It’s hard to imagine tolerating a relationship that makes you miserable. Hearing about other people who are in situations like that makes you stop for a moment to evaluate your own situation. It makes you do everything possible to reassure yourself that you are not in the same boat as the unhappily together couples are.
But ready or not, getting caught up in a cycle of unhappiness and routine is easy to do. All it takes is our willingness to comply with terms we do not agree to, but follow like we do. Everybody has their reasons for allowing certain people into their lives. Whatever the reason we have for choosing the people we bring into our inner circle, it always revolves around it benefitting us. Somewhere along the way we start losing the benefit and don’t notice. Before we know it, we are in a situation that offers us nothing but grief.
An unsatisfying relationship is frustrating and frustration leads to discontent with every other thing we may have going on in our life. This domino effect makes it hard to distinguish the rotten area of our life, so it continues to rot. Unless we take steps to figure out what it is that is taking away from our happiness, we will continue to feel bad to the point of becoming numb.
When we first get into a relationship, we notice all the good things that seem to come with it. We feel on top of the world. Because of this feeling, our tolerance of things that are not so pleasant goes up and we focus only on how good we feel. Our new relationship gets all the credit for everything that is good in our life.
When things start going wrong and the things that used to feel good and bring us pleasure no longer have that effect, we don’t think to look at our relationship. At least not at first. It actually may take us a while to think to look there for the missing piece to our puzzling unhappiness.
All we know is that we feel deeply dissatisfied and nothing we do seems to cure us. Then one day our partner snaps at us, or makes us feel bad, and it catches our attention. All of a sudden we realize that this wasn’t the first time. We realize that there has been a pattern developing for quite a while. A pattern of this person bringing us down. Everything begins to get very clear as we replay all the times that we were on top of world, only not because of them this time, and they dragged us down from the top, straight to the bottom.
At the very moment that realization strikes and sheds the candle of light on the root of our discontent many things run through our minds. We think of all of our options and how we could possible handle a relationship that is already so far gone. Then it occurs to us, we can simply walk away. Just walk away from it and don’t look back.