If Your Relationship Breaks Don’t End It — Fix It
The world is an increasingly intolerant place, that extreme intolerance is finding its way into relationships and too often killing ones that should never end
I was speaking to a friend of mine who works as a relationship therapist and I asked her what in her honest opinion was the key to a successful modern relationship. She told me that extremely high levels of tolerance as people were nightmares these days.
After the laughter died, she told me that she wasn’t joking about the former part and added that she had found the people who had the most successful relationships had high levels of tolerance, specifically towards differences of opinions and wants and needs, along with very open minds, and a strong desire to fix things when they work broken.
It was the latter part that really caught my attention, the most successful relationship people she had come across were problem solvers who weren’t afraid to embrace new and out-of-the-box ideas to fix problems. This didn’t surprise me, but Hannah’s reasoning for why this was so important did at first surprise me.
She told me that those who do not do everything in their power to try to fix a relationship every time it breaks, tend to be the ones who find it increasingly difficult to ever form relationships.
On first hearing her say that, I’m not going to lie, I was certainly not sold. After all, sometimes a relationship breaks so badly that it clearly can’t be fixed.
Hannah though argued that even then you need to try everything in your power to fix it, because only then will you know for certain that it can’t be fixed, and the brilliant way she explained her reasoning behind why having this attitude is so important sold me on her point. As such, I wanted to share her reasoning.
The brilliant way Hannah argued that if you’re not willing to try to fix a relationship every time it breaks, you may as well not look for one
Hannah put it to me like this: “Imagine a relationship is like a car. When you enter a new relationship, it is like a shiny new car.”
“However, as cars age they get battered and they need new parts, also, they are going to need to be regularly serviced. On top of that, they are going to get scratches, and many are going to break down, some are even going to crash and need full repair jobs. More than that, some are going to crash so badly that they are going to need to be completely rebuilt from the ground up.”
“Relationships are the same,” Hannah emphasised. “However, unlike with cars — when getting a new one is often a smart option if one proves especially troublesome — replacing a relationship when something’s gone wrong is rarely the best course of action.”
“The reason being, is that once you decide that replacing a relationship is the preferable option to trying to fix the one you have, that will become your standard practice every time there is even a slight bump in the road — let alone a big one.”
“The fundamental problem with this is that, just as every new car is just as likely to get scratches, to break down, to need to be repaired, and to crash so badly that a full repair job is needed, so is every new relationship.”
“That means one nice shiny relationship is rarely different from another — sometimes it is, but rarely — meaning once you start replacing your relationships every time they break down, you are no longer getting into them for the right reasons, instead, you are “buying” them for how shiny they are — or appear to be.”
“Once you start doing that, it’s hard to come back because the relationships you enter become increasingly superficial i.e. you are saying it is not about what’s under the hood but how shiny it is on the outside.”
“Worse than that, by repeatedly doing that you never learn or grow as a person, and neither will any partner of yours learn and grow with you — the core elements of relationship and personal growth.”
Why I love this analogy
In the world we live in, we have access to so many people, especially when it comes to dating, as such it’s easy to think that when a nice shiny relationship breaks or ceases being quite as shiny, it’s better to get a new one and hope that it does not lose its glistening sheen.
So, it’s easy to think that because this one has been screwed up for whatever reason, it is best to end it and take what you have learned into the next relationship so the same thing won’t happen.
It may not happen in the next relationship, but the odds are something will, and if your attitude is to learn the lesson and do better next time, you are never going to grow as a person enough to be able to learn how to not only pre-empt problems and breakdowns before they occur, but how to survive them up when they do incur.
Not just that, but you’re not going to learn the most important relationship strengthening method, how to survive relationship breakdowns and come out of them stronger together.
The more relationships break down, and the more you work together to fix them and rebuild them, the stronger the relationships end up being, the more you keep doing that with one individual, the more bonded you both end up being.
This is often how infidelity can so often lead to a relationship becoming so much stronger than it was, it is not because of the infidelity, it is because the couple involved has the attitude of working together in an open-minded manner to fix problems.
That attitude builds bonds, and the stronger the desire is in both parties, the stronger the potential for a successful relationship.
Final words
Some things in relationships should never be tolerated, abuse being a prime example. However, outside of the world of abuse, if a relationship breaks for whatever reason but was good once, the odds are if you’re willing to fix what is broken it could be even better in the future.
That’s why it’s always better to try to fix a relationship every time it breaks rather than try to seek out a new one, because only by fixing relationships when they break, can relationships grow into those fulfilling and long-lasting things that we all desire. After all, as the age-old adage goes, what doesn’t break us, makes us stronger.
That means if your relationship breaks, don’t end it, fix it. Odds are — one way or another — you’ll be all the happier for doing so.
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