Ending a love relationship may be the greatest emotional pain you will ever experience. The pain is so great, in fact, you may react with denial or disbelief. This only prevents you from facing the important question: Why did my love relationship have to end? There are rarely simple answers, so it will take some time and effort. Until you can accept the ending, you will have difficulty adjusting and rebuilding.
Owl is crying forlornly in the dark,
I heard him calling to his mate last night.
I waited with him to hear the familiar answering cry,
And my heart fell with his
as the silence fell, louder than a cry.
He is still calling tonight,
Only to be answered by longer silences.
I have never seen the owl.
I have only heard him calling
And waiting…
—Nancy
Look at the big crowd gathered at the trailhead waiting to climb the mountain! There are so many kinds of people waiting—all sizes and colors, all ages, both men and women, some wealthy, some poor. Some people think that only losers get divorced, but many of these look like winners. Some are eager to start the climb and are doing calisthenics. Some look in shock—as though they have just witnessed a death. There are some who look up the mountain and act overwhelmed, as though they expect never to be able to climb to the top. Many are waiting around, expecting their former love partners to pick them up so they won’t have to make the climb.
Many act confused and disoriented. John is shaking his head and mumbling, “I thought we had a good marriage. I had been the captain of the football team in high school, she was a cheerleader. Everyone predicted we would be perfect together. Then last week she dropped the bombshell on me. She said she was unhappy, that she didn’t love me, and she wanted a divorce. She left with our two children to stay with her parents. I was dumbfounded. I thought it would never happen to me.”
Mary is impatient to start the climb. She is telling a passerby, “I was so unhappy in our marriage. I wanted a divorce but was afraid to initiate any actions. Then he was killed in a train wreck, and everyone thought I was weird because I felt so little grief. But his death left me free to climb this mountain. When do we start?”
We hear Rita saying, “He has left me and is living with another woman, but I know in my heart that he will always be my husband. God made this marriage and God will have to end it. I refuse to climb this mountain and will stay married until I die. Maybe when we get to heaven, we will be together again.”
David is warming his feet by stomping on the ground and appears to be cold and in shock. “I had a good marriage. We never fought. But last night, she told me she had fallen in love with my best friend and she was packing her bags to leave. I went in the bathroom and was sick. This morning, I called my lawyer and asked him to start divorce proceedings.”
Maria is a gray-haired grandmother. “I lived with him and gave him my whole life. I planned to share the harvest of our years in old age with him. But he left without giving any reasons. My harvest is destroyed, and I am too old to plant another crop.”
We could fill this whole book with stories similar to these—similar yet unique stories of people who are reacting in many different ways to the ending of their love relationship.
It is hard for anyone to be comforting when you are hurting so much. The most help we can offer at this point is to listen to your reality of the crisis. You may feel as though you have failed, as though you have been hit in the stomach and had your emotional wind knocked out, as though you have just experienced death even though you are still living. The initial shock is easier for those of you who made the decision to leave and who were more prepared for this crisis, but the ending is still painful no matter what the circumstances.
The big question you may be asking is “Why?” You feel a strong need to understand what went wrong, to perform an “autopsy” on the dead relationship. You want to know why, yet denying the pain often prevents you from accepting the results of this emotional autopsy. To understand why it ended helps you overcome the denial, so in this chapter and the next, we’ll discuss some of the reasons love relationships die.
It’s fun to start a talk with teenagers by asking them, “How many of you plan to get married?” Usually, about half of them raise their hands. Then the next question: “How many of you plan to get divorced?” There are never any raised hands after this question.
No one plans to get a divorce. And most of us deny it at first even if it does happen. We want to bury our heads in the sand like ostriches to avoid the storm. But, like the ostrich, we have problems in our love relationships that are more obvious to others than they are to us.
There are three entities in a love relationship—two individuals and the relationship between them. It is analogous to a bridge: the two people are the foundations at each end of the bridge; the relationship is the span that connects the two foundations. When change occurs in one or both of the foundations at the ends of the bridge, it strains the bridge itself. Some changes are too great for the bridge to handle, and it falls into the river. In people, such changes may result from personal growth, education, religious experiences, attitude shifts, illness, anxiety, anger, relocation, or maybe a reaction to stress or trauma. (One way to prevent such stress on a relationship is to never grow or change—not a very healthy way to live, is it?)
