Nurses carry a lot in this world. They are constantly burdened by grief, illness, tragedy, and death. I have a few friends who are currently nurses. I also have two friends who are in nursing school right now. One of those friends is currently struggling with balancing her marriage with nursing school. This struggle she is having made me interested in the research surrounding how nurses form attachment to their partners.
Nurses must have extreme emotional strength and maturity to do the work they do. Throughout their day, they have to interact with patients and families in hard situations. I asked a nurse how she would describe her relationships with her patients. Her answer was...
I feel a connection to patients in a way to serve them by being an advocate, by being a friend that they wouldn’t have in any other situation.
Some would refer to nurses as Earth’s angels just because of how much they deal with on a day-to-day basis. Nurses deal with everything from joy to extreme grief. They handle losses, stand with family members and patients, monitor their patients, and save lives every day. But how does this extreme emotional strength and maturity translate to how nurses interact with their partners at home? How does nursing school affect nurses and their relationships versus actual nursing hours?
I asked the friend mentioned above who is currently a nurse some of these questions. This friend has been with her current partner for 20 years. She had some great insight into how she interacts with her partner. For example, she mentioned how nursing school taught her to not see her partner as her patient and how to separate her work life from her personal life. Based on the questions I asked her, this person has a very secure attachment to her partner: she ranks her satisfaction with her husband as extremely high, she feels that her partner is very rarely not available when she needs him, and she mentions that her partner is “always a safe place despite emotions.” She also mentioned how the length of one’s relationship affects how satisfied that person is with their romantic relationship.
As said above, the person I interviewed reminisced about how much nursing school taught her about being attached to her partner. Similarly, in a study done by Kaya, it was found that after nursing school nursing students were more securely attached to their significant others than before nursing school (Kaya, 2010). This could be because of what nursing school teaches nurses about work-life balance.
In a study that observed nursing students, it was found that there is a high importance in nurses having a secure attachment to their partner because that relates to their emotional maturity with their patients (Kaya, 2010). There is a high level of emotional maturity that is needed for nurses to be nurses because of the need to separate their personal life from their professional life. As described above, nurses also have a lot to deal with on a daily basis at work, so having a secure attachment to their partner is crucial for nurses to be able to separate their professional life from their personal life.
My friend who is currently a nurse provided some of her strategies for keeping her personal and professional lives separate. For example, she reminds herself that she has many identities other than being a nurse. She is also a mom, a wife, a daughter, a Taekwondo athlete, and so much more. She also now knows that if she is still thinking about a patient when she gets home that it is because there is something wrong with their care or there is something ethically wrong with the situation. When those cases happen, she takes off her “work shoes” and leaves that problem with her shoes, as she can’t fix it now that she is home.
I hope some of these strategies may be of some use to you in your future career as a nurse, social worker, psychologist, or other mentally taxing career when considering your romantic relationships.
References
Kaya, N. (2010). Attachment styles of nursing students: A cross-sectional and a longitudinal study. Nurse Educ Today, 30(7), 666-673. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2010.01.001
I really appreciated this discussion about how nursing impacts romantic attachment. It was just so interesting to see how your friend developed a secure attachment with her partner by simply learning how to separate work from personal life, which can be so difficult for such a simple idea. I can relate this to my boyfriend, who is a civil engineer, and he often has issues with taking the emotional stress of his job home. Kind of like your friend, he finds that having a loving and supportive partner makes a big difference in handling stress and being able to come home to someone who can help care and comfort. Knowing someone is consistently “a safe place” allows him to recharge and maintain balance. Kind of like your strategies you talk about, like leaving work shoes at the door and keeping those two parts of life separate, seem like good way to keep a healthy relationship while also being able to manage a tough and demanding career. This post really highlighted how emotional challenges at work can strengthen romantic bonds at home as well as familial bonds or friendships.
