Six Psychological Reasons Why The Majority Of Modern Relationships Fail
Relationships fail for many reasons, here are six reasons why the majority of modern ones are destined to do so
The success rate of long-term relationships in the Western world has been hovering around the 40 to 50 percent mark since around the 1970s/1980s. Though prior to the 1920s you were more likely to find a truthful politician than see a divorce — divorces just did not happen.
Prior to the mid-1900s society was simply not built to cope with singledom — hence, why relationships were for life and divorces did not happen. Northwestern University psychologist, Eli Finkel perhaps stresses this point better, highlighting that marriage in the Western World has gone through three stages:
-Institutional marriage (up until 1850)
-Companionate marriage (from 1851 to 1965)
-Self-expressive marriage (from 1965 onward)
So prior to 1850 you were not allowed to break up. For the next hundred years or so you were sort of allowed to break up but not really because you know, again, society was not built for singledom. Then finally in the 1960s, the era of being able to break up was born.
Here are six reasons why many of us are destined to embrace that era by breaking up.
We have the choice of entering into a relationship for any reason we want — even as a means of escaping something
From 3 April to 3 May 2020, 5.0% of people said they feel lonely “often or always”, around 2.6 million people across Great Britain.
Source: ONS
Some people enter into relationships as a means of escaping something, whether that be poverty, persecution, loneliness, boredom, celibacy, the list goes on. Relationships born for these reasons rarely end well.
For example, a friend of mine once recounted to me how her attempts to escape loneliness ended with disastrous consequences. After her marriage to her abusive husband ended, she was single for five years. During that period she felt desperately lonely and longed for a new relationship.
The problem was she felt she could not trust men. And after several attempts at dating men and failing to overcome her issues of trust, she gave up and decided to try dating women as a means of finding love and escaping her loneliness.
She found a woman, a gay woman, and had a three-year relationship with her. Which would have been fine, except she herself was straight and so inevitably it ended very badly. And not only did she feel more lonely than ever during it and after it, but she was also left with the guilt of having completely and totally shattered somebody’s heart.
This is an extreme example, but it’s amazing how loneliness — along with all forms of using relationships as a means of escaping something — can lead us into making poor relationship choices. Choices that can hurt both ourselves and the people we get with.
That’s why using relationships as a means of escape is a common reason why relationships end. Because they shouldn’t have begun in the first place.
How to avoid this situation
For any romantic relationship to work, there needs to be real feelings of attraction there and a real connection otherwise inevitably it will end badly. So always get with someone who you are attracted to, and who you know is attracted to you.
As the world changes, we change — and if people change relationships often struggle to survive
The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.
Rupert Murdoch
We are adaptive creatures, when our environment changes, whether willingly or kicking and screaming, we change with it. And as the world is a very fast-changing place these days, we are all changing rapidly with it.
As we change, that person we got with who may have been perfectly suited to us when we got with them, may no longer be suited to us. Or that person who was perfectly suited to us may have changed and may no longer be suited to us.
For example, a couple of friends of mine from university appeared the perfect couple. Both were doing the same degree, and both had the same ideas about pretty much everything. It was amazing how much in common they had. Literally, it was like they were made for each other. They even fought for all the same causes and everything.
Then Brexit came along, one picked one side, the other picked the other. The breakup was more brutal than the U.K.’s with the EU.
Another example is an elderly couple I know, one embraced the Internet world and technology, one did not, and their divergence brought a 30+ year relationship to an end.
Sometimes the world just changes and when we change with it, sometimes our relationships can’t survive those changes. This is why a rapidly changing world is a factor that can kill relationships.
How to avoid this situation
You can’t really avoid this one, if it happens it happens, it’s just one of those things.
Meeting lots of new people can change the way you see the people already in your life — and in the modern world we are always on the cusp of meeting lots of new people
You’re limited to 100 right swipes per day on Tinder. Think about that, limited to. In the past you would be lucky if you came across 100 potential matches across twenty or more lifetimes. That’s why all of us are struggling.
Unknown
Imagine living in a village of just thirty people, and never meeting anyone else in your entire life other than those thirty people.
It’s a fair bet that in your village of thirty you would find somebody to get into a relationship with. The question is if you lived in a village of a thousand people, could you say that you would pick the same person?
Sometimes even though we don’t intend to and are not thinking that we are doing so, we simply pick the best of the available options.
This means when we get more options, we may find there is a more suitable option available. So a person more on our wavelength.
That does not mean we will have an affair, but it may mean that we will fall out of love with the person we are with, and there may not be a damn thing we can do about it.
Meaning a factor that can cause relationships to end, is an increase in available options to one or both parties.
How to avoid this situation
Again, you can’t really do anything about this one. If you want to hide away from the world perhaps you can, but as our environment changes, we change with it. Meaning if lots of new people come into our lives, there is always a chance that one of those people will change the way we see the person we are with.
Modern relationships are about happiness — and the illusion of happiness during the honeymoon period and an inability to handle the fall from it can make everything that comes after feel drab
“That honeymoon phase is so much fun in real life, when you meet and discover somebody new and fall in love and chase them. The pursuit. And that climatic final moment of ultimate togetherness. It’s simply amazing.”
