Those who work in law enforcement often experience difficulties that can impact or spill over into their intimate relationships. Relationship wellness is essential to the safety of officers; in fact, officers who have happy and stable homelives are less likely to experience distraction on the job. Just like work life can spill into homelife, problems at home also spill over to the job.¹ When officers understand the causes of and how these spillovers occur, they can correct the difficulties in the moment, instead of years later, after damage, resentment, and contempt has built up in their relationships. While many officers realize that shift work, sleep schedules, and lack of time often contribute to their struggles in their relationships, preventative measures can be put in place to prevent further difficulties. By understanding the components of a happy and functional relationship and the impact of police work on one’s personal life, officers can significantly reduce negative impacts and improve their relational health.

Relationship Components

Renowned relationship experts Drs. John and Julie Gottman have used  combined their research on relationships and clinical expertise to provide a framework for couples to examine their relationships. In the Sound Relationship House Theory, Drs. Gottman describe the nine components of healthy relationships.

Trust: In law enforcement lingo, it’s essential to believe that one’s partner has your “six.” This is built on the belief that each partner acts and thinks to maximize the benefit to each other and not in self-interest.

Commitment: Commitment to one’s partner means loving their attributes and growing an appreciation for those things that might otherwise be an irritation. This is also acting and believing that both partners are in the relationship for the long haul.

Build Love Maps: The foundation of any relationship is friendship, along with knowing and understanding each other’s worlds. If a map (or GPS) is not updated regularly, the user will not have the best understanding of how to get somewhere. If a Love Map is not updated, partners will not be able to truly know each other.

Shared Fondness & Admiration: This requires thinking fondly of and admiring one’s partner and believing they think and feel the same about you. In short, it is a culture of appreciation for each other in a relationship.

Turn Toward: Partners “turn toward” each other daily in small ways such as sharing a joke, starting a conversation, or responding to emotional needs and support. Think of this as a sliding door into a partner’s world. Turning toward can often be difficult and uncomfortable.

The Positive Perspective: The positive perspective is the ability to offer a positive or generous explanation for events. This perspective can cushion or soften difficult conversations and prevent conflicts from spiraling out of control.

Manage Conflict: Managing conflicts focuses on being able to solve problems or move gridlocked issues to a solvable problem. It involves knowing how to start a difficult conversation, accepting influence, repairing, de-escalating, and the ability to compromise.

Make Life Dreams Come True: Helping one’s partner realize his or her dreams and aspirations is a big part of relationships. This may include play, fun, adventure, and purpose.

Create Shared Meaning: This involves creating shared meaning (e.g., family, legacy, culture, beliefs) that may drive how a couple uses their resources.

The principles espoused in the Sound Relationship House theory are impacted in every type of relationship. However, as a result of the culture and job, law enforcement officers face a set of unique challenges. A couple must develop awareness to counterbalance the impact the career can have on the relationship and prevent spillover from work life to personal life, as well as vice versa.

Impacts of Law Enforcement on Relationships

The OODA Loop (see sidebar) protects an officer on the job and is almost impossible to turn off simply when with his or her spouse. When officers go out with their spouses, their eyes may wander as they observe people or orient to the space around them. This ingrained behavior can be misinterpreted as disinterest in the spouse or the conversation, annoyance with the activity or location, or more interest in scanning the room for more sexually desirable individuals.  These interpretations of the vigilant behavior and the resulting negative feelings could impact various elements of a relationship “house,” including trust, commitment, and managing conflict.

Coming down from the hypervigilance cycle is another common occurrence in law enforcement relationships that results in negative interpretations by others. An officer is on high alert all day and decompresses afterward at home. When officers have down time after a shift, the biological processes result in officers appearing numb and not fully engaged with their surroundings. They might respond with minimal communication such as “yeah” or “uh-huh” but, in actuality, not be engaged in a conversation.³ Other possible behaviors include “checking out” by watching TV, scrolling on a phone, or playing video games. The result can be a spouse who feels disregarded, disrespected, and alone. Attempts to engage the officer by the spouse, referred to Bids for Connection by Dr. John Gottman,  are ignored, disregarded, or sometimes flat-out rejected due to the officer’s place in the cycle, which causes additional hurt, disconnection, and loneliness for the spouse.⁴ This can negatively impact the elements of trust, positive perspective, turning toward, and managing conflict.

