have accomplished more career-wise since Charley and I got together than previously. That’s not to say that I was ever a slouch in the workplace. It just means that I’ve done more with my life—been more consistently productive—since we met, fell in love, and got married.

For that matter, together we’ve also done more philanthropic work, done more for the environment, been more politically active as well. So the moral of this short story is: Assuming you have a good sense of yourself, find someone with whom you can share your brilliance, your greatness, your passions—someone who is passionate about his or her life as you—and  you’ll be doing your part to help reduce stress in the workplace!

Yours in love,

Tanii