From the outside, it seems impossible to predict whether a couple will break up or stay together…unless we fathom the …
it can seem very confusing why certain long-term relationships survive and some don’t it can from afar look as if it’s the most cruel and alarming sort of lottery trying to explain love to a child or a visitor from another planet promises to be a perplexing matter indeed all couples on their wedding day are united in wanting to make things work then for reasons beyond anyone’s comprehension some of them simply seem to dissolve and others don’t to remove some of the terrifying element of apparent chance and encourage us to work on the right aspects of our own couples it may be helpful to become deliberately reductive about the real reasons why breakups occur we need in this regard first to discount certain causes that gain far too much air time relative to their actual likelihoods of course sometimes people break up because one party wants a younger partner or because they want better sex or because they are seeking a more exciting companion or because their hobbies or political views have drifted apart or because things have somehow grown stale but let’s quickly try to reduce the role we give to such explanatory factors given the costs of breakups given the massive investments that people make in being together given the chaos generated if there are children one can assert with a high degree of confidence that almost no one ever splits up for such familiar reasons the real reason lies elsewhere the real reason for breakup lies in one or both spouses sense that they have not been heard that something very important to them has been disregarded that their point of view has not at a fundamental level been acknowledged and honored it doesn’t matter what the subject of this non-hearing happens to be it could be that they haven’t been heard about their views on money or on the way the children are being brought up or on how their weekends should be managed or on how intimacy occurs or doesn’t occur it’s feeling unheard for our differences that is unbearable it’s never the presence of differences per se we don’t break up because a partner doesn’t agree with us we could stand not getting what we want we could stand a partner who votes another way than we do or who is no longer as young as they once were or who has annoying friends or different tastes in holidays what we can’t stand is someone who blocks us when we try to articulate how troublesome we find these areas of divergence when our unique way of looking at existence seems a matter of basic indifference that is too lonely and enraging to bear it’s better to be single than unseen after all the unseen are alone anyway whatever their ostensible relationship status there is a big difference between a partner not doing what we want and a partner not hearing what we want it’s entirely possible that one would remain with someone who doesn’t share most of our interests so long as they happen to accept and signal an understanding of how much these interests matter to us it would be possible for us to live with someone who doesn’t want the same sort of sex as we do or wants no sex at all so long as they can at points see matters from our position and can give a modicum of empathy to our hopes and longings we could be with someone whose needs for affection run in a different direction so long as they have the courage to listen to how ours operate we don’t need partners to agree with us on everything we need them to give off signs that they can accept the scale and legitimacy of our vision i understand is the phrase that could single-handedly rescue more long-term relationships than any number of anniversary celebrations or therapy sessions it deserves to be known as the most romantic phrase in existence there is a lot of hope in this thesis if we want to stay together we don’t need to be exceptionally beautiful or rich we don’t need to rely on chance we don’t need to have brilliant sex or friction-free alignments of interests we just need to make sure that we are people who listen who when the partner has something very important they need to get across to us can bear to take things on board can bear to acknowledge an opposite position can bear to say i can see this matters a lot to you and i will try my hardest to think about it and see what i can do about it from here it really doesn’t matter if things radically change or not the vital work will have been done and the relationship will have been assured people described as defensive may have a thousand charms but we should know that the most flawed open person is preferable to the most seemingly accomplished defensive one the person we should settle down with isn’t the most attractive or the cleverest it’s the one who feels no pride or compunction in readily saying i can hear what you are saying and how much this matters a lot to you i get it or because i love you this makes me curious tell me more this person will surely one day annoy or frustrate us mightily everyone does will just be highly unlikely ever to 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