You may recognize that you or your love partner recently went through a period of change and personal growth, and that upset the system of your love relationship, tumbling your bridge into the river.
If you need to doubt and question yourself and your abilities, you may feel that you should have been able to adjust to this stress resulting from change. If you had been, you would be unusual. Two of the most important abilities we need to learn in our lives are how to build and maintain the bridge between two people in a love relationship and how to parent our children. And where do we receive education and training for these two important roles? From our parents mostly. And TV. And other adults. Not always helpful or well-informed sources. In a talk to a group of about a hundred women, Bruce asked them how many would like to have a marriage like that of their parents. Only one raised her hand! Did the rest receive good training from their families on how to have a happy love relationship? Did you receive good training and education on how to adjust to a strain in your love relationship?
Perhaps relationship counseling would have helped you to adjust? Perhaps. We are terrific marriage counselors when both parties want to work on the relationship, but lousy marriage counselors when only one wants to work!
What was the reality in your love relationship? Were both you and your partner wanting to work and improve the system, or did only one of you want to work on the relationship? If only one is willing, then it is not very likely that the relationship will improve. A team of horses will not pull a very big load when one of the horses is lying down.
You may be punishing yourself with feelings of failure in your love relationship by playing the “if only” game: “If only I had listened more… . If only I hadn’t become so angry.…If only I had made love to her every time she wanted to.…If only I hadn’t been such a bitch.”
We hope by now you have satisfied your need to punish yourself. We suggest you let it go. Your hindsight is much better now. You have learned a great deal about life and about yourself since the troubles began in your love relationship. Your awareness and your insights are much improved. How about using the new awareness and insight as a basis for further growth rather than self-punishment? Do something for the rest of your life, not the past. Try saying, “I did the best I could with what I knew and what I had to work with,” and leave it at that. Now you’re going to work on today, and tomorrow, and the next day, and the next… .
Maybe your relationship failed because there was a third party involved. It is easier to be angry at that third party than it is to be angry at your former love partner or yourself. There is a catch-22 in being angry at your former love partner: “You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” How can you be angry at the person you loved? It is easier to be angry at the person who came in and “took your spouse away from you.”
There are many reasons why one partner leaves a relationship to become involved with another. You may feel that the other person had something to offer that you didn’t have. That may be true in some cases. But every love relationship has some cracks in its foundation, and in many cases—and for many reasons—these cracks may result in a breakup. Patterns of development and interaction start long before love relationships end. If there were such serious cracks in your relationship, it may be difficult for you to see and understand them at this time.
Here’s an example. Many people have not freed themselves from their parents’ influence when they marry. They don’t have identities of their own, separate from being children of their parents. Such a person may later decide to dump a love partner. But when you examine what is really going on, you see that he or she is actually dumping the parents’ control and influence. To rebel against the spouse may be, in reality, to rebel against the parents.
So the crack in your relationship may have begun even before you married. And if there was a crack in your relationship, it is easy for a third party to become involved by filling that crack. It often is easier—or seems easier—for a person outside of the relationship to fill the deficiency than it is for a person who is part of the relationship. A good marriage counselor may be able to help you explore and understand some of the cracks and deficiencies in your past love relationship.
There is another important phenomenon that frequently contributes to the demise of a marriage. Many couples make the mistake of investing all of their time and energy into a project external to the love relationship. Examples might be building a new house or business or going to school. This external project may keep the couple so occupied that they have little energy or time to invest in their love relationship. In fact, the project may become a method of avoiding each other. When the house is finished, the couple finds they have nothing in common anymore, and the new house becomes a monument to their divorce.
Many people ask, “Why did so-and-so get a divorce?” Sometimes a more relevant question is, “Why did that couple marry?” (Bob recalls a college paper he wrote that began, “The basic cause of divorce is marriage.” Not profound, perhaps, but not far off when we look at the facts surrounding most divorces.)
Many people marry for the wrong reasons, among them (1) to overcome loneliness; (2) to escape an unhappy parental home; (3) because they think that everybody is expected to marry; (4) because only “losers” who can’t find someone to marry stay single; (5) out of a need to parent, or be parented by, another person; (6) because they got pregnant; and (7) because “we fell in love.” And on goes the list.
