Today, I want to share with you what I think is the biggest reason that good relationships turn bad and I'm doing this because I want to help you because I get a lot of messages and I've experienced this myself of the pain when you are in a relationship and it is struggling.
Or sometimes, even worse, when you wish hadn't ended; it can be very devastating.
And so I want to share what I've sort of seen and learned in order to help you if you're in a relationship and perhaps navigate down a different path.
And if you're not in a relationship, in your next one, hopefully, you can get it started on the right foot because what I'm sharing with you I see as the underlying reason that relationships go bad is, yes, there's cheating, there's distrust, there's resentment, and all that stuff builds up but I think it comes from a soil — the wellspring — of what I'm gonna be sharing with you in this post.
And to do that, I want to start with an unrelated story; at least, it's seemingly unrelated.
It is about a computer. I was living in Las Vegas at the time and my brother had this old MacBook and it was ridiculous because when you opened it, the hinges were so messed up that the screen would just fall flat unless it was at a 90-degree angle or otherwise supported.
The speakers didn't work and so you had to put your headphone jack in but most of the time, the headphone jack didn't work unless you jiggle it around, it would turn off... it was only two years old hadn't had anything horrible happen to it.
So this computer exists in my brother's life; it's hilarious because we're watching him struggle with it every day and at one point, my other roommate says, "Hey guys, I'm thinking of getting a new computer. What kind should I get? Should I get a Mac or PC?" And before anyone could say anything, my brother chimed in and he said, "Dude, you gotta get a Mac. They just work." And I remember my jaw just hitting the floor because I'm going, "What are you talking about?" And then it dawned on me; my brother, like me, had been watching television and for months, I don't know if you remember, there were these commercials that were Mac VS PC.
And one of the common refrains in those commercials and in Steve Jobs' keynotes which were everywhere was that "Macs just work." And so I looked at him and I said, "Henry, are you sure this is what you mean because your computer clearly doesn't work every single day," and we all laughed about it but that left a lasting impression on me because I realized in that moment that direct experience of our lives is often overshadowed by marketing.
Apple is the biggest or was the biggest company in the world — I don't know if they are today — but certainly, they're marketing budget is enough to completely transform my brother's day-to-day experience so how else might that be affecting me? And so I said, "Okay, well, Apple is the biggest company. What are the things that we market to each other?" And one of the first ones that came back was, "Oh, my gosh. I've experienced this travel." If you've opened up your Instagram recently, you've probably seen beautiful travel photos, travel goals, and these amazing places.
Now, I've been very, very fortunate — I got to study abroad, I have had an opportunity to travel in many places and I'm so grateful for it — but one of the things that I've seen is that travel does not look like those photos.
And in fact, when most people travel, they spend a lot of the time miserable because they're waiting in line, they're at a train station and their train is gone and they don't speak the language and they don't know where they're going, the food makes them sick and they're puking, they hate the locals because they're don't fit in with their culture, and they just have a hard time of it.
And what I also notice is I'll meet these people, maybe connect with them briefly, find them later, talk to them about their experience, and I'll get a completely whitewashed version about the amazing things that they saw.
And I'm going, "Wait a second, I was with you. I've watched you be miserable." And so I realized that at least with travel in many ways, though it can be fantastic and I'm not saying you shouldn't travel, there's a cultural mythology that a lot of people contribute that says, "If you travel, it will be amazing and it's absolutely worth your time and your money," and so we buy into that and people unfortunately are, I think, hurt by this.
But that was just the tip of the iceberg; as I thought deeper, I realized that there was something beyond travel that is in every song, it's in all the movies, and it's in all the movies especially that he watched as a kid that are from Disney that permeates the way that we communicate — friends say it to one another, you've heard it from your aunt's, your uncle's, your mom, your dad — it's perhaps the most marketed idea that I've seen in America today.
And it's this idea that a romantic relationship is the inescapable key to happiness — that if you are not romantically involved with your better half and with the person that completes you, you cannot be happy or at least if you are, it's fake and it's going to be short-lived.
And conversely, if you are involved with the right person then happiness is pretty much a guarantee — sure, there's going to be some trouble and some work but really, the movie ends at happily ever after.
And the songs end when things are good and even the break-up songs have this mentality in them that, "Okay, it wasn't you but guess what? Now, this next person is going to appreciate me and things are so much better now." The point of all of this is that someone that you are going to meet is going to come into your life and dramatically make things better; that is the most offered cultural thing that I've ever heard in my entire life and if you live in America I think this is probably true for you.