Officers are continually exposed to situations involving danger, deceitful individuals, criminals, crisis, and trauma. This exposure is likely to result in cynicism and changes in belief systems, such as that the beliefs that “all people lie,” “people only look out for themselves,” or “the world is a dangerous place.”⁵ These beliefs can impact conversation and interaction within a couple. Conversation that was once open can become minimal due to the officer expressing cynical or negative beliefs. For example, a spouse who brings up a work situation to his or her officer might feel disregarded when the officer answers, “you can’t trust anyone,” instead of expressing understanding for what the spouse is experiencing. In extreme situations, officers might struggle with extending trust to their spouses and children or might try to protect those they love from the outside world. The beliefs can start to impact behavior, resulting in verbal outbursts, various forms of control, or anxiety. Spouses may choose several responses to these beliefs and behaviors including harshly confronting the officer, sitting in silent contempt, or even “walking on eggshells” in an effort to prevent the negative behavior or avoid discomfort. This pattern can establish problems in multiple areas including fondness and admiration, love maps, turning toward, and trust.

In all these situations, the officer in the relationship lacks a positive perspective, which results in a domino effect. Many times, these situations start with a decrease in emotional trust, meaning the officer struggles with trusting that the spouse is there to support him or her in a positive way. This struggle could impact the spouse’s choice to share information—thus affecting love maps, which can spiral into decreases in fondness and administration, turning toward, and positive perspectives, while increasing conflict. These then can lead to struggles in commitment to the relationship.

Taking Off the Invisible Armor

Intimacy is important to every couple—not just physical or sexual intimacy but emotional intimacy. It is common for couples to struggle with intimacy at some point in their relationship. A common pattern is one partner will want to be sexually intimate while the other partner resists. Both are needing and wanting connection but are needing it in different ways. In order to create the deep intimacy that couples want and desire, vulnerability is needed. Dr. Brené Brown, known for her research in vulnerability and shame, , points out the need for vulnerability to create connection She defines vulnerability as “emotional risk and exposure.”⁶ Vulnerability does not correlate to being successful in law enforcement,  yet it is vital for deep and meaningful relationships. This deep connection that couples frequently desire requires individuals to emotionally expose themselves, be open, and potentially be seen in a way that they do not want to be seen by their partner. It is often feared that being vulnerable will cause one to be seen as weak, not enough, or less than, all perceptions that officers resist in their career.

Officers wear armor every day to protect themselves physically; however, they also develop invisible emotional armor due to the occupational culture and the nature of the job. Continuous exposure to trauma, whether vicarious or shared, may lead to a hardening or numbing of feelings and emotion. On many occasions, an officer must put emotion aside and continue forward. Officers who display emotion are potentially seen as soft and not dependable in times of a crisis, which can lead to additional traumatic stress. Thus, the stigma of emotions and conditioning of the culture may impact their ability to emotionally connect with others, including their partners or spouses. This altered connection may also impact officers’ ability and willingness to lean on or turn toward their partners or spouses.

This blocking of negative emotions limits the capacity for positive emotions to occur.⁷ While there is more of a spotlight on the emotional impacts and culture of policing, these aspects are often viewed as systemic and ingrained in the officer. It often becomes a part of the officer’s identity, which leads to the spillover in their relationships. As officers becomes more enmeshed with the law enforcement culture, it becomes easier to stay in the role of “the rescuer,” and they begin to establish a pattern where they support others but don’t accept or seek the same type of support for themselves. This common occurrence can lead to isolation, loneliness, and resentment and can set up the potential for affairs or even deep depression due to limited emotional support.

Not only is this culture and behavior ingrained in the officer, this may also become true for the spouse. Spouses take pride in their “knight” and sometimes overidentify with their spouse’s role as a police officer, which can perpetuate the culture and stigma of dismissing emotion. It can be difficult for spouses when their “heroes” experience upset and express pain or sadness. For the spouse, this may lead to feelings of unsafety, resulting in the spouse trying to diffuse the emotional situation and push the officer back to a position of perceived strength (i.e., less emotional). While well-intended, this behavior often encourages the officer to push away the emotion and establishes that their home may not be a safe place to express difficult emotions.