We’ll talk more about love in another chapter, but for now, let it suffice to say that there are many levels of love and not all are mature enough to provide a sound basis for getting married. It’s common to develop an idealized image of another person and to fall in love with that image instead of the real person. When the honeymoon is over (a long time passes before reality hits), disillusionment follows; that person is not living up to the idealized image. Perhaps “falling in love” is an attempt to fill some emptiness, rather than a sound basis on which to build a marriage.
Those who get married for these wrong reasons (including “falling in love”) might be described as “half people” who are trying to become whole and trying to find happiness by getting married. Even the usual wedding vows talk about “two people becoming one.” During a talk with a group of ministers, one asked if Bruce thought the marriage vows were contributing to divorce. When he replied “yes,” the discussion grew lively, and a few of the ministers began to consider changing the vows in the marriage ceremony.
Similarly, Bob has often objected to the common marriage ritual in which two candles (representing the two partners) are used to light a single candle (representing the relationship)—okay so far—but then the two are extinguished! What happens to those individual partners when their “candle” goes out?
When you are ready to face life alone and have found happiness as a single person, then you are ready to face life together with another person. Two whole people who have climbed the mountain of personal growth and self-awareness will tend to have a much more dynamic relationship than two half people joining together in an attempt to become whole.
Most of the wrong reasons people get married can be summarized by stating that the unhappy person expects that getting married will bring happiness. Do you remember movies about marriage in the old days? (Television has seen to it that no one is too young to have seen them!) The movies were all about the courtship of the couple. When they married, the movie ended. The subtle message was that you became married and without effort lived “happily ever after.” Such a fairy tale!
Bruce’s son Todd writes his ideas and thoughts on paper, and often they are profound. As a young man, he described a good reason for getting married: “At some time in the future during my growth toward becoming a full person, there will come a day when my cup runneth over so profusely that the need will arise for another person to soak up the excess.”
Recognizing the ending of an unhappy and unproductive relationship may help you look at your divorce as a decision reflecting good mental health. Take a look at your former relationship, your former partner, and yourself. Set aside for a moment all of society’s reasons why you were “meant for each other.” This is the time for painful honesty. Ask yourself:
We hope these questions were not too painful for you. Your honest answers will probably help you recognize that your relationship really was at an end in many ways, even before the formal separation or divorce. It is tough to acknowledge some of those shortcomings. It is even tougher to accept that you were part of the problem (easy enough to blame your partner, society, or someone or something else). Acceptance, however, is the all-important positive side to the denial rebuilding block.
Take some time with this. And remember: you do not have to take on a load of guilt in order to accept that your relationship is over! Stay out of the “if only” game. The reasons, the contributing factors, are as complex as those structures that support a bridge. It takes a great deal of analysis of known forces and stresses and loads and strength of materials to build a successful bridge. How infinitely more complex is a successful love relationship! And how little most of us really know about the interpersonal forces and stresses and loads and strength of our own materials!
You’ll learn much more as our journey up the mountain continues. For now, take a deep breath and say it: “My love relationship has ended.”
Now let yourself cry for a while.
Now that you are up to your tears in the reasons why relationships end and you have taken a hard look at the cracks in your own former love relationship, you may be feeling “sadder but wiser.” And maybe a bit down on yourself. You are not alone.
In fact, one subtest of the Fisher Divorce Adjustment Scale was designed to measure acceptance of the ending of a love relationship, and data from this scale over the years has revealed that feelings of acceptance and self-worth are significantly related. More specifically, the better your sense of self-worth, the easier it is for you to accept the ending of your love relationship.
If you have difficulty starting the journey up this mountain because you refuse to accept the ending of your love relationship, you may need to work on improving your self-concept. When you are in the shock of a recent ending, telling you to improve your self-concept is like blowing in the wind—it does not change much. Still, you will find it true. Especially after we deal with self-concept more in chapter 11, you will experience the difference for yourself as you discover more of your own value.
As you come closer to standing alone, to accepting that your relationship has really ended, the emotional pain will get pretty intense. And the pain you are feeling is real. Divorce and death of a spouse are probably the two most painful experiences you will feel in your life. Millions of other people have felt the same things you are feeling as your relationship ends. It hurts. And even knowing you’re not alone helps only a little. But we need to use our pain to learn. To flow with the pain rather than denying it. To use it as motivation to grow and turn the crisis into an opportunity instead of an experience that leaves us with wounds that never heal. We can use the pain as an excuse to remain bitter, angry, unhappy; or we can use the pain to grow. Which do you choose to do?