It's so pervasive that it's like water.
Now, the second question that I had was — does this match my direct experience? With the MacBook — same thing, I want to not just check what's the marketing but I want to see, "Is this the way the computer works?" And I don't know if this matches your experience but mine is that relationships are not exactly that.
And I don't want to quote any statistics because I don't know them but certainly, there's quite a bit of divorce; you probably know some people.
Maybe you or a friend has been in a relationship that seems like it should have ended far earlier but they stuck it out, they tried to make it work against all odds, all of their friends saw that was crumbling, and maybe they lost friendships, moved cities, sacrificed in other ways to try to, "Please get this relationship to work," and then it fell apart in the end.
I think that comes from this mindset that, "This is the most important thing. Everything else, we can forget about because if we can make this work happiness is assured." And I am not saying this to say that relationships can't be amazing — I personally have been dramatically impacted; I've had some hard times, some wonderful times and a tremendous amount of growth from my romantic relationships.
But what I'm saying is that when we lean as human beings on anything more than it can stand, we're going to wind up on the floor.
The analogy that I think of is just kind of like leaning on a table.
Think of money for instance; if you use money in a healthy way, it's amazing.
It can pay for you to live, it can pay for you to live in a nice place, to eat food, and to treat your friends and family to wonderful experiences.
And if that's your relationship with money, money is a positive thing in your life; it doesn't matter if you have a billion or a million or a hundred thousand or less; if that's your relationship with money, that's a good relationship and sure, you might need a little bit more but it's not this awful thing in your life — you have other things because you're not valuing money beyond what you can.
You might say that you're leaning on money in an appropriate way.
But if you're someone that thinks that once they get 10 million dollars, they will be superior, that they will have proven it — and this is often subconscious — to their dad or their mom or that person who didn't like them in high school that they are really worthwhile, they're going to lean very heavily on money.
And eventually, they will get it usually and it will crumble beneath them and they'll go, "Oh, my god. This didn't work. I don't feel superior. I don't feel better. I still feel unworthy," and that's because they expected out of money something that money couldn't give them; they expected a feeling of worthiness.
Take the same analogy with relationships.
If you have perhaps a more healthy sense of relationships, you feel like a complete human being.
You are capable of functioning through your life and you don't have to have someone else and I know that this is probably a bit of a contentious idea — that you could go your entire life and not have a life partner that was romantically involved with you and still have a thrilling complete fulfilled life; but that is how I have come to believe.
And whether or not you believe that, the idea that you might lean a little bit too heavily on your relationship and expect some other flawed human being to enter your life and then make things dramatically better than they were before — to make you a better person and to be your everything — in my opinion, that is leaning on the relationship way too much.
You are expecting things out of it that it cannot give you in what could have been a wonderful relationship between two human beings that were complete, that spend time together, and help each other grow and had amazing experiences become something that leaves you flat on the floor because you leaned on it too heavily.
And I believe the problem is that our society conditions us all to expect this other person to come in and transform our lives for the better.
Meanwhile, they have the same idea and so we come in for a period of time, we can be infatuated and pretend that we can be everything for them and they can be everything for us but — and I think that the data shows this — if you look at your own life, that doesn't tend to last forever.
So what I would like to encourage you to do is not to take my word for it and it's not to listen to my marketing, it's to reflect on your own experiences and to look to your own relationships and look to the relationships around you.
If you have a completely different view of things based on your life, then throw this out.
But ask yourself the following questions — what do I expect out of a romantic relationship? It's worth asking. How much time and energy compared to other things does the idea of having a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a husband or a wife get for me? When I'm in relationships, do I say things like, "You're my everything. I don't know what I'd do without you. Life without you wouldn't be worth it," and are you expecting this other individual to completely be your reason for living? And if you've been in a relationship for a short period of time whether it's a few months or maybe just one or two years, do you have a belief that this is going to last forever? Are you confident in that? And if you are, have you considered that that statistically is unlikely to be the case? And if you have deviated from the statistical norm, ask yourself, "What reasoning do I have for this?" Are there good valid reasons that other people would find, "Yeah, that makes sense. You guys really do have a chance of having a long-lasting and happy relationship," or do you feel like everybody else does who has bought into this idea that this other person must complete them and therefore they have to make it work? Just some questions for you to ponder and when I make this post, I always try to have an action guide.
