5 Options When You Feel Stuck in Your Relationship

–He didn’t show up to your latest important event. He wasn’t at the last one, either.

–It’s Valentine’s day again, and your fiancé is skiing with his parents who don’t really seem to embrace you as a future son-in-law and quietly exclude you from family events.

It’s easy to get caught up in stories, confusion, and helplessness when your desires are consistently disregarded by your partner, and yet you find it hard to imagine leaving the relationship. You do have choices. Here are five of them.

1. Stay and Do Nothing. Sometimes we’re not ready for change, or for the loss that comes with change, or even for what we stand to gain if we take the necessary steps to let go of a relationship that isn’t working and move on. In this case, we do very much have the choice to stay and do nothing. Some people make the mistake of thinking of this choice as non-choice, but it’s not. It’s chosen. You may as well realize when you’re choosing it.
2. Leave and Do Nothing. This is a choice, too. If you make it, know that you’ll likely re-enter a similar relationship, with similar painful patterns, even if the dynamic takes on a new form. Recognize that it may not yet be time for you to let go of certain dreams and fantasies you harbor about love, relationships, and yourself, and that you may need to cycle through some more of the same types of difficult relational experiences before you’re ready to do the work of conscious growth.
3. Stay and Work on Yourself (without your partner’s buy in). This is a powerful choice someone can make in a relationship that isn’t working. We tend to think that in order to change a relationship, we need our partner to form an alliance with us. In fact, we can fully own where we are in a relationship and do a lot of work on our own. We can work on our beliefs, our perceptions, our thoughts, our large and small choices in the relationship. We can work on our expectations, our presumptions, our assumptions and projections. There are many ways to work on oneself, even when your partner isn’t doing their own work. Tools for self-work include meditation, yoga, breathwork, individual therapy, dance, journaling, bibliotherapy, group therapy, spiritual practices, training the mind through concentration practices, in-person and online workshops and more.
4. Stay and Work on Yourself (with your partner’s buy in). Similar to the last option, we can choose to turn toward rather than away from the challenges in the relationship and see them as entryways to greater self-awareness and self-knowledge. In this case, you can do this with your partner’s support, and they can do it with your support. Additional tools to the ones I’ve already listed in the last option include bibiotherapy, couples therapy, relationship building rituals, and couples intensives and retreats.
5. Leave and Work on Yourself. You can honor the relationship for what it has given you, for the ways it has helped you grow, and you can make the decision to accept the reality that it’s just not working, and allow it to end. There are relationships for a reason, a season, and a lifetime. If you deeply and truly know that you’ve done your work in this relationship and it fits into the “reason” or “season” category of relationship types, it may be time to leave. Let yourself make the break and give yourself permission to feel whatever emotions come up for you: guilt, grief, sadness, happiness, fear, relief. Process the loss. Cycle back through the self-work portion of #3 above and take time to understand yourself and what may have been underlying the unfulfilling or painful dynamic with your partner in the first place.

Whatever you decide, it’s a choice–your choice. Even when you feel stuck, you have a choice. Owning your decision is what gives you the power to either accept what’s happening or to change it by letting go of what doesn’t serve you.