There are three clear cut ways to measure if your relationship is thriving or headed for trouble. Independently or simultaneously, they pose significant threats to a relationship?s survival. The sooner intimate partners recognize them and change their patterns, the more likely they can get their relationship back on track and recreate the love they once knew. ?
Threat Number One ? When bad interactions begin to outnumber good ones
Most intimate love relationships begin with many more positive, intriguing, and loving interactions than painful ones. In time, though, every relationship will face unexpected hurdles that create negative interactions. If the partners do not resolve the resulting emotional damage at the time, they will silently suffer from those buried, unresolved issues and begin the process of withdrawing energy and hope from the relationship. ?
When your relationship began, you most likely remember how treasured you felt by your partner, praised for your assets and readily forgiven for your faults. Some ?not-so-compatible? areas may have existed, but consciously or unconsciously, you chose to give them less attention. ?
Over time, those non-attended-to negative interactions may have changed the percentages of good connections to bad ones. Now you are having more difficulty both erasing them and also holding on to the positives you once took for granted. The good parts of your relationship may still be there, but the damage is taking its toll and you can feel each other?s lowered frustration tolerance and increased quickness to anger. Emotional scars are building and your relationship?s ability to create new options is diminishing.
If you cannot transform your negative patterns and grow beyond your current limitations, your lack of action will keep feeding energy into the bad interactions and starve out the good ones. Your relationship will begin to show signs of decay: loss of hope, more conflict, and decreased intimacy. Stuck in old patterns and destructive rituals, you may no longer be able to access the resilience you once had.
Solution
The imbalance of bad interactions to good can be reversed if both partners do the following:
- Recognize the direction the relationship is going without blaming each other for what has happened. This is a crucial time to not judge, but simply to share your observations with each other without becoming defensive.
- Identify and stop whatever interactions that may be causing either of you to feel scarred. You must stop your destructive behaviors destruction before you can move forward.
- Begin focusing on behaviors that still feel positive between you, and share those observations. Agree to continue to remind each other of feel-good interactions every day until your love feels stronger again.
- Look for new ways to go beyond your current relationship?s limitations by creating better communication skills, more joyful times together, re-prioritizing your obligations and commitments, and cutting down on any stressors that have weighed your both down.
Threat Number Two ? Letting attachments suppress authenticity
Every partner in an intimate relationship has attachments to his or her significant other. An attachment is anything that you may be afraid to lose or something you want from your partner. As the relationship matured, you may both have increased or added attachments to certain behaviors, and found others to be less important. ?
As you deepened your commitment to each other, your attachments likely increased as well. To keep them secure, you had to sacrifice some of your own needs at times in order to give your partner what he or she wanted from you. You may have felt a little martyred some of the time, or even gave up some of your own self-respect, but in the moment, it seemed the right thing to do. You felt that your partner not only recognized your willing sacrifice, but would readily have done the same for you.
Somehow, over time, you began to feel that you were giving more than you were getting back. Your sacrifices now appear to be more expected and your paybacks are not adequately compensating you for your efforts. Your partner not only doesn?t give you more of what you want, he or she doesn?t even recognize that you?ve been silently bargaining.
If you allow this imbalance to continue, you will eventually feel like you?re being taken for granted and lose trust in your partner?s willingness to reciprocate. Shutting down your own needs to keep your attachments from being threatened, you are now self-blackmailing just to keep things in place. Worse, you may be blaming your partner for breaking a contract that he or she never signed.
Status quo attachments are hard to give up. You started out readily sacrificing and expecting reciprocity, as your partner may have as well. Over time, you may have also have created many other legitimate tethers: children, possessions, families, friends, business partnerships, spiritual communities, values, and commitments. You would understandably want to hold on to those attachments, not knowing how to resolve with the imbalance that is now expected.
Solution
- Make a list of the behaviors or things you are attached to in your relationship. Put a number from one to ten after each to let your partner know how important they are to you. Asking yourself what you would be afraid to lose can help guide you in creating your list.
- Tell your partner which of the things on the list he or she already provides for you, and which you feel you are not getting.
- Let your partner know those things or behaviors you have been willingly sacrificing, and those you martyred yourself in giving.
- Ask your partner if there is anything you can do to get your needs met.
- Ask your partner which things you are presently sacrificing that may no longer be important to him or her.
Threat Number Three ? Trust-breaking incidents
Most new couples do not address their non-negotiable bottom lines up front. They either trust that their lovers have the same values and ethics, or believe that they would never hurt them by doing something they have agreed would be unacceptable.
You probably began the same way. Then, as your relationship matured, you discovered new things about each other that altered your initial perceptions. Some of those revelations were delightful surprises that deepened your trust and love. Others may have caused concern, like past behaviors that your current relationship could not survive. You?ve probably talked to each other about what each of you holds sacred, and trusted that your commitment would keep any potential trust-breaking at bay.
As you grew to know what your partner could or could not tolerate, you may have begun withholding some potentially relationship-destroying thoughts, telling yourself that you would never act upon them. Perhaps you feared a loss of your intimacy or painful criticism if you did share what you were thinking. Whatever the apprehension, you chose to keep them in an internal, emotionally secret compartment to keep the love between you intact. ?
If you were aware of the slippery slope you were creating by rationalizing the situation, you may have decided to risk sharing your internal desires with your partner to restore your relationship?s authenticity. Hopefully, your partner was grateful that you were honest and was willing to work with you. If, instead, he or she communicated anger, resentment, or fear, you may have regretted your decision to be honest, offered superficial reassurance to ameliorate the situation, and gone underground again. That choice will have left you vulnerable to act out your hidden desires at some future time.
Couples who cannot share their secret thoughts or behaviors risk the loss of their intimacy. Their bond weakens, and they are more likely to act without considering the outcome. For instance, one partner may have started a non-flirtatious relationship with a co-worker, then found it slowly becoming more intimate over time. Were the other partner to know, he or she would feel exposed, threatened, or embarrassed. The initially innocent partner now cannot share how far it has gone without fearing incrimination or loss.
If you have been the unfortunate one who discovers your partner?s secret, threatening behavior, your trust may be irrevocably shattered. You must now decide whether you to stay in the relationship, and, if so, what it would take to rebuild. A significant break in trust is agonizingly difficult to repair, and you both must decide if you have what it takes to stay together.
Solution
Source: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rediscovering-love/201212/how-intimate-relationships-fail-0
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