Bryan Reeves recently stumbled upon one of the most important aspects of building a sound and stable relationship. It happened during the most beautiful breakup.
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I recently experienced the most beautiful breakup.
It happened inside a tiny bathroom in a rental cabin my girlfriend (now ex) and I were staying in near Tahoe, California. Well into a severe drought, this normally thriving winter playground had little snow. Which could be a metaphor for our relationship, because it had stopped being a fun playground, too.
After just three months, we had left the all-things-dreamy phase and were entering work phase.
Expectations had started creeping into the relationship like kudzu vine. We were slowly suffocating from lack of loving sunlight.
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Here’s why: expectations had started creeping into the relationship like kudzu vine. We were slowly suffocating from lack of loving sunlight.
What happened in that bathroom is simple: We let each other off the hook.
We told the truth about what we were each experiencing in the relationship without making each other wrong or responsible in any way.
Then we intentionally gave back to each other the freedom to be whoever we authentically wanted to be.
During that hour long conversation we both came clean about how we were struggling and let go any expectations that the other try to ease our struggle. We reclaimed our freedom to effortlessly be.
We also decided to end our intimate relationship.
We had both been experiencing incompatibilities in the way we relate to each other that we decided we didn’t want to continue moving pushing into. Though we surely could have overcome those challenges had we been committed to doing the work, we both decided that right now neither of us wanted to do that kind of work.
So we set each other free.
♦◊♦
Every couple should set each other free.
Tell the truth about what’s really going on.
Share what’s working and what’s not, without obligating your partner to do anything about it.
Obligation is bondage. Obligation is why relationships stagnate, or worse: cause them to implode in a fiery fight of chaos and vitriol. Ensuring an ill-fitting obligation gets met often requires some measure of force, whether passive aggression or outright violence.
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Obligation is bondage. Obligation is why relationships stagnate, or worse: cause them to implode in a fiery fight of chaos and vitriol. Ensuring an ill-fitting obligation gets met often requires some measure of force, whether passive aggression or outright violence.
Telling our personal truth instead sets everyone free.
It sets us both free to stay if we’re genuinely called to stay, and it gives us the freedom to leave if our deepest truth is to dance elsewhere.
Despite my provocative title, I’m actually not suggesting every couple break up and stop seeing each other. I’m not suggesting couples shouldn’t hunker down and do the work it takes to create a thriving intimate relationship. That would just be silly of me.
I’m only suggesting that we let our partners off the hook.
Perhaps the most destructive element in a relationship is the expectation that my partner will behave different than she genuinely wants to.
In the past, when my relationships were struggling to fly, it’s almost certainly because expectations were weighing down the vessel. Either mine or hers, and usually both.
It’s perfectly appropriate – healthy, even – to make requests for what we want. But it’s futile to obligate our partners to do what they do not authentically want to do: touch us more, touch us less, do things different, see things different, think differently, want different things than they actually want, eat differently, spend their free time differently.
I get it, though. We’re scared we won’t get our needs met, so we obligate the other person to show up and make it happen. In the process, we enslave a good person. Everyone loses, even when you get what you want.
The best gift I can ever give a partner is my happiness that doesn’t depend on her behavior.
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The best gift I can ever give a partner is my happiness that doesn’t depend on her behavior.
When I make my partner responsible for my happiness, I’m saddling her with an obligation to be a certain way for my well-being.
I’ve never met a woman who seemed to enjoy wearing a saddle. I sure don’t want to wear one. Even horses don’t like wearing a saddle until they’ve been “broken.” I don’t want a broken woman.
Consider how deeply my partner can relax when she knows she doesn’t have to pretend or force herself to be a certain way just to please me!
A wise woman living in the Australian outback with her beautiful family once told me, “I knew I had met the man I would marry when I didn’t want to change anything about him.”
Your intimate partner isn’t your project.
When I saw myself starting to think of my girlfriend as a project that needed my fixing, I knew it was time to leave. She deserves a man who will worship her as she is today. She’s extraordinary. I wasn’t offering her that anymore.
♦◊♦
After setting each other free, we stayed together in Tahoe a few more days, and those few days were sublime. We started laughing again; we made scrumptious love and slept warm and cuddled close through the night; we once again shared those intimate knowing looks-without-words like we had countless times before. We connected deeply in our authentic love for each other, without expectations, and were once again able to appreciate each other’s authentic presence.
Releasing each other from all expectations was profoundly liberating.
We could both breathe again.
—Make your relationship extraordinary. Explore coaching with Bryan @ www.BryanReeves.com
—Originally appeared on www.BryanReeves.com
—Photo by Dimaz Fakhruddin/Flickr
You sound very afraid of being responsible for your girlfriend’s happiness. No matter how you try to rationalize and then dismiss it..You are partly always responsible for her feelings. This article doesn’t belong to “The Good Man Project” concept. It doesn’t teach men how to be or stay good, but how to dodge difficult areas of a relationship (in a jerky way).
Loved the article Bryan! It put ideas that I’ve had building over the years as “pre-epiphanies” in to a perfectly concise article that really clicked for me. I’ll be keeping it in mind for my current relationship as it grows and changes over the years. Jed, that’s perfect: “I tell my friends and clients that you can’t keep a relationship alive and well unless you’re willing to take the risk to let it end, i.e. letting yourself and your partner tell the truth” and make an honest decision to stay or leave. This is a great read for both men… Read more »
I liked the provocative title and the commitment to tell the truth and let each other off the hook of our own expectations. My wife and I have been married for 35 years, and have been married three times to each other. We got married, and made the commitment “until death do we part.” But things change in a marriage and we realized we were afraid to re-look at the marriage to see if it was really working for us. After 15 years, we decided to take an honest look after the deep “dark night of the soul” talk. We… Read more »
Bryan, I think the whole point of healthy relationships is not to have unrealistic expectations of our partners. Naturally, we desire that they fill certain needs and desires and vice verse. But the nature of these need to be the kinds of things where flexibility is an option. The more cursory things in which an individual’s identity is not invested. For any relationship to work there is always give and take. Yet it is within the boundaries of what we as individuals are willing to change. For a relationship to be healthy and flourish, expectations that our partner will either… Read more »
Actually, Dave, I entered the relationship with no expectations. I was genuinely simply honored to spend time with this woman. I didn’t expect do anything in particular to make me feel good, because I came into it feeling great already. Actually, we had pretty minimal expectations of each other throughout. Still, there was something about the experience that started to grind after a few months. That happens in most every relationship, I believe. In our case, I think it became clear that we each were somehow expecting the other to be different – the fantasy of who we thought we… Read more »
I’m a little confused as to the point of this too. I think the problem is we treat dependency as the norm for modern relationships. Obviously this unhealthy. So I’m glad you’ve realized this. It’s unclear to me if you’re still with this girl. But in any case congrats on your new outlook.
I don’t relate to this as being about dependency so much as how we expect other people to be different than they are so we can feel good. I can see the dependency component of that, but what I’m pointing at I think is far more common in relationships: Making other people responsible for our happiness. I think it’s pretty radical in today’s world to let people off the hook from that, whether or not they stay together.
So basically: your big epiphany was that you stopped lying to one another about your expectations of them, decided you were incompatible… and then you had casual-sex. Congratulations.
The big epiphany was that we each stopped lying to OURSELVES. That’s what enabled us to let each other off the hook, to be in love with the real person again (after letting the fantasy go), and yes, we chose to make love with each other again after that moment.