How Soon in Relationships Do You Start ‘Doing the Work’?

If you’re having to work hard through every little thing from day 1, is that bad? Here are 4 times to start doing the work.

Lee Bidoski
7 min readJun 26, 2024
The silhouette of a man walking, dragging a wheeled suitcase behind him
Photo by Mantas Hesthaven on Unsplash

I dated a guy for a year. Somehow, it seemed like we were always putting out relationship fires. There was just always something we had to work through. (Yep, I’m cognizant of the bad word ‘always’.)

I’m not talking about ‘stop leaving the toilet set up’ kind of work.

(For the record: Leave it up, leave it down — I don’t care. Just don’t mind that I won’t leave it up for you, so I don’t mind if you don’t leave it down for me.)

I mean the kind of work…where he said that a professional photographer should take a picture of a run-down building we drove past.

I said that I knew a guy who took pictures of old buildings but couldn’t sell the pictures even though they looked really cool because no one seemed to want prints of shacks, even shacks ensconced in wildflowers and bathed in a sun-glow, hanging on their walls.

That bothered him, like he somehow took it to mean I didn’t value his view or something like that (I’m still not sure what he was upset about). So he had to deal with his feelings with that, then eventually…

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Lee Bidoski
Lee Bidoski

Written by Lee Bidoski

I’m a psychology professor trying to understand and improve our lives. Relationships | Dating | Health | Careers | Sports | Law Enforcement | Military