Why does a relationship fail?
A relationship fails for so many reasons. But much of it boils down to incompatibility and readiness. This type of incompatibility does not belong to differences in shared interests or differences in personality such as introversion/extroversion or neuroticism. While having similarities in this regard can really help two people get along or connect, the incompatibility I am referring to often shows up in two major aspects:
Relationship Incompatibility
1. Value Systems
Do you share core values together? Or at the very least, if you do not share core values, do your values complement each other? Do you make room for each other’s values in your lives if they do not align.
At this point you might be thinking I don’t even know what my values are. Values are things like meaningful work (work where you see direct impact), freedoms (freedom of movement, freedom of time and so on), family (large, small, tight knit, blended and so on), authenticity, influence, openness, responsibility and the list goes on.
To better understand your values, think about your day to day life and what you consider important in terms of your behaviour and how you priotize your time or even what you aspire to.
A relationship does not require that you share all the same values, but it does require that you can find compromise in your values together and make room for both of you. The more core values you share, the easier it becomes to align.
Your partner might really care about their online influence or even the influence they have over their social circle but you really hate being somebody that focuses on image and influence. Instead, you deeply care about privacy, honesty and respect. This can pose certain challenges and present points of conflict.
There are many cases in which these conflicts can be worked out because the relationship has a lot more to offer in terms of support and care and so compromise is found and other cases in which it becomes too much. The conflicts add over time and resentment seeps in. Whether it works out or not is really dependent on the two (or more) people in the relationship.
Ps. Our book, which is coming out soon, covers more on values and has plenty of exercises to help you understand yours better.
2. Emotional Intelligence/Experience
One of the most interesting things I ever learned is that we really do have a tendency to pick a partner that is of similar emotional intelligence to us. Or as physician and author Gabor Mate put it:
“..couples choose each other with an unerring instinct for finding the very person who will exactly match their own level of unconscious anxieties and mirror their own dysfunctions, and who will trigger for them all their unresolved emotional pain”
What does that mean exactly? My take on it is that you are drawn to people that have just enough similarities of the environment that you grew up in so that you can relive some of the emotional conflicts you experienced and hopefully this time resolve them. Is this even possible? Are we doomed to fail? It can be if you have emotional maturity or if you have the right support and guidance.
How does emotional maturity or lack thereof lead to relationship failure? The issue lies when one person comes into the relationship with a lot of self-awareness and a willingness to compromise or grow and the other is happy they lucked out.
For example, Laurence might respectfully distance himself from a really elevated situation but Elizabeth follows him around until she experiences a thorough release of her emotions and has finally made him feel the way she was feeling. This interaction can potentially leave a mark especially if there is no repair after the argument. Laurence might constantly offer space for Elizabeth to finish her thoughts however when it is his turn to say something he is met with “that’s not what happened”. Eventually enough of these incidents can really wear on the relationship. This is not to say Laurence is without fault. Even if it is the case that the two partners struggle to get through to each other or one of them has a lot more practise respectfully managing conflict than the other, what matters is primarily the willingness to develop. The reality is that these skills can be learned. Most of us did not have nearly enough opportunity to learn them or practise them in our upbringing.
Ps. This is why I coach and absolutely love it. I too had to learn these skills in my adulthood and experienced many “aha” and “ooooh” moments that I now love seeing my clients experience in session.
Many relationships may however find their end when there is no substantial effort to develop in a similar direction. Especially if there is little to no self-awareness. They can also find their end after enough of these jarring instances have built up over the years with no resolution in sight and no repair. By “enough” I mean when you can hardly ever come up with good things to say about your partner or even the beginning of your relationship because that is how far the resentment has seeped in.
Readiness
Earlier in this article I mentioned readiness as a possible reason contributing to relationship failure. You have to be ready to make room for someone in your life. You should be ready to compromise with someone and be capable of setting and respecting necessary boundaries. You may know “all the right things” to do or say or even the type of partner that might be right for you. However, “knowing” and actually living and acting out the things you know are not quite the same.
Stay tuned for the next blog post where I will go over tools for how to recover from a break up and what is realistic for breakup recovery. The best way to know when blog posts are released is to subscribe to my emails as all new blog posts will be announced!