This one doesn't have a clear but step one would be this — self-reflect.
Ask yourself what relationships have meant to you.
Pay attention to the songs that you listen to.
Reflect on the things that you've said while you were in relationships or to your friends about relationships and what they mean.
The second thing I'd recommend is really being honest not just in your self-reflections but if you have someone that you are dating, with them too.
Share what you're honest unfiltered perhaps childlike expectations are of this relationship whether they're realistic or not.
It's worth just saying, "I didn't necessarily know this about myself but I realize that I've been expecting you to make me happy always no matter what. And I don't have a solution to that but I wanted to tell you. I've probably been putting a lot of pressure on you."
Be honest and reflect on the degree of honesty that you're capable of having.
If you're in a relationship and that sort of honesty makes you feel queasy, just sit with that.
And the final thing which I believe is the solution to this is the way that you can have healthy long-lasting happy relationships is to first — or if you're in a relationship, start now — develop a sense of self-love.
The myth that someone can come to make us happy, which is so powerful, because we start from a place of feeling a deep black wouldn't be something that was at all able to be sold to you if you didn't feel like you were incomplete to start with. And my contention and what I've heard many people who have traveled similar paths before me and many famous people who have gone down this road have seemingly experienced everything — I've had the love, the adoration, and the money.
And they seem to come back to the sense that there is nothing outside of yourself that can bring lasting fulfillment and if you expect it to, you're going to be depressed and sometimes, unfortunately, if you look around in the news today, taking your own life.
It doesn't matter how much money you have or fans or how many people love you. So get back to self-love and if you don't know where to start, I'm going to put a list of articles in this post; this is a topic that I've talked about. I tend to like the idea of tables and chairs and supporting them for this metaphor so you're gonna hear that again but I'm gonna put a link to articles on self-love.
I believe that the solution to this — to feeling like half a person and expecting someone else to come in and complete you is to instead realize recognize and support the notion that you are full and complete and capable of living a wonderful happy life by yourself.
And that someone else who is full and complete could walk that path with you and that could be amazing.
Let me know what you think; I know this is somewhat controversial and some whatnot but I'd be really curious for the people that are in relationships that think it's their everything, what they think; let me know in the comments.
And of course, I hope you enjoyed this article. I'll see you in the next one.
Or sometimes, even worse, when you wish hadn't ended; it can be very devastating.
And so I want to share what I've sort of seen and learned in order to help you if you're in a relationship and perhaps navigate down a different path.
And if you're not in a relationship, in your next one, hopefully, you can get it started on the right foot because what I'm sharing with you I see as the underlying reason that relationships go bad is, yes, there's cheating, there's distrust, there's resentment, and all that stuff builds up but I think it comes from a soil — the wellspring — of what I'm gonna be sharing with you in this post.
And to do that, I want to start with an unrelated story; at least, it's seemingly unrelated.
It is about a computer. I was living in Las Vegas at the time and my brother had this old MacBook and it was ridiculous because when you opened it, the hinges were so messed up that the screen would just fall flat unless it was at a 90-degree angle or otherwise supported.
The speakers didn't work and so you had to put your headphone jack in but most of the time, the headphone jack didn't work unless you jiggle it around, it would turn off... it was only two years old hadn't had anything horrible happen to it.
So this computer exists in my brother's life; it's hilarious because we're watching him struggle with it every day and at one point, my other roommate says, "Hey guys, I'm thinking of getting a new computer. What kind should I get? Should I get a Mac or PC?" And before anyone could say anything, my brother chimed in and he said, "Dude, you gotta get a Mac. They just work." And I remember my jaw just hitting the floor because I'm going, "What are you talking about?" And then it dawned on me; my brother, like me, had been watching television and for months, I don't know if you remember, there were these commercials that were Mac VS PC.
And one of the common refrains in those commercials and in Steve Jobs' keynotes which were everywhere was that "Macs just work." And so I looked at him and I said, "Henry, are you sure this is what you mean because your computer clearly doesn't work every single day," and we all laughed about it but that left a lasting impression on me because I realized in that moment that direct experience of our lives is often overshadowed by marketing.
Apple is the biggest or was the biggest company in the world — I don't know if they are today — but certainly, they're marketing budget is enough to completely transform my brother's day-to-day experience so how else might that be affecting me? And so I said, "Okay, well, Apple is the biggest company. What are the things that we market to each other?" And one of the first ones that came back was, "Oh, my gosh. I've experienced this travel." If you've opened up your Instagram recently, you've probably seen beautiful travel photos, travel goals, and these amazing places.
