Building and Maintaining Healthy Relationships

The initial phase of any relationship is full of excitement, but as time passes, maintaining a relationship requires  effort, understanding, cooperation and enhanced sensitivity for your partner’s needs. Often your spouse may also be a student, may be working, or he/she might just be staying at home. The pressures of work, deadlines, competition at school and work, may often leave you exasperated, and you may end up ignoring the need to nurture your personal relationships. How often have you vented your work frustration on your spouse when all they were trying to do was to make you feel better? As a result we pave way for increased ego, communication gaps that transcend into unbridgeable chasms, feeling utterly lonely.  It is human to disagree, but one needs to handle the disagreement in a matured manner. Remember you are not the only person handling stress, and you are also not the first person to do so! Also remember that we change, and so does our relationship. Talk to each other, make an attempt to listen to your partner with an open heart, use that understanding to resolve differences, grow with the changes in your relationship, and learn to adapt to positive changes. The need for this effort becomes a lot more if you are an international student who is traveled away from home. Your partner is your only family in a new place, and your closest emotional support. Work to keep that support intact rather than making your life fall apart. Also try to explore the community resources available to you. Be aware that there are several resources that are available to you as a student of UT Austin, and at the University Housing. Last but not the least, always remember that its not that hard if you want to make it work

TAB invited Dr. Sylvia Chen who works at UT Counseling and Mental Health Center to organize a workshop on “Empowering yourself and your relationships”. The workshop had some very useful tips to work on our personal relationships. Here I am attaching a handout that was provided. Have a look at it, I hope you find it helpful!

How to maintain healthy relationships_pdf

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