Don't Break Up: A Good Argument for Staying Together

This post is Part 1 in a two-part series.

When I reflect on the now shallow-sounding, flimsy, depth-of-cardboard reasons I had for breaking up, I'm embarrassed. I recall impetuous, adolescent moments when my whiny, egocentric reasons for ending my relationships went something like this: "She didn't always like what I did or said," or "She didn't like my friends," or "She didn't always get along; she argued a lot," or "She wasn't very charitable sexually," and so on.

In those early days, I convinced myself these were grave character flaws and therefore solid grounds for breaking up. Not surprisingly, my network of supportive but equally underdeveloped adolescent male friends agreed.

"Blame-throwing"

My complaints reeked of fault-finding—"she did this, she didn't do that." My finger-pointing, surfacy teenage reasons for breaking up had a tenuous toehold in highly questionable "partner indictments and convictions." The obvious inference was: If only she'd met my needs, I could have been happy and there would have been no need to "drag her into relationship court" where she would inevitably be found guilty.

Character-based love

Still, looking back, I confess that "sexy, fun, and easy to get along with" were the backbone of my selection criteria, the byword of my adolescent search for the "ideal" girlfriend. Then once I'd found the "right person," someone I thought possessed these qualities, I quickly fell in love. Right from the outset, I projected onto her my boyish, wish-filled expectations that these key, "love-evoking," qualities would reliably express themselves without interruption, even endlessly, and with little or no effort from either of us.

Not conscious of its delimiting, personal-power-stripping implications, my affections were "headquartered" on the shifting ground of my perception of my girlfriend's qualities. And so it was that she would soon be found "guilty"—after all, who can be non-stop sexy, fun, and easy to get along with? In sum, my character-based love pivoted upon a wobbly foundation of perception and trait-dependency. In this unthinking manner, I yielded the control of my needs and feelings to the person I expected her to be.

My teenage, relationship-impoverishing mentality begs these relevant questions: Should our love for our partners be based solely upon who we perceive them to be or on how well they gratify our personal needs? The answer to both questions is probably not. Equally pertinent, who's ultimately responsible for the management of our personal needs and feelings?

A painful awakening

Sadly, for me, my thinking wasn't much different at 21, when I stumbled across the threshold of adulthood. My paltry, adolescent expectations hadn't morphed much and for a couple of years afterward, they remained disappointingly about the same.

Then like a huge, mind-altering slap in the face, personal tragedy struck when I suffered two successive heartbreaking losses. In the soul-crushing wake of these losses, my underdeveloped, adolescent mentality began to unravel as I took a very hard, critical look inward. At the same painful, eye-opening time, I became a very serious psychology student, and this powerful confluence of forces succeeded in completely overhauling my thinking on relationships. Happily, a better version of myself slowly began to take shape.

Blaming undermines our personal power

Blaming our partners presupposes they have an inexorable influence over us, even full sway, by how they manifest their traits. Hence, we are passively, helplessly dependent on them to, at all times, express themselves agreeably in ways aligned with our expectations. Thus, by expanding this same "logic," blaming reinforces the tenuous but common assumption that our partners play an outsized role in the ebb and flow of our emotional well-being.

Further, this potentially hazardous reasoning presumes our love for our partners hinges upon their meeting our needs, and when they don't, we reflexively tilt toward fault-finding, our "justifiable" default position, which, of course, is non-optimal for the health of our relationships.

Lamentably, for many of us, partner-blaming is the very tip of the spear for rationalizing our breakups.

Are there any valid reasons for breaking up?

Like snowflakes, each relationship has its own distinguishingly unique character and therefore merits an equally unique and sensitive understanding of what tests its intrinsic qualities, limitations, and durability. But without exception, where one or both partners engage in violence, physical and/or emotional, every available means should be urgently deployed to stop the violence including separation, breaking up, or divorce, especially where children are involved.

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Shy of these extremes, many hapless partners prematurely "throw in the towel," foreclosing on salvageable relationships that might otherwise be rescued, repaired, or "cured." After working with a wide range of couples, it's evident to me that couple rehabilitation is clinically possible even in cases where partners believe they have been deeply betrayed by sexual infidelities. Of necessity, however, both partners must commit to the often-assiduous process of resurrecting their trust and commitment to each other.

Lessons to be learned

For those intrepid, persevering couples who don't break up but instead choose to remain intimately partnered, the lessons can be profoundly self-illuminating. For example, the intimate relationship brings to light how much self-compassion we possess and relatedly, how lovable we feel we are as individual partners.

Our day-to-day efforts to manage our needs effectively put these personal attributes "on parade" where they are openly displayed in one form or another. Surely, how well we manage our personal needs is virtually impossible to conceal, especially over the long term within the all-revealing context of the intimate partnership.

Moving up

Good personal need managers elevate their rankings on these enviable qualities of self-compassion and felt lovability because they consistently rise to the ongoing flow of tasks involved in effectively identifying, validating, and representing their individual needs and feelings. Here, success readily translates into greater self- and partner-respect and affection.

This alone, I hope, will provoke serious reconsideration in those contemplating breaking up.