Want Your Romantic Relationships to Last?

Broken relationships are common but often avoidable.

People fall passionately in love for a while, then it doesn’t work out, and they go their separate ways. Sound familiar?

But seeing what’s at the center of all this will build your awareness and you’ll be able to see what’s happening so you can change it for the better. There are universals to relationships.

First, I have one caveat, which I like to mention in articles from time to time. I’m not advocating for anyone to stay in a blatantly and irreparably abusive, toxic, self-destructive, sociopathic, or otherwise unredeemable relationship.

But for the rest of us who are in love with a person who is forgivably human and faced with loving them and staying committed to them despite their flaws, this article is for you.

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Experiencing that the other person is human.

We all go through a process that is something like the following. We fall in love with a person, idealize them, and then eventually come to the realization that they’re human (just like us!).

Even if we don’t think of what we see in them as inherent flaws per se, we become disenchanted that they aren’t who we thought they were, and rather than reconciling that, we give up on the relationship.

Maybe we see ourselves as growing in new ways and them stifling that. Regardless, we see incompatibility.

Then, we are either upset by it to the point of setting dynamics in place that ultimately cause the relationship to fall apart, or we come to accept it for what it is and work through it as the actual state of the relationship.

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Why is this? It happens for a number of reasons:

We show our best selves early in a relationship so that we can sell ourselves and win our lover’s affection.
We see the best in others early on because of wishful thinking — we want to buy what they’re selling because we’re romantics.
We jump to conclusions based on a limited impression that later turns out to be incomplete and we feel misled.
Over time we come to see them regulate from natural negative states that we all cycle through in life, as we experience life with them.
Seeing someone we have idealized in less flattering ways causes cognitive dissonance and ambivalence.
This process of seeing our own humanity and our lovers’ can amount to vulnerability, disappointment, denial, guilt, frustration, and regret — and many of us struggle to face that.
Our lovers will also be reacting to the same experience on their end, which can result in a downward spiral where both parties feel free to show their worst to the breaking point of the relationship.
People change over time and they’re individuals, even when coupled. There will always be some discord as people have to deal with their innate differences.
Early on, opposites can attract more. And we tend to think that it’ll all work out because we’re in love. But we have to face the truth over time; some differences will always exist.

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Everyone’s experience is subjectively their own.

This can be a slippery slope. It’s hard to know where to draw the line between what’s acceptable, flawed humanity, and what’s unacceptable.

Generally speaking, it’s your and your partner’s call to figure that out for yourselves. But just being aware of this idealization — which happens in all relationships to some degree, including healthy ones — is going to help act as a sieve early on so that you don’t figure it out after many relationships have already been tossed out despite being totally salvageable.

I write about this because I’m totally familiar with it. Every relationship I have had featured this dynamic, at some stages, front and center. Although I have only had a handful of relationships, they were all quite passionate and long-term, and there was a fairly significant period in all of them where I had this experience.

And I could see it happening in my significant others as well. I know we all have this tendency in us, it just manifests in different ways and degrees for different people. Over time I became savvier about where my weak spots were — the issues which would cause me to feel ambivalent towards my partner and also where to look for ways I might disappoint them over time.

I think that if you look at the relationships where people stay together and some portion of those where they break up, they all have this feature in common. The most identifiable difference is that the ones who stay together conquer it and the ones who break up don’t.

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Summarizing points

Figure out how you’re idealizing your partner early on and be prepared for them to change. Remember that their dynamic qualities are what make them more interesting and lovable in the long term.
Also, be aware of what they might be idealizing in you, and preventively try to smooth the process by upholding integrity to certain precedents you set. After all, some betrayals are real and deserve breaking up over.
Realize that this pattern will play out in all romantic relationships to some degree. It’s just a matter of coming to terms with it and making it work with the person you love from both sides of the table.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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