When You Can’t Let Go of a Relationship
I wish this story ended differently. It didn’t. And it might be a story you are very familiar with.
A few years ago, I knew a woman named Erica who had just gone through a breakup with her boyfriend for the second time. It ended for the exact same reason it did the first time, which I will tell you about in a second.
But somehow, even though she had tried and failed to work through the issues with him, she still couldn’t face the idea of truly letting him go.
Have you ever had someone you couldn’t say goodbye to, even though what they were offering you didn’t make you happy or meet your needs?
As a coach for nearly 20 years, I have seen this story play out over and over again. People question if it was right to walk away or if they’re letting go of something good too soon.
It’s even harder when the relationship doesn’t have the bad parts that we so often hear about: cheating, lying, abuse. Just two people who seemingly were right for each other until they weren’t.
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Here is a summary of the transcript from YouTube, slightly edited with AI.
A Relationship That Wasn’t Moving Forward
If any of this describes you and you have a situation where you don’t feel good right now, you’re not completely happy with the way it’s going, I want you to treat the next 10 to 15 minutes like you just joined a coaching session with me one-on-one.
I’m going to take you through a little process that I’ve taken thousands of people through for figuring out what needs to be the next step in their relationship.
This is designed to bring clarity to whether ending things is the right thing for you or whether it would be premature to give up on this person.
My hope is that by the end of this video, you feel a different level of peace in your decisions.
Either way, Erica’s story went like this.
Erica wanted to find love her whole life. She was 31, successful in her career, a go-getter, likable, had a couple of great friends, and really loved life.
But her dream, her deepest dream, had always been to find love, to get married, and to raise a family.
Despite everything else in her life, this was her number one goal. She loved love stories, romantic movies, and listened eagerly any time she heard dating advice that she thought could help her find that kind of love for herself.
Then after years of dating, she met someone who represented all she had been looking for.
It finally felt like her very own love story had begun. The train had officially left the station and was on its way.
The only problem was she was now four years into that relationship and no closer to being engaged to a man who changed the subject every time she tried to bring up marriage.
Now 35, she had just given him an ultimatum for the second time.
“I’d like to get engaged soon or I’m out.”
When Love Isn’t Enough
Her boyfriend chose out.
He loved her. He even said, “You are the love of my life,” during the breakup, but he wasn’t ready to take that big of a step.
When things ended, she immediately second-guessed her decision to speak up.
Getting married was deeply important to her, but she couldn’t help how much she loved him.
So often in breakups, what should have ended with a period gets afforded those extra two dots that turn it into an ellipsis.
In Erica’s case, her ex saying that she was the love of his life during the breakup gave her hope.
One dot.
Then a couple of weeks later, Erica texted him when her cat got sick and she felt lonely over the holidays, which led to them talking again.
Two dots.
So, their story continued.
Anytime she got lonely, she would reach out to him. And anytime she was strong and went no contact, he became genuinely afraid that he was losing her for good and he would reach out to her.
Eventually, they slipped back into a relationship.
The Cost of Abandoning Your Needs
When we decide that holding on to a person is more important than our own needs or principles, we lose a part of ourselves.
There is a deep sadness, perhaps even a sense of tragedy, about finding someone we love who loves us back, but then finding that our visions for the future are incompatible.
But there is an even deeper tragedy at play than Erica’s boyfriend not wanting to marry her.
That is Erica slowly trying to convince herself not to care about something that deeply mattered to her just so that she could hold on to the relationship.
That is a different kind of emotional injury, and it is one that can become chronic.
This isn’t a video about the virtues of marriage. Plenty of people build beautiful lives and relationships without getting married.
The question here is how much marriage mattered to Erica. And it did matter to Erica.
She wanted a husband. She wanted a family. She wanted the security and commitment of building a life with someone who was excited to choose her fully.
Erica had focused all of her attention on the perceived danger of losing her boyfriend.
What she hadn’t factored into the equation was the danger over time of negotiating herself out of wanting what she truly wanted.
Three Things That Shape a Relationship
Her boyfriend wasn’t villainous. He may genuinely have loved her. He may be a good man who is genuinely conflicted.
But a good person can still be the wrong partner for your life vision.
And when we continue to go back to someone who has shown us repeatedly that their vision doesn’t align with ours, we are communicating something without words: their vision doesn’t have to change because our vision is pliable.
There are three factors at play in any relationship.
The first is your standards. In other words, what behavior are you willing to accept from a partner?
This can also relate to your future. What vision of my future am I committed to as a standard?
In Erica’s case, her standard was that dating someone for four years meant that she was ready to move things to the next level and get engaged.
Endlessly dating was not something she desired or wanted for herself.
The second factor is their behavior. This is how someone you are with behaves, both in life and towards you.
Erica’s boyfriend’s behavior showed that he would rather lose her than make a commitment to marry her.
The third factor is the status of the relationship. This is whether you choose to stay with them or not.
In any relationship where you are not currently happy or at peace, one of these three things has to change.
Either your standards, their behavior, or the status of the relationship.
There is no scenario in which all three stay the same.
What We Accept Becomes Our Reality
If your standards change really easily, their behaviors will not.
To be unwilling to let go of something or someone is to agree, whether you consciously realize it or not, to bend your own rules in order to stay in it.
There is a telltale sign that we are in a situation like this.
When the people who know us best and love us the most start recognizing that we have become a different version of ourselves.
They recognize that we have abandoned parts of ourselves and what we have wanted in this relationship or in life.
Sometimes we start hiding parts of the relationship from our friends and family.
We don’t want to answer questions about things we don’t have good answers for.
We may even start repeating the excuses made by our partner to our family in an effort to defend them and thereby defend our decision to be okay with whatever is happening.
All of this leads us to internally reset our expectations for what we accept from the relationship.
We quietly recalibrate our standards to a new norm.
Choosing Yourself Again
When you go back to a relationship that isn’t working for you, who you really are and what you once wanted still remain, lurking deep inside, but buried beneath layers and layers of compromises.
These adjustments often happen gradually. So over time, we don’t notice just how far we have departed from our original vision of the relationship.
It is completely healthy and even normal to evolve your standards over time. It can be a sign of maturity and wisdom.
The question we have to ask ourselves is: can I adjust my standards in the ways that this relationship calls for and still be happy?
In Erica’s case, retracting her ultimatum and going back to her ex meant that she was willing to stay in a relationship that may never lead to an engagement and a wedding, both of which she really wanted.
Unfortunately, Erica didn’t do that.
And we don’t get what we deserve in life. We get what we accept.
The ultimate answer to the question, “Why do people continue to treat us casually?” is simple: because we let them.
I wish her story had ended differently. It didn’t.
But yours can.
You can take a look right now at a situation in which you are unhappy for whatever reason, and you can ask yourself which one of the three factors will need to change for you to feel at peace and content.
Will it be their behavior, which you can influence by advocating for yourself and your needs?
Will it be your standards if they don’t change their behavior?
Or will it be the status of the relationship by ending it so that you can make room for one that is right for you?
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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