Relationships 4. The REAL reason why relationships break down

We have come to the last post of this series, and to THE message I wanted to share.

Why do people break up or why can’t we suddenly be friends with a person anymore?

This is not about love, it is not about caring for this person or not.

It is that we simply don’t work together anymore. 

Someone asked me recently: “Don’t you think we should strive for relationships that start with love at first sight?”.

I heard myself reply: “I think love at first sight is really about our automatic patterns, the things that we carry inside our nervous systems that lead us to be attracted to some things, but maybe these are no longer the things that we want to go for as a person living in 2024”.

I realised my work with trauma explains why I said this, because I often work with clients on what they want for themselves versus what their life experiences so far have led them to be driven to. 

This links well to what I think happens most of the times when relationships end: “I care a lot about you, but this relationship is not what I want anymore. It is not what I deserve. It is not what I need in my life.”

It is not only that two people are not the same as when they first met, but they no longer match each other in what they carry in their nervous system; what they expect from the world, from their relationships, from their lives; what they want to achieve; how they want to be treated - the list goes on. 

My guess is that anyone reading this has been in relationships, not just with romantic partners but with friends or at work, etc where there have been people that you felt really drawn to, where you felt “oh my, this person is amazing”. Then life happened, you have each been on your own journey and this person became “someone you used to know”.

This is the real reason why relationships break down.

I want to emphasise this: when this happens, it never means the relationship did not matter. It doesn't mean we don’t care for this person anymore or this story never happened.

But I think the myth that love can and should conquer anything, and also that myth about love at first sight, mean we struggle to reconcile this reality and see it for what it is: it can be very painful, but it's okay to grow. 

It's okay to evolve, and to evolve in different ways, even when this means that we now can't stand traits in a person that we loved when we first met them.

It's okay, but it doesn't mean it's easy. 

And that's why my next series of blog posts will be about grief and loss. I will be touching on grief and loss in the context of relationship breakdown.