5 Steps to Build Stronger Relationships
“It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us” (St. Teresa of Kolkata).
I’ll probably always remember the moment in the homily at my wedding Mass when our priest gestured behind him at the crucifix, telling us it was the model of love. I try to keep that image in mind as much as possible now as a wife and mother.
It’s not just married couples who are called to love each other like Jesus loves us, though. We’re called to love everyone that way—and we’re called to have relationships with people other than our spouse. Regina Boyd, a Catholic licensed mental health counselor and marriage and family therapist, reminds us of this truth in her book Leaving Loneliness Behind: 5 Keys to Experiencing God’s Love and Building Healthy Connections with Others, out now from Ave Maria Press.
Communion: The Cure for an Epidemic of Loneliness
I first heard the phrase “epidemic of loneliness” in 2018, when I cited, in an episode of the podcast I used to host, research by Cigna finding that loneliness among Americans has reached “epidemic levels.” Almost half of the 20,000 adults surveyed in Cigna’s research reported “sometimes” or “always” feeling alone.
You’ll note that this survey was taken before the COVID-19 pandemic created lockdowns and sent children and office workers to learn and work from home (and eliminated the jobs of many other adults). Since then, even as the pandemic has ended, loneliness has surged, impacting personal and professional relationships alike.
Boyd’s book is based on her experience working with individuals (and couples) and grounded in her Catholic faith. “God gives all of us certain charisms or missions in life,” she writes in the introduction. “One of mine is to end loneliness. One of my goals in life is to help people establish meaningful relationships by learning how to build and develop emotional intimacy.”
She adds that this intimacy is what occurs “when we live in communion with God and neighbor, entering into the mystery of trinitarian life where we surrender everything and so participate in God’s infinite love.”
5 Components of Emotional Intimacy
Boyd’s book explores five elements of emotional intimacy:
Connection
Trust and vulnerability
Communicating during conflict
Healing
Self-gift
As Boyd says, “these five components don’t exist in isolation. They overlap with and condition one another. The closeness that you need to feel, a sense of connection, really isn’t possible without communication, and sometimes healing is necessary before we know how to make a gift of ourselves to others.”
Fortunately, while each chapter is dedicated to one component, Boyd moves seamlessly from one to the next, so you never get the sense that they work in isolation. She also incorporates anecdotes from her own life and the lives of people she’s worked with, providing illustrations (often very moving ones) of the principles she discusses.
You can also purchase a workbook to accompany your reading. The workbook includes exercises and questions for each chapter to help the reader explore the ideas in depth and apply them to his or her own life. For readers who prefer longform journaling, the book includes an appendix of journaling (or discussion) questions to help process the principles in the book.
Love Thy Co-Worker
The help Boyd provides in Leaving Loneliness Behind can support any type of relationship. As we’re a site for businesswomen, however, I want to end this review with a note about co-working relationships.
Recently, many executives have tried to enforce their return-to-work policies with expressions of concern about employee loneliness, implying that their best or only relationships are with co-workers. I hope that we all have relationships outside of work, particularly with family members and close friends. It’s concerning to me that we might have created so much of a “hustle culture” that we don’t have those close personal ties.
That said, whether you work part time or full time, your professional relationships are important, too. And if you work full time, your co-workers may be the people you spend the most time with. So, it’s important that these relationships be strong ones. I also encourage friendships in the workplace and have had such relationships extend after I’ve left an employer. I certainly am friends with my business partner at Catholic Women in Business and enjoy the personal connections our team makes with each other asynchronously and at the start of each team meeting.
The principles in Leaving Loneliness Behind can apply to work relationships, particularly close ones. And Boyd points out that “all of our gifts, including our very selves, are meant for other people.” Perhaps especially in secular workplaces, we can use our relationships to convey Christ’s love to others, especially people who haven’t experienced it with anyone else.
“We may be tempted to limit the amount of love required in the Christian life by drawing a circle around people who are easy to love and excluding the ones who aren’t,” Boyd writes. Family and work relationships may be the best opportunities for us to love the people who are hardest to love, because those relationships are often the ones we can’t choose. You can’t pick another parent or sibling, and you often can’t pick another manager, colleague, or team member.
Boyd challenges us to “allow Jesus’s teachings to further expand our capacity for love,” and she gives us a roadmap for how to do so. “Who are those people in our lives [and our work!] for whom we haven’t romanticized the idea of love and self-gift?” she asks. “They are the people who need us most.”
Taryn DeLong is a Catholic wife and mother in North Carolina who serves as co-president and editor-in-chief of Catholic Women in Business. Her first book, written with her co-president Elise Crawford Gallagher, will be out in fall 2024 from Ave Maria Press. Connect with Taryn: Instagram • Facebook • LinkedIn • Blog • Substack