Now, I've been very, very fortunate — I got to study abroad, I have had an opportunity to travel in many places and I'm so grateful for it — but one of the things that I've seen is that travel does not look like those photos.
And in fact, when most people travel, they spend a lot of the time miserable because they're waiting in line, they're at a train station and their train is gone and they don't speak the language and they don't know where they're going, the food makes them sick and they're puking, they hate the locals because they're don't fit in with their culture, and they just have a hard time of it.
And what I also notice is I'll meet these people, maybe connect with them briefly, find them later, talk to them about their experience, and I'll get a completely whitewashed version about the amazing things that they saw.
And I'm going, "Wait a second, I was with you. I've watched you be miserable." And so I realized that at least with travel in many ways, though it can be fantastic and I'm not saying you shouldn't travel, there's a cultural mythology that a lot of people contribute that says, "If you travel, it will be amazing and it's absolutely worth your time and your money," and so we buy into that and people unfortunately are, I think, hurt by this.
But that was just the tip of the iceberg; as I thought deeper, I realized that there was something beyond travel that is in every song, it's in all the movies, and it's in all the movies especially that he watched as a kid that are from Disney that permeates the way that we communicate — friends say it to one another, you've heard it from your aunt's, your uncle's, your mom, your dad — it's perhaps the most marketed idea that I've seen in America today.
And it's this idea that a romantic relationship is the inescapable key to happiness — that if you are not romantically involved with your better half and with the person that completes you, you cannot be happy or at least if you are, it's fake and it's going to be short-lived.
And conversely, if you are involved with the right person then happiness is pretty much a guarantee — sure, there's going to be some trouble and some work but really, the movie ends at happily ever after.
And the songs end when things are good and even the break-up songs have this mentality in them that, "Okay, it wasn't you but guess what? Now, this next person is going to appreciate me and things are so much better now." The point of all of this is that someone that you are going to meet is going to come into your life and dramatically make things better; that is the most offered cultural thing that I've ever heard in my entire life and if you live in America I think this is probably true for you.
It's so pervasive that it's like water.
Now, the second question that I had was — does this match my direct experience? With the MacBook — same thing, I want to not just check what's the marketing but I want to see, "Is this the way the computer works?" And I don't know if this matches your experience but mine is that relationships are not exactly that.
And I don't want to quote any statistics because I don't know them but certainly, there's quite a bit of divorce; you probably know some people.
Maybe you or a friend has been in a relationship that seems like it should have ended far earlier but they stuck it out, they tried to make it work against all odds, all of their friends saw that was crumbling, and maybe they lost friendships, moved cities, sacrificed in other ways to try to, "Please get this relationship to work," and then it fell apart in the end.
I think that comes from this mindset that, "This is the most important thing. Everything else, we can forget about because if we can make this work happiness is assured." And I am not saying this to say that relationships can't be amazing — I personally have been dramatically impacted; I've had some hard times, some wonderful times and a tremendous amount of growth from my romantic relationships.
But what I'm saying is that when we lean as human beings on anything more than it can stand, we're going to wind up on the floor.
The analogy that I think of is just kind of like leaning on a table.
Think of money for instance; if you use money in a healthy way, it's amazing.
It can pay for you to live, it can pay for you to live in a nice place, to eat food, and to treat your friends and family to wonderful experiences.
And if that's your relationship with money, money is a positive thing in your life; it doesn't matter if you have a billion or a million or a hundred thousand or less; if that's your relationship with money, that's a good relationship and sure, you might need a little bit more but it's not this awful thing in your life — you have other things because you're not valuing money beyond what you can.
You might say that you're leaning on money in an appropriate way.
But if you're someone that thinks that once they get 10 million dollars, they will be superior, that they will have proven it — and this is often subconscious — to their dad or their mom or that person who didn't like them in high school that they are really worthwhile, they're going to lean very heavily on money.
And eventually, they will get it usually and it will crumble beneath them and they'll go, "Oh, my god. This didn't work. I don't feel superior. I don't feel better. I still feel unworthy," and that's because they expected out of money something that money couldn't give them; they expected a feeling of worthiness.
Take the same analogy with relationships.
If you have perhaps a more healthy sense of relationships, you feel like a complete human being.