Much like law enforcement officers, spouses also take pride in being emotionally tough in order to cope with the effects of shift work, disconnection, and loneliness. This might be done by burying the negative feelings and bearing the responsibilities of kids, home, personal, and familial relationships, along with handling the spouse’s own career and identity. All of these situations have the possibility to create a difficult relationship culture in which neither of the spouses can remove their emotional body armor.

If officers share the struggles they are experiencing, they might fear how they will be seen by their spouses. Spouses, in turn, fear that sharing their feelings of loneliness and being overwhelmed might be viewed as complaining and not supportive of the officer’s career. In short, in a culture that values stoicism and emotional strength, it does not come naturally to be vulnerable and share or listen to difficult emotions. This sets up struggle with intimacy.

Both Drs. Gottman and Dr. Brown speak about the need to express empathy for connection in relationships as it makes someone feel deeply understood.⁸ True empathy requires people to feel with their partners. To do so requires  individuals to be willing to connect with similar feelings within themselves and to express those feelings. This can be perceived as a dangerous place for officers whose survival can depend on the ability to tuck the emotional component of their job away. Tapping into their own emotions has the potential to release a floodgate of repressed feelings that officers may not know how to regulate, cope with, or even experience. Thus, when officers are confronted with difficult or unpleasant emotions in their relationships with their spouses or children, they may choose to brush over the emotional content and try to fix the problem or ignore it. They might dismiss the other’s emotion as being ridiculous, explain that the emotion doesn’t make sense, or simply ignore it. Any of these responses can not only cause the partner to feel misunderstood and lonely but also leads to a missed opportunity to create intimacy, which may exacerbate the problem. A well-intended solution can lead to a partner feeling criticized and eventually lead to increased disconnection.

Emotional armor, left unchecked, can impact almost all aspects of  a relationship.⁹ If feelings are rejected or dismissed, emotional trust and love maps erode and fondness, turning toward, and positive perspective decreases, which will negatively impact the ability of the couple to manage conflict.

Solutions for Strengthening Relational Wellness

The combined impacts of emotional armor, hardening of emotions, hypervigilance, and the conditioning of the job can cause law enforcement couples to have additional hurdles in their relationships. Acknowledging and addressing these difficulties can offer opportunities to conquer the impact of a career in policing. Here are some strategies to implement in your relationship to assist in increasing the intimacy.

Create a Safe Space: Developing Love Maps

Couples need to make their time together a safe place for both partners to be emotionally vulnerable and open. Be willing to be uncomfortable and share struggles and support your partner in his or her struggles. Try asking open-ended questions to find out more. Ask about the best part of the day, difficulties during the day, or what negatively or positively impacted the day. Be willing to share and be honest. Dig in and reflect about experiences throughout the day, what was meaningful, and feelings, positive and negative. Talk about the difficult stuff. Spend time getting a complete picture of each other’s world at home and at work. Who does your partner spend time with? Converse with? Since law enforcement couples often spend days apart, it is essential that they can understand each other’s worlds. Notice, validate, and acknowledge your partner’s content and emotions without judgement. If you are not sure what your partner is feeling, it’s okay to guess. Be sure to stay out of fixing and offering advice; instead, ask if you can offer support. Make a habit of scheduling time for these types of conversation and connecting with your partner.