Those of you who believe that you will be getting back together with your former love partner probably feel there is no reason to climb this mountain of adjustment. What’s the best plan of action for those of you who want to get back together? Do you have to climb the mountain? If your relationship has become fractured to the point of physical separation and you are talking about divorce, you may need time apart to change the old patterns of interaction. You may need to close off the bridge to traffic while you shore up the foundations. Experience individual personal growth before you start working on the bridge. It’s pretty easy just to move in together again, but it’s difficult to make the old relationship more meaningful and productive unless both people go through changes. You may need to climb the mountain before you go back to your former love partner!
There are three areas relating to denial that cause problems for kids.
The first is that children of divorce will continue to maintain some sort of a fantasy of their parents getting back together again. They have difficulty accepting the reality that their parents’ relationship is over. It may be surprising for you to learn how strong this fantasy is in your children. You continually need to present them with the reality that the relationship is over so they don’t continue to invest in this fantasy.
Your kids may use all kinds of manipulative behavior to try to get the two of you back together again, to have you spend time together, or to get you talking to each other. Kids have a large emotional investment in not accepting the ending of their parents’ relationship and in hoping that their parents will get back together again. Respond gently but firmly and persistently with your own decision—that the marriage is over.
The important second aspect relating to kids in this denial stage is their belief that they did something to cause your breakup. The last time that they disobeyed—when they didn’t go to bed or clean up at mealtime or do their household chores—they think this led to your fight and then to your divorce. Try hard to help your kids see that it’s not their fault and that divorce is a grown-up problem.
Third, children fear that now that they have “lost” one parent, could they then lose the other? They tend to be very clingy and dependent upon their parents at this point, and they need a lot of reassurance that neither will leave them. Parents do divorce each other, but they do not divorce their children. You need to reassure your children that even though Mom and Dad are divorced from each other, you will never divorce them.
Thoughts about Friends and Lovers
I want to become somewhat parental and talk to you about how vulnerable you are to becoming involved in another love relationship as a way of making your pain go away. My belief is that you need friends rather than lovers right now.
Have you read Homer’s Odyssey? This Greek myth tells of sailors on a journey filled with various obstacles. One of these obstacles is an island where beautiful female sirens attempt to seduce the sailors into stopping. (The sailors have been forewarned that stopping will lead to their destruction.) They prevent the sirens from tempting them by tying themselves to the ship’s mast and blindfolding themselves.
Like Homer’s sailors, you will need to tie yourself to the mast of self-discipline and avoid becoming too deeply involved in another love relationship until you have healed some of the emotional pain. Almost always, a relationship that is started when you are in deep pain will add to your misery in the long run. But friendships are helpful; and if you can build friendships rather than love relationships, it will be more productive for the present.
Imagine a circus tightrope act. The platform at one end represents the security you had in the love relationship. The platform at the other end represents the security you need to find within yourself. You need to walk across the tightrope in your adjustment process to find that inner security.
You can fall off one side by withdrawing into your home and not making any friends.
You can fall off the other side by becoming deeply involved in another long-term, committed love relationship—if you’re investing more in the relationship than you are in your own personal growth. You wake up one morning and discover you’re trying to please the other person and trying to make the relationship work, but you’re not trying to become the person you wish to be.
But having friends is the balance pole that will help you keep walking across the tightrope. Friends give you honest feedback that is not biased by a need to have your love. Friends are more objective than lovers, and you need objectivity at this point in your life. Set yourself a goal: learn to be happy as a single person before you become coupled again!
—Bruce
You may be making this journey even though you don’t want to, even though you are still married in your heart. The emotional pain is so great that you know you have to climb. It will benefit you to learn as much from this journey as possible, so decide to make it a positive experience rather than one you undergo begrudgingly.
In the next chapter, we’ll continue our exploration of why love relationships end. Before you go on, however, take time to complete this chapter’s checklist, to help you decide if you are ready to move on to the next portion of the trail. Use it to check out your progress. No one is grading you, so be very honest with yourself.