The relationship drama you’re far too old to be engaging in

Still relying on the silent treatment and public blowups? It’s time to grow up.

by: E.B. Johnson

No matter how old we get, there will be some drama or some conflict that rears its ugly head in our relationships. While these dramas traditionally lessen as time goes on, they can be exasperated when one (or both) partner(s) find themselves dealing with immature patterns of their own. If we say we’re old enough for a serious, committed partnership — then there are some actions that we just have to outgrow. Long-term relationships require maturity, and that’s something that can only come from within.

Stop engaging in the petty arguments and the public blowups. Stop begging for attention and clinging to your partner for dear life. Deal with the baggage of your past and find a way to move forward in personal confidence and strength; so that your partner doesn’t have to deal with your pain for you. The sooner you banish these immature behaviors or attachment to the past, the sooner you will be able to move forward in confidence, peace and security.

We have to grow up at some point.

If we want relationships that last, we have to grow up and figure out what we truly want from life and from love. This takes digging deep, but it also asks of us to look at our pasts and the pain that lurks there for what it truly is. The longer you run from the resolutions you know you need, the more the drama and the heartache will blight your relationship. Building mature relationships means building a better version of ourselves from the inside out, while looking at our pain and behavior honestly for what it is.

We have to grow up at some point and address our hangups if we want to build happier futures. Relationships blighted by immature behavior leaves us alienated and can also erode our self-esteem. While our romantic partners certainly aren’t the end-all and be-all of this life, they can offer us inspiration to do the things that we might otherwise never find the courage to do on our own.

If your relationships are impacted by constant drama and ego, it’s time to put the childish and juvenile behaviors of your past behind you. You can build more stable and equitable relationships, but it’s going to require you to dig deep and take brutally honest looks at how your behavior is impacting the world around you. Don’t settle for conflict, chaos and pain. Create a happier future and happier partnerships by addressing your baggage and laying claim to the actions you need to take in order to be a better person.

Reasons why we engage in the immature B.S.

Like any other pattern in our lives, immature behaviors are learned and ingrained deep within our subconscious. Whether we learn them in childhood, or we develop them as a result of traumatic relationships of our own — the key to overcoming them is identifying them and understanding them within ourselves.

Scared to go deep

To some, immature or explosive behavior is a means of self-protection. They become afraid of going to deep or being vulnerable with their partner, so when things get too real, or too raw, they blow up and run away under the cover of smoke. We can’t do this if we want to build better partnerships that add value to our lives. Doing that requires letting go of our hesitation to get too close, while embracing the act of opening up and being vulnerable with someone outside of ourselves. When we break down our walls, we allow ourselves to see and be seen.

Too self-centered

Frankly, some of us are too self-centered for a long-term relationship. We want what we want, and we expect everything to go according to our plan. While there is nothing wrong with this in theory, it becomes different in a relationship. When you are the only person in the world that matters, you can find yourself lashing out at those around you and punishing them when they don’t give you your way. Emotional tantrums become the norm, and blow-ups seem to confront you around every single corner.

Insecurities everywhere

Insecurities undermine our self-esteem, but they also seriously corrode our happiness within a relationship. When you have no confidence in yourself, it’s hard to have confidence in other people. Trust issues become common, and fights too can become a normal occurrence. This is because you have such a low opinion of self, that you are unable to understand how anyone else could love you. So you doubt your partner, and this doubt creates a divide that’s hard to move past.

Relationship trauma

Perhaps one of the most common reasons that we engage in poor or immature behaviors within our relationships is our past romantic experiences. Bad former partners teach us bad habits, and they can also teach us to invest in toxic behaviors. If your last partner cheated or constantly forced you to doubt them, you’ll come to expect the same from your next partner. Rather than giving them a chance to prove themselves, you might find yourself lashing out and creating drama that pushes them away before they can hurt you.

Poor examples early on

The examples set for us in childhood and early adolescence are important, and we grow up to perpetuate them in our adult relationships. Unfortunately, not all of these examples are productive. Sometimes, our parents and our caretakers teach us toxic forms of bonding and attachment that create juvenile beliefs and behaviors in our adult relationships. Parents that fought over insecurities, caretakers that undermined or mocked one another — all of those things count. Often, the immature behaviors we learn come right from the homes we were raised in.

Warped views on love

Though we tend to think that everyone has the same view of romantic love, nothing could be further from the truth. The way we see love depends on our perspective of it, and every person has their own unique perspective as formed by their unique experiences throughout life. Some of us form warped views on love and come to see it as something that should be filled with dramatic fights or explosive jealousy. The longer we cling to these warped perspectives, the more toxic our views on love and partnership become.

Relationship drama you’re far too old to be engaging in.