You are capable of functioning through your life and you don't have to have someone else and I know that this is probably a bit of a contentious idea — that you could go your entire life and not have a life partner that was romantically involved with you and still have a thrilling complete fulfilled life; but that is how I have come to believe.
And whether or not you believe that, the idea that you might lean a little bit too heavily on your relationship and expect some other flawed human being to enter your life and then make things dramatically better than they were before — to make you a better person and to be your everything — in my opinion, that is leaning on the relationship way too much.
You are expecting things out of it that it cannot give you in what could have been a wonderful relationship between two human beings that were complete, that spend time together, and help each other grow and had amazing experiences become something that leaves you flat on the floor because you leaned on it too heavily.
And I believe the problem is that our society conditions us all to expect this other person to come in and transform our lives for the better.
Meanwhile, they have the same idea and so we come in for a period of time, we can be infatuated and pretend that we can be everything for them and they can be everything for us but — and I think that the data shows this — if you look at your own life, that doesn't tend to last forever.
So what I would like to encourage you to do is not to take my word for it and it's not to listen to my marketing, it's to reflect on your own experiences and to look to your own relationships and look to the relationships around you.
If you have a completely different view of things based on your life, then throw this out.
But ask yourself the following questions — what do I expect out of a romantic relationship? It's worth asking. How much time and energy compared to other things does the idea of having a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a husband or a wife get for me? When I'm in relationships, do I say things like, "You're my everything. I don't know what I'd do without you. Life without you wouldn't be worth it," and are you expecting this other individual to completely be your reason for living? And if you've been in a relationship for a short period of time whether it's a few months or maybe just one or two years, do you have a belief that this is going to last forever? Are you confident in that? And if you are, have you considered that that statistically is unlikely to be the case? And if you have deviated from the statistical norm, ask yourself, "What reasoning do I have for this?" Are there good valid reasons that other people would find, "Yeah, that makes sense. You guys really do have a chance of having a long-lasting and happy relationship," or do you feel like everybody else does who has bought into this idea that this other person must complete them and therefore they have to make it work? Just some questions for you to ponder and when I make this post, I always try to have an action guide.
This one doesn't have a clear but step one would be this — self-reflect.
Ask yourself what relationships have meant to you.
Pay attention to the songs that you listen to.
Reflect on the things that you've said while you were in relationships or to your friends about relationships and what they mean.
The second thing I'd recommend is really being honest not just in your self-reflections but if you have someone that you are dating, with them too.
Share what you're honest unfiltered perhaps childlike expectations are of this relationship whether they're realistic or not.
It's worth just saying, "I didn't necessarily know this about myself but I realize that I've been expecting you to make me happy always no matter what. And I don't have a solution to that but I wanted to tell you. I've probably been putting a lot of pressure on you."
Be honest and reflect on the degree of honesty that you're capable of having.
If you're in a relationship and that sort of honesty makes you feel queasy, just sit with that.
And the final thing which I believe is the solution to this is the way that you can have healthy long-lasting happy relationships is to first — or if you're in a relationship, start now — develop a sense of self-love.
The myth that someone can come to make us happy, which is so powerful, because we start from a place of feeling a deep black wouldn't be something that was at all able to be sold to you if you didn't feel like you were incomplete to start with. And my contention and what I've heard many people who have traveled similar paths before me and many famous people who have gone down this road have seemingly experienced everything — I've had the love, the adoration, and the money.
And they seem to come back to the sense that there is nothing outside of yourself that can bring lasting fulfillment and if you expect it to, you're going to be depressed and sometimes, unfortunately, if you look around in the news today, taking your own life.
It doesn't matter how much money you have or fans or how many people love you. So get back to self-love and if you don't know where to start, I'm going to put a list of articles in this post; this is a topic that I've talked about. I tend to like the idea of tables and chairs and supporting them for this metaphor so you're gonna hear that again but I'm gonna put a link to articles on self-love.
I believe that the solution to this — to feeling like half a person and expecting someone else to come in and complete you is to instead realize recognize and support the notion that you are full and complete and capable of living a wonderful happy life by yourself.
And that someone else who is full and complete could walk that path with you and that could be amazing.
Let me know what you think; I know this is somewhat controversial and some whatnot but I'd be really curious for the people that are in relationships that think it's their everything, what they think; let me know in the comments.
And of course, I hope you enjoyed this article. I'll see you in the next one.
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