Lucas Neff
The honeymoon period of a relationship — due to the intoxicating flood of feel-good chemicals that occur during it — frequently gets compared to crack heroin. For good reason — as anyone who has experienced it will attest, the honeymoon period can be amazing.
But there is a big difference between how we navigate the end of the honeymoon period in the present compared to how we did so in the past.
In the past when it ended, normally there would be a child to keep the bond strong, or an unrelenting quest to produce a child. That is now rarely the case.
That means we have never evolved to handle the end of the honeymoon period in the way that we now do. Which is childless.
This is why navigating it — once all those feel-good chemicals stop blinding us and we cease being drug addicts — can be so challenging for some people. It is also why some people find it impossible to continue any relationship beyond the honeymoon period.
Because they can’t cope with the loss of the feel-good chemicals which were fuelling the initial relationship — they think that feeling is what a relationship is.
So a common reason for relationships ending is due to a desire to find a relationship in which the honeymoon period does not end.
How to avoid this situation
The end of the honeymoon period is when the real relationship begins. And real relationships have ups and downs and require hard work and effort to maintain.
People who accept these realities, that relationships have ups and downs, and that the first big down will always be once the honeymoon period ends, tend to have more long-lasting relationships.
Our instincts are built for a world that is totally different from the world in which we now live — potentially dooming us into making poor relationship choices
Instinct evolves by natural selection. […] The behavioural traits defining each species, no less than those defining traits of their anatomy and physiology, are hereditary. They arose and exist today […] because in the past they aided survival and reproduction.
Edward O. Wilson — The Social Conquest of Earth
Up until the mid-1900s, a woman getting pregnant while out of a relationship would find both her own future along with the life of her baby in great jeopardy. Who was going to provide for it? If the man who got her pregnant did not agree to do so, then she would be in big big trouble. And so would the baby.
Yes, the past was a tough world, especially for single women.
The present is different — thankfully, very different. Due to technological advances, societal changes, and the invention of contraception, sex does not have to equal babies. And even if contraception fails and pregnancy occurs outside of a stable relationship, women do not have to fear for their futures nor the lives of their babies.
This is why large numbers of women, despite numerous studies showing that casual sex makes them feel regret afterward, continue to have casual sex. Because the instinct that is making them feel regretful about it is no longer relevant — so they don’t listen to it.
There are many more examples of instincts that we still feel but which are no longer relevant to us. For example, feeling the need to be in a relationship no matter what. Feeling the need to be in a relationship for a purpose other than love.
Basically, our instincts can screw us over and make us think that a person is right for us when they are just not. Meaning our outdated instincts — which can lead us to make poor choices —are a possible factor that can cause relationships to fail. Because they can dupe us into entering relationships we should not.
How to avoid this situation
Don’t just listen to your instincts, listen to your heart and mind as well. Ask yourself do you actually like this person as a person and get along with this person as a person. More importantly consider whether, if you didn’t fancy this person, you would still want to be around them.
That means, despite the popular consensus saying otherwise, when it comes to modern relationships, it’s better to trust your mind rather than your instincts.
Relationships are no longer about surviving and making babies, predominantly they are now about finding happiness — meaning relationships can now end whereas in the past they could not
“More relationships have ended through choice in the last month, than in the entirety of history prior to the 1850s. I’ll be damned if I can work out whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”
Unknown
I already sort of covered this in the introduction, but it deserves further elaboration.
Prior to the 1800s, the child mortality rate was so high (historically close to fifty percent of children died before the age of five) and conditions were so difficult, that for the human race to survive, it was simply best practice for a woman to get with a man as soon as possible and as young as possible, and for a man to get with a woman as soon as he could provide for her so that she could start having babies.
This is why historically age gaps favour the older man with the younger woman. It is also why love did not matter. Because the goal was not love, it was survival, specifically the survival of the human race.
However, women no longer need to go through fifteen/twenty pregnancies just to produce two children who may or may not make it to adulthood and have children of their own.
Because of this men and women alike can take time over selecting their partners. Add this to the technological innovations which mean that men and women don’t need to be in relationships for their survival, add that to overpopulation.
Add all of the latter to a whole lot more, and all in all, what that means is that relationships now exist predominantly to make us happy. That means for the first time in history, personal happiness is the primary goal of a relationship.
That means the main reason why the majority of relationships now end is: because they can.
How to avoid this situation
You wouldn’t want to.
Final words
The ability to end an unhappy relationship is one of the greatest gifts of the modern world. Because it means you can put your own personal happiness first, rather than having to worry about the survival of yourself and the human race.
Never in history have we been able to do that. That doesn’t make relationship breakups suck any less, but at least it shows you how far we have come as a people.
That’s all from me, thanks for reading!
If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy the following:
The Five Main Reasons Why Dating in The Modern World Is So Difficult
Twelve Ways to Boost Your Chances of Finding Love in the Modern World of Dating
41 Hilariously Bad Chat Up Lines to Rock Your Date’s Night
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