If you’re ready to put down roots and grow and long-lasting, stable, and healthy relationship, then you have to take an honest look at yourself and your behaviors. What immature actions are driving you further away from the people that you love? The further you embrace the truth, the more serious you can get about building a better tomorrow.

Inability to keep cool

As adults, one of the skills we should be working to master is the management of our emotions. The way we feel and think becomes more complex as we age. Our emotions are powerful and they can overwhelm us when we don’t master our thoughts and take charge of our own behavior and choices. An inability to keep your cool when things get tough is something you should be working past as a grown up who is managing their own lives. Temper tantrums are for children, after all, not our romantic relationships.

Playing mind games

Do you still rely on mind games to punish your partner? Or to make them fall in line with certain desired behaviors? Mind games are a sure-fire sign of immaturity in a relationship, and they also indicate partners who aren’t yet confident enough, or enlightened enough, to address and work through their emotions. Rather than asking for what they want, or talking like adults — they manipulate you through emotional game-play, or threats that hold the partnership hostage.

All-around messiness

Are you or your partner a complete mess? While our partners can provide support to us, they should not be held responsible for the drama and inability in our own lives. If you always drop the ball, create unnecessary drama, or implode your relationship through poor choice after poor choice — then your partner has a right to question it (and your partnership). As adults, we’re responsible for carrying our own weight in a relationship, and we’re also responsible for being respectful to and of our partners.

Nebulous identities

An important part of every relationship is setting boundaries and keeping both partners on the same page. At the earliest stages, this happens by putting a label on your relationship and making it clear (to everyone involved) precisely what your partnership is and what it is working towards. Refusing to identify what your partner means to you is a serious sign of immaturity. If you can’t call them your “boyfriend”, “girlfriend”, or even “partner” it indicates that you aren’t putting the relationship in a prioritized position in your life.

Town gossip

While you should never hold on to secrets like abuse or neglect, there are some details of our partnerships that just don’t need to be shared with others. If you have a major fight with your partner, it doesn’t need to be blasted on social media. And you certainly don’t need to get their mother involved. Some issues in our relationships are better worked out without the intervention of others, but that’s impossible when one partner is the town gossip. In mature, healthy and stable partnerships — we don’t feel the need to air our partner’s dirty laundry to others.

Constant jealousy

Are you constantly jealous of your partner? Do you envy their friendships? Their career? The way they carry themselves? While a tinge of jealousy is only human from time-to-time, major envy that erupts into arguments or conflict is not normal and it’s not healthy. Once you pass a certain age, this type of jealousy is not only corrosive…it’s concerning. At some point, we have to accept and trust that our partners have our best interests at heart. If we cannot do that, then we have to the adults that figure out whether the relationship is really worth it or not.

Withdrawal

Withdrawing emotionally is unhealthy, and it does nothing to help us resolve the issues in our relationships. The silent treatment never equals results. Reaching emotional maturity means we find the courage and the strength to stand up and talk about what’s troubling us, rather than avoiding it and running away. You can’t turn your back on your partner when things go wrong. You have to sit them down and both of you have to show a willingness to open up and talk about the tough stuff.

Over-the-top clinginess

Clingy partners are insecure partners who have not yet discovered the power and depth of their own self-love. They might have a history of family trauma that has taught them this; they might have a long list of romantic heartbreak behind them. Whatever the reason, their insecurity becomes overwhelming and they cling to their partners in ways that create even greater divides in their love and their relationships.

How to build more stable, mature relationships.

You don’t have to be stuck in these negative behavioral feedback loops forever. You can build happier, more effective partnerships by getting real about your own baggage, and taking steps to resolve your pain and your hangups. Don’t fight an uphill battle against instability forever. Transform your relationships (and yourself) from the inside out.

1. Work out your baggage

Before you can build a better relationship, you need to build a better self. Getting to the root of your baggage can begin that process, and it can help you to identify and move past your negative or immature behaviors. We have to look at the patterns of yesterday and identify those hangovers that we are still clinging to today. Then, we can release our pain and our baggage and find new and better ways to love and communicate with those we love.

Get some space from your partner and your relationship (regularly) and spend some time working through the heavy pain of your past. If you need to enlist the help of a professional, do so, but ensure that you’re committing to this work every single week.

Journalling is also a great place to start. Spend a few minutes just thinking through who you are and where you’re at. Look at personal behaviors that bring the most negative feedback into your relationship. Are there better, more efficient ways that you could get your point across? Are there different behaviors you could engage in that result in more peaceful resolutions for everyone involved? Work out your own baggage and stop bringing it into your partnership to manifest as immature and destructive actions.