ReplyDeleteThis post stood out to me specifically because my mom is a nurse. From my outside perspective and watching my mom navigate her own relationship I agree with this post. I think in any relationship it is important to separate it from your work life. It reminds me of people saying you shouldn't work with your spouse. I think it is especially important for someone in a role like nursing because of the emotional stress like you listed. My mom tries to separate her work life from her home life with the exception being talking through her stress with someone. How you talked about having a safe space for stress can really help and I think mom is able to find that in multiple people. I'm really happy to see a discussion talking about nurses and the challenges they may face in and out of the workplace.
ReplyDeleteThis post really stood out to me because it bridges the emotional demands of nursing with the necessity of a secure romantic attachment. In our Romantic Attachment lecture, we explained how secure attachment promotes a "safe base" from which individuals can cope with and balance stressors. Reading about your friend reminded me of my own experience growing up. My brother was often in the hospital because he had asthma along with a hole in his heart, and his nurses became a comfort and stability for my family. My parents spoke only Spanish, so this staff member made a point of reassuring us and keeping us part of what was going on. I believe that the ability to show empathy while maintaining boundaries reflects the same attachment principles you describe, being a safe place despite the emotions. I think this shows that secure attachment is valuable not only in personal fulfillment but also in professional resilience. Nurses, like many others in emotionally taxing professions, require significant others and support networks with whom they can leave the grief of the hospital at the door. That "taking off of work shoes" metaphor is such a powerful reminder that both at work and home, boundaries and secure relationships help us to thrive.
ReplyDeleteYour post really opened my eyes to how much emotional weight nurses deal with every single day. I’ve seen this personally because one of my cousins is a nurse, and when she first started working, she would come home exhausted not just physically, but mentally. She talked about how hard it was to switch out of “caretaker mode” with her boyfriend because she was so used to being responsible for everyone else’s needs. Over time, she learned to set boundaries and remind herself that she deserves support too, not just to give it. I like how your friend recognizes that she has multiple identities outside of nursing — that mindset feels essential to keeping a healthy relationship. It’s comforting to hear that nursing school can actually help build secure attachment rather than break relationships apart. Your post makes it clear that having someone safe to come home to matters just as much as saving lives at work.
ReplyDeleteThis post really stood out to me because I had never thought of this perspective before, specifically with nurses. I myself am a college freshman who is not studying anything in the medical field. However, I have two friends back home that I have known for a while. I have formed close relationships with their mothers who I will say treat me like a daughter and friend. Reading this helped me better understand these two mothers. I realized these two women, who are very passionate, about their work often come home carrying the weight of their work day on their shoulders. This creates conflict between them and their 18 year old daughters because there is a lack of understanding. I like the insight from your friend that she is able to associate her identity with more than the title nurse and there are other parts to her life that make her who she is.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading all that about how nurses get so caught up in work it is hard for them to connect with there partners. Something similar happened with my grandma where she was in med school, school would take over just about her entire life. When ever she would get home she was drained and never wanted to talk to anyone when she came back. At school she was talking to her friend about not feeling like her self when ever she was at home because she was always making her school life inside the home. Once she started to do school work outside of the house at little coffee shops she then started to feel more like her self and be able to have relationships with people in her lives. Your post really shows how hard nursing really is on people and they ways it effects them outside of work.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your post because it reminds us about something that most of us forget and take for granted; nurses carry a lot of emotional burden. They walk around every day, acting like they are okay, their loved ones expect them to show up for them every day, yet they somehow the forget the burden they are carrying. Your discussion about how nurses separate their work identity from their partner identity reminded me of our lesson about how secure attachment gives people a safe place to come to after stress. I have a friend who is a nurse and I’ve seen how emotionally overwhelmed she gets after work, so hearing how your friend handles that and protects her relationship really impressed me. Your post made me really think about how essential it is to have secure connections before getting into a career that is emotionally tiring.
ReplyDeleteI was deeply affected by this post due to how it shows how much a nurse's emotional reality affects the nature of the relationships they have, something that is typically overlooked by others. It makes perfect sense that how nurses' private lives would be influenced by the pressure, grief, and obligation they deal with on an everyday basis. The idea that having an established connection could help nurses in balancing their professional and private lives, while letting them to take it easy and rebuild their connections, touched resonance with me foremost.
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