getting real love 7: are you mending or ending?
Over the past 150 years’ couple relationships have undergone a (not always) quiet revolution.
Gone are the days when it was good enough to have a husband or wife that took on and concentrated on established roles, now it is normal, expected even, for our partners to not only be our confidante but our therapist, confessor, sexual pleasurer, cook, car mechanic…the list is endless in the cultural maze and drive of contemporary life.
The impact of this cultural drive and imperative is most striking on modern family and couple life; it can feel as if our marriages break against the force of expectation.
Bruised and a little bloodied we move on, limping into the future, yet it can be years later (as a couple therapist I know that it can take couples up to 6 years to tackle relationship issues) before problems are addressed.
At that point most couples have three choices: live with things as they are-and this is not really a choice since this still leads to increased unhappiness and misery all around- or mending or ending the relationship.
It’s not been my experience that any individual ends their marriage or couple relationship without serious, prolonged and heart-breaking thought. The attachments that are formed in romantic bonds are just too crazy-powerful (they’re meant to be) to come apart without considerable anguish and a certain amount of trauma; ending a relationship, ending a marriage, stirs up every single chaotic, regretful, negative, destructive, shameful and stomach-churning emotion a person can possibly have, it’s devastating for both. And yet, ending a marriage or relationship is not the same as ending a life, life goes on and if you are ending, or part of a relationship that’s ending, your primary task is to work out how to live again and anew-which might take a long time.
The other choice is to mend the relationship. You can do this yourself (you can!) or you can fast-track the repair and refit of your relationship with couple therapy. It takes a great commitment to do this and you need plenty of motivation.
But, your mutual happiness may be worth it.
You will need to probably think of your relationship as having three distinct stages:
- Version 1: the past
- Version 2: where you are now
- Version 3: how you take responsibility for change into a shared future
Version 2 is the confusion phase; you will be engaged in doing something you’ve mostly never done before: creating strong and loving bonds in a more fully conscious, mindful and compassionate relationship.
Mending can be the most exciting and rewarding time of your life.
Are you mending, or ending?
