Why relationships fail
I am a relationship coach, and I am obsessed with helping couples understand themselves and each other better so that they can have better relationships, avoid separation and divorce, avoid putting more children into a place of having to live without one parent and the list goes on. Do I work with individuals, yes, because if I can help them with what I do, they can impact the relationship!
Am I successful with every couple I work with. No. Shock horror! So how would someone know if working with me is going to be worthwhile and actually save / improve their relationship. Well, let’s consider why relationships fail, and then you’ll know the answer to that question.
I believe, if we look at the majority of failed relationships, it comes down to the following reasons:
· Ignorance
· Laziness/complacency
· Wrong choice of partner (actually a rare one!)
· Major life events
· Trauma / ill mental health / serious addiction
Let’s go from the bottom up. If you or your partner has experienced some major trauma, perhaps have some PTSD, or are struggling with serious mental health challenges, or have developed a very serious addiction, it will undoubtedly affect your relationship and may cause it to fall apart. I would suggest individual therapy as soon as possible to get support and help in that issue before it is too late.
We all have a set of values, a set of core beliefs, and these are generally developed early in life, often as a result of key decisions we make when something happens in our life. These values and beliefs shape how we see the world and how we react to anything happening in our world. They affect so much of what we do.. and we likely find a partner with similar values and beliefs. All good so far, but the most likely time we have a shift in values and beliefs as an adult is because a major life event happens and we make a new decision. If this happens, it can radically change our outlook on life, and that can play into everything including our relationships. So if this has happened, we may need to work individually with you to help you understand what has changed, what is now important to you and look at whether there is still some common ground with the person you are in relationship with, or whether the gap is now just too great to bridge and an amicable parting would be best.
Wrong choice of partner – I hesitated to put this in because it really shouldn’t happen but of course it does for a number of reasons. The most common wrong choice is probably because we (some of us!) allow a relationship to play out in the normal way, we are attracted to someone, we jump into a passionate sexual relationship, it’s fireworks all the way and we figure this is the perfect person for us, so we make a commitment, or we decide to have a child, and then then we wake up! We realise that no relationship can be held together just by the passion and sex, but when that becomes ‘the norm’ we don’t really get on, don’t have much in common and in fact, we are not sure we like them! Ooops. Now what….
Another common scenario might be the rebound, or the affair, where we are either coming into a relationship hurt off the back of another, or as an affair. Either way, we are not in the right place and have not got our full antennae working properly, so the wrong people might just sneak in and secure the spot, only for us to eventually realise they were not who we thought they were. I cover this in more detail in other talks.
The final reason this might happen is that we are simply looking for someone to ‘complete us’ (thanks Jerry Maguire for introducing that load of rubbish to us all!). We don’t feel we can be happy without finding the one. Hmm.. newsflash, if you are not happy on your own NO ONE is going to change that!
So that takes us up to laziness / complacency. Common this one, but of course you don’t want to raise your hand and say ‘yep that’s me’ to this… but honesty goes a long way in growth 😊
Why do I say this is common, because as one of my teachers and mentors (Tony Robbins) would say, if you keep doing the things you did at the start of a relationship there wouldn’t be an end.
Dwell on that one. It’s truth. Consider a typical pattern though… girl meets boy, girl and boy both on best behaviour, and putting loads of thought and effort into impressing each other, for long enough to both commit to being together, and then both breathe and think ‘oh good I can go back to being myself now’! I wonder why that’s not going to work! If the version of you that is you is not the version of you that showed up in the early (dating!) days, then you have deceived your partner. ‘Yeah but I should be able to be myself’ I hear you cry. Yes you should, but why weren’t you yourself when you first started dating? ‘Because I had to put in the effort to win them over’ you reply. See how long that works for you.. .and when it goes wrong, and you repeat the same pattern again, we’ll have the same talk then! Be yourself, be authentic, but understand this, relationships take WORK and you have to be committed to showing up and working at them beyond the initial ‘honeymoon’ phase if you want it to last.
Your choice..
Finally, ignorance. And ignorance is simply because, when we consider a man and woman in a relationship, men are not hairy versions of women, and women are not beautiful emotional versions of men. So we are quite frankly clueless as to how to approach this different species which causes us such interest and stirs such feelings in us. Our natural default is to treat them as we would want to be treated, and then wonder why that might not be working too well! We need to understand our differences, understand what each other actually wants from this relationship and how we can give it to them, and then GIVE IT TO THEM! And if we did that, and learnt how to communicate better with each other, it might just help! How? Well you might be able to figure that one out for yourself, of, if you are like many couples I work with, you might need a little coaching.. .welcome to my office!
If you’d like to know more about that, and how it can work, why not book a free initial consultation with me, we can meet, chat, have some fun and figure out if I can help you or not. I am not a salesman, I am simply someone passionate about helping couples eliminate some of these reasons so that another relationship breakdown doesn’t happen..
To book that call, click here:
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