Conquer Negative Stories: Develop the Positive Perspective

If a couple struggles with trust or negative assumptions, they can work on impacting the positive perspective. Start by extending a generous explanation and belief to a spouse’s behavior or words.¹⁰ Work to construct beliefs around the strongest negative messages. For example, a negative belief of “people are liars and always have an angle” can negatively impact interactions and communications with your spouse. Extending a generous explanation based upon the facts you know about your spouse might allow the belief to be changed to “My spouse knows that honesty is important to me and works to honor that in all our communication.” If this is a struggle and the negative story or belief is difficult to overcome, it is helpful to pause, not react, and get curious. This is easily expressed by saying, “Can you tell me more about that?” Getting curious can help to fill in gaps of information or understand the spouse’s point of view more accurately so the negative story can shift. Another way to conquer negative stories within the relationship is having an awareness of tone. A sharp or sarcastic tone can easily be interpreted negatively and lead to unintended altercations. When receiving a communication in this type of tone, a partner might extend a positive perspective and belief that the tone shows that his or her partner is hurt, stressed, or overwhelmed. Partners can work to prevent the possible negative communication from the beginning by softening their start to a conversation. In The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, relationship researchers John Gottman and Nan Silver state that the best way to soften the start to a conversation is to share responsibility, state a feeling, share the specific situation the feeling is about, and end positively with what is needed for the situation.¹¹ This type of communication does not have to be perfect in order to give partners a more positive perspective on a situation or story. Having a positive perspective needs to be a practice in a relationship, not just used in the moment. Using it daily in small ways will help in the big, difficult moments.

A Low Boil Creates a Fire: Increasing Fondness and Admiration Through Appreciation

As noted throughout, a career in law enforcement can have a significant impact on a relationship. Emotional intimacy needs to be fostered through small moments of connection, which will lead to physical intimacy. Think of this as putting a pot of water on low and letting it eventually come to a simmer. While it is always important to demonstrate love through small behavioral expressions, verbally expressing fondness and appreciation to your partner is an important way to warm the water. Knowing your partner is key; as expressing admiration or appreciation of their physical appearance over and over might not be what he or she wants and needs. Find out what is meaningful specifically to your partner. Words such as, “thank you for,” “I appreciate,” and “I cherish” are ways of expressing fondness and appreciation. Be as specific as possible in your verbal expression. Saying “thanks for dinner” is nice, but the comments could become more impactful by saying, “I appreciate you taking the time to prepare and make dinner. It makes me feel cared for.” Look for opportunities to express appreciation in your daily life. Another way to enhance fondness and admiration is to think fondly of your partner. Think kind and loving thoughts about your partner and develop an appreciation for those behaviors that drive you crazy. Recall reasons you fell in love with your partner, what you admire about him or her, which might include his or her physical form. Finally, behavior sometimes speaks volumes over words. Consider the behaviors that your spouse will consider an act of love or service. If you consider your spouse in your actions and words, you will strongly impact the emotional and physical intimacy in your relationship.

All couples must invest emotional energy and time in a relationship in order to ensure success. Challenges with shift work, the hypervigilance cycle, cynicism, and many other aspects of a policing career can present additional difficulties for law enforcement couples. Partners have their own unique experiences and perspectives, but many times they have the same emotional consequences of loneliness and disconnection. By considering the principles discussed herein, couples can assess their relationship, conceptualize how it is impacted, and adjust behaviors and beliefs that so as to negate or diminish the negative impact of a career in law enforcement. Couples must have awareness of and work together to reduce the impact and stress policing can have on the relationship. Staying focused on understanding each other’s world through love maps, turning toward each other, ensuring they have each other’s “six,” and extending a positive perspective in difficult times will result in law enforcement marriages not being casualties of the career. d

Notes:

^1‑ Brooke Mcquerrey Tuttle et al., “Stress Spillover in Policing and Negative Relationship Functioning for Law Enforcement Marriages,” The Family Journal 26 no. 2 (April 2018): 246–252.

² John Mordechai Gottman, Principia Amoris: The New Science of Love (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015).

³ Kevin M. Gilmartin, Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement: A Guide for Officers and Their Families (Tucson, AZ: E-S Press, 2002).

⁴ John Mordechai Gottman and Nan Silver, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (London, UK: Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2018).

⁵ Gilmartin, Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement.

⁶ Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t): Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough” (New York, NY: Gotham Books, 2008).

⁷ Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (London, UK: Penguin Books Ltd., 2015).

⁸ Gottman, Principia Amoris; Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t).

⁹ Gottman, Principia Amoris.

¹⁰ Brené Brown^, Rising Strong (New York, NY: Random House, 2017).

¹¹ Gottman and Silver, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.

Please cite as

Cyndi Doyle, “Thriving Intimacy in Law Enforcement Relationships: Obstacles and Resiliency,” Police Chief Online, May 22, 2019.