We’ve all been there. You’re contemplating the health of your relationship and wondering whether it’s the right fit for you. You’re looking at your partner and wondering if they are “the one”. You’re thinking about ending things, but are not sure if you should. You’re seeking advise from friends, family, and the internet to try to navigate your contradictory emotions. While searching for reasons why things just don’t feel right, you come across some version of the following:
- Love is a choice, not a feeling. Just because you’re not feeling butterflies does not mean the relationship is not good.
- Relationships are hard work. They are not easy and if you leave, your next relationship will still require effort.
- You’re not supposed to be happy in a relationship all the time. It’s normal to have bouts where you feel disconnected or discontent.
- Everyone has different communication styles. It takes time to calibrate with your partner and learn not only how to talk to them, but how to listen.
All of these are true. And yet, people break up every day. According to various studies, the average person will have between 3-5 long-term relationships before settling down into marriage. So what is the deciding factor? Sometimes, it’s easy to know you’re making the right decision. If you’re being treated horribly, or being abused, or being cheated on, breaking up is nary a question. But what of those other times where things are not so clear cut?
Given that love is a choice, that relationships take consistent hard work from both partners, and that happiness in relationships fluctuate, how do you know when to call It quits? How can you tell if a relationship is worth trying to salvage or is destined for the garbage heap? How do you know when enough is enough? Here are some things to consider when making that decision.
You’re Having the Same Fights
Conflict in relationships are inevitable and are not necessarily indicative of an unhealthy relationship. In fact, fighting might be a prerequisite of a healthy relationship. Every couple, no matter how compatible, will have breakdowns in communication and hit a brick wall in conflict resolution. Not every couple will be blessed with sharing the same communication style or love language. What is pertinent is not that people fight, but how they fight and what they fight about. Are your conflicts ones of core values, or ones or preferences? Do you and your partner fight dirty? Do you stomp through the house, waiting for him to notice you’re upset and ask you why? Does he act petulant and shrug when you ask him what’s wrong, only to get pissy when you don’t figure it out? Do you go for the jugular over minor infractions? Do you like to talk through an argument right away while they prefer to cool off and figure things out later? All of these could be deal breakers, or they could be opportunities to grow in your communication. You and your partner could make a concerted effort to cease emotional warfare, to communicate clearly and bluntly, to plainly say what you want, or to admit candidly that you don’t know what you want, but still feel the way you feel.
However, what happens when you’ve done all of this and none of your recurrent problems are being resolved? What happens when your conflicts are ones of core values and you don’t know how to communicate your way to common ground? What happens when your conflicts are simply ones of preferences, but there are so many of them they move from being annoying to being truly destabilizing? What happens when you can honestly look at yourself in the mirror and say that you’ve tried, that you’ve communicated as openly as you know how, that you’ve tried different strategies, and yet nothing has remotely changed? What if you truly feel that you’ve given your partner a fair chance to address the issue at hand, but they continue to disregard your concerns? In that case, it could be possible that the fights over the same issues, over and over again, could be a compatibility issue rather than a communication issue. If your arguments are going nowhere except in circles, then break the cycle. You can’t communicate someone into a different person.
When you think about breaking up, it is about everything except your partner
Practically speaking, choosing to end a relationship isn’t actually that hard. It is as simple as telling your partner you no longer want to be with them and then leaving. But emotionally, it is obviously not that easy. The decision is weighed down with all kind of baggage, inner turmoil and self doubt. Contemplating a breakup can implicate our own character. After all, we’re a “nice person”, and nice people wouldn’t just abandon someone, would they? On paper, your partner is great. What kind of person are you to leave a perfectly decent person for no good reason? Sure you’re not “clicking” but what does that even mean? Sure you have compatibility issues, but these issues are not terrible. If they’re not terrible, how can you justify your gut feeling that you still cannot live with them? These musings betray that this process is more about you, how well you can justify the breakup to yourself and others and how the breakup would reflect on you. Your partner is barely a factor.
Or perhaps you think of breaking up and feel a sweet piercing agony over the thought of losing your partner. But these thoughts are heavily interlaced with thoughts of how much it will suck to go back into the dating pool, how soul-sucking online dating is, how you won’t be able to find someone else who will love you, how you will have to start all over again and expend enormous energy to get a new relationship up and running. These musings betray that it might be fear and insecurity that make you hesitate on pulling the trigger, not a genuine belief that your relationship can be salvaged.
Or maybe your thinking about how on Earth you’re going to get out of your lease, or find a place to stay, or decide who gets the cats, or how to split shared assets. These musings betray that complacent apathy and logistical malaise might be binding you more than the ties with your partner.
You Just Know
Think back to your last break up. Do you feel embarrassed that you didn’t catch the red flags until it was too late? Do you ask yourself “what did I ever see in him?” At the time, did you swear that you would avoid the pitfalls which proved deadly on your next go-around? Did you wonder how you would stop yourself from being fooled the next time?
But that’s just the thing — you probably weren’t fooled. Humans tend to idealize the things they want. When people are in love, it makes their partner more attractive, intelligent and desirable than they actually are. You fall in love with the God or Goddess inherent in your chosen mate, then have trouble reconciling the human. Red flags are seen and noticed, but are minimized because we want so badly to make the relationship work. We recognize behaviours that are intolerable in the long run, but convince ourselves we can tolerate them. Or worse, change them. We think this will change, we think that will get better. Looking back, we remember moments where, deep down, there was a feeling something was wrong. We remember noticing that something in our partner’s actions, or words, or body language, wasn’t sitting right but averted both our eyes and our hearts. We remember moments where the words “I love you” felt awkward on our tongue. So on and so on. We weren’t fooled. Not really. We fooled ourselves because we wanted to believe in the better version of the situation.
Are these feelings always right? No. And no long-term relationship can move forward if these feelings are serviced without thoughtful and careful analysis. However, if you are having these feelings more often than you’re not; if you can’t find a rational reason for your discontent, but you keep searching anyways, almost hoping to find something to validate your murky emotions; if you feel a sense of relief when you find a red flag that lines up with your relationship and a sense of disappointment when it doesn’t… then it may be time to think more seriously about whether you and this relationship are the right fit.
A lot of the times you can have the most rational reasons for why you should stay. You can make your list of pros and cons. You can seek the advice of friends and family. You can Google until your fingers are fatigued and come up with no “reasonable” reason for why you should not stay together. Except for the simple fact…that you don’t want to. And there’s only so many times you can ignore your intuition before it considers you a lost cause and stops raising objections.
-Ren