2. Perfect the art of letting go

Romantic love is complicated, and it comes with a number of moving pieces that can make it hard to keep everything straight. You not only have to deal with your emotions, and the emotions of your partner — you also have to deal with their friends and family, your social circles, and the pressures of everyday living. There is so much going on that it’s impossible for all of it to be good. Part of learning how to grow up, however, is learning how to let go of the little stuff so that you can focus on what actually matters…the future.

Perfect the art of letting go and start taking a step back before you flip the switch or blow your top. At the onset of conflict or annoyance, imagine yourself literally leaving your body and looking at the entire situation from an attached, third-party point-of-view. Is it really worth a blow up? And the time it will take to fix it? Is this one aggravation enough to throw your whole relationship away?

The more often we ask ourselves questions like this at the onset of conflict, the quicker we can come to realize whether we are fighting a battle worth waging. Because our relationships are so intense, we can start to believe that everything that occurs within them is of great importance, but that just isn’t true. Some things aren’t worth fighting about, and mature partners who are confident in themselves and their relationships realize that. Don’t fight every battle. Pick and choose what’s worth it and let the rest go.

3. Learn how to talk about it

It’s impossible to have a stable and equitable relationship without learning how to communicate. You both need to be able to come to one another with concerns or problems and open up. You shouldn’t be scared of the other person, or what they will say about how you’re feeling or what you’re experiencing. Mature relationships are free of judgement and — for that reason — have improved channels of communication. Want to kick the fighting to the curb? Start talking about things before they become an issue.

Learn how to talk about how you feel and learn to listen when your partner does the same. Rather than running away from your feelings, take some time to process them and then find a safe time and place in which you can express them to your partner. Once your issues are out there, it’s important to work together to come up with a plan of action that can bring you both peace and comfort.

It’s important to remember that talking to your partner is just as much about listening as it is sharing your side of things. Give them space to express themselves and drop any judgements or dismissals you might feel compelled to give. You don’t have to justify or defend yourself. However your partner feels is theirs by right. Your job is to listen, take responsibility for the mess that’s yours, and then come together to figure out what actions you both can take to make things better. It’s about balance and finding the give and take in it all.

4. Find your independence

When we’re stuck in a place of reaction, rather than conscious action, it leaves us dependent on the people and experiences around them. Our entire lives become based around one emotional response to the next. We’re constantly braced for drama. The cure to this is creating a sense of independence for ourselves, while learning how to step up and take charge of the lives (and relationships) we’re so desperately trying to build.

Break free of your immature relationship behaviors by leaning into your independence. Stop making your partner responsible for your happiness, your entertainment, your healing. Find these things for yourself and create them independently if you must.

Lean into your personal space within your partnership. Get back in touch with your passions and the dreams that once motivated you to keep pushing forward. Rather than seeing your relationship as the focal point of your entire life, see it as a beautiful accessory — that adds more value to the overall tapestry that is your world experience. See the beauty in standing on your own two feet and take pride in the victories that you manage.

5. Embrace more compromise

Compromise is a key part of building a life with someone else, but it gets thrown to the wayside when we’re stuck in our immature patterns of attachment. While there are certainly some things that can’t be compromised on (like children, career, etc.) — the rest of our lives are spent making hundreds of small compromises each and every day. If you want to be loved, you have to make room in your life for someone to see you and know who you are.

Embrace more compromise in your relationship and let go of your compulsive need to have everything your way. We find the true beauty in our partnerships when we find the balance between the give and the take. Ask your partner to make a little room for you, sure, but make just as much room for them in your life.

Learn how to love your partner’s shine as much as your own. Learn how to give up things you kinda-like for things that they love. Understand that their passions — those things which interest them, or make their eyes shine a little brighter — are just as important as your own. The more we come to see our partners as just as important and capable as we are, the easier it becomes to do our growing up. Who wants to work downward? Lift your parter up by compromising with one another.

Putting it all together…

To many, romantic relationships form an important cornerstone of their lives. They provide support and a new way of viewing ourselves which can be transformative, but what happens when they’re plagued with our immaturity and insecurity? We have to let go of those childish behaviors which undermine our happiness. From public blow-ups to emotional manipulation, happier relationships require us to banish the bad habits in order to get focused on the good.

Work out your baggage, and come to your partner a whole person with a wide perspective on life, love and partnership. Perfect the art of letting go and understand that you don’t have to fight every battle; you don’t have to win every single war. Some things aren’t worth confronting your partner over. We have to learn to let go of the drama so that we can stand up maturely for the things that actually hold worth. Learn how to talk about your feelings instead of relying on the silent treatment, fear and emotional manipulation. Relationships are hard work, but they become easier when we find our independence and the courage (and strength) to be ourselves. Let go of your constant need for drama control and build more mature relationships by finding the compromise. Stable relationships require stable partners. Do you part in reaching this stability by growing up and getting real about what matters most to you.