It’s Not Your Job to Break Down Their Walls

Like snowflakes, romantic relationships are endlessly unique from beginning to end. They succeed or fail for countless reasons, but one of the most common harbingers of doom is the presence of walls.

A wall can create a variety of barriers to long-term happiness. It might be located between two people, or it might be standing in front of them on the road from “casually dating” to “genuine commitment.” The wall might disappear at times and then reappear when the relationship encounters problems and one or both people disengage or shut down. There may even be multiple walls, protecting each member of the couple from things that have hurt them in the past.

A wall is different from the natural tendency to reveal ourselves gradually when we’re entering a new relationship. It’s normal to keep parts of ourselves hidden until we build trust with another person. The difference between that behavior and putting up a wall is that the wall stands in the way of trust and true intimacy. It’s a barrier that has no intention of coming down.

If you’re aware of walls you’re creating in your romantic relationships, it’s your responsibility to understand why they exist and start to do what you need to do to knock them down. Maybe that’s taking some time to be alone, heal from past wounds, and get in touch with what you really need from a partner. Maybe it’s going to therapy or reading books about recovering from trauma.

Those are things you can control, even if they’re uncomfortable and difficult. What you can’t control is another person’s walls.

Let me say that again: You can’t break down another person’s walls. Only they can do that.

We all want to believe that if we love someone enough, keep showing up for them, and remain patient, they will eventually let us in and reveal the parts of themselves that are hiding behind their walls. We may even make some minor progress and think we’ll be able to keep chipping away at the barrier until it no longer exists.

Sometimes our walled-off partner does let us all the way in, but the truth is it’s not because of how much we loved them, showed up for them, or how patient we were. Ultimately, it happens because they are finally ready to accept the risk of being vulnerable in order to find mature, lasting love.

You can’t force someone to take that leap of faith. And if they never get there with you, it doesn’t mean you weren’t worthy; it simply means their walls are still serving a purpose they aren’t yet ready to give up.

What you do with that realization is up to you. You are free to invest as much time and energy into your relationship as you want. But you should relieve yourself of the burden of knocking down your partner’s walls, because it’s a futile effort that will only leave you depleted and frustrated. Whether the walls stay up or not is not for you to decide.

Accepting how much in love is out of our control is extremely hard. But it can also be liberating. It’s not your responsibility to clean up the messes that happened in someone’s life before you came on the scene. You can offer support and empathy, and you can try to understand what put those walls there in the first place, but the job of taking them down is theirs and theirs alone.

You may arrive at a point when you have crashed into your partner’s walls one too many times. You may decide that the love you need and deserve looks different than what this relationship is offering you. In that case, there is one piece of good news when it comes to walls: they may keep you from reaching the person you care about in the way you hoped to, but they still leave one path open — the exit.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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