A Break Is Not A Failure
Perhaps your partner has recently broken up, after thousands of doubts, several reconciliations and accumulating moments of sadness that seemed impossible to overcome. Leaving a relationship is usually a time of mixed feelings, not because there is more or less love left, but because it means leaving behind a stage of life, as others have been. Unfortunately one of those feelings is usually failure.
Thus, it is not strange that nostalgia for the lost is mixed with a certain enthusiasm for having been brave and having encouraged us to leave behind a situation that burdened our lives. Thus, they can be moments of true confusion in which we take one step forward, two backward, another two forward, until we finally get out.
Also breaking with a partner is usually synonymous with breaking with stability, since no matter how intermittent the other was as a point of support in our minds, we did not stop counting on him for our projects. Projects that in part may have been broken with the end of the relationship, others will survive but we will do them with other people or alone.
The feeling of failure when the breakup occurs
One of the most common feelings in couples who have just left the relationship is the feeling of failure. They had sworn love of the good, the eternal, the forever and suddenly they find a void in which these words make a very powerful echo. It is the echo of fear, and anger as well.
When a couple is formed, the most common is that the two people invest a lot so that the bond grows fast and strong. It is an investment in which enthusiasm, details and the desire to share time together prevail. A time that never seems enough, in fact it is one of the few things for which indulgence does not have to leave a hangover.
When time passes, the situation stabilizes and the two begin to pull on the strings that were previously loose, giving rise to the first tensions. No one can survive long in the first phase that we have described before, since it is a period in which the balance in which we put the facets of our life is totally unbalanced. The couple, friends and other personal projects are separated and with the normalization of the relationship, it is time to partially recover.
However, within this second period, although the investment is less crazy, it still exists. It is no longer so much giving or offering as building together. This building in turn creates that they will complicate any separation. We can talk about a house or a mortgage, but there are also the families of each one, the trip scheduled for the summer or the wedding they were going to go to together.
Breaking these ties is precisely what heightens the feeling of failure : they remind us that we were participating in a project that has disappeared. This feeling of failure is what makes, for example, a couple take a while to communicate that they have separated, despite the fact that they have not built together for a long time.
It is also easy for the feeling of failure to be accompanied by a deterioration of self-esteem, especially in people who have not finally made the decision. They may feel that they are not good enough for the other person to continue to accept them as a partner and generalize this thought to other areas that are susceptible to evaluation, such as job performance.
If we look at our relationship in another way, the feeling of failure will not appear
Thus, the feeling of failure is logical in this way of conceiving a relationship. A form historically inherited from previous generations in which separations were viewed with suspicion, if not certain repudiation, by society. It is also part of our way of life, in the sense that many of our present actions are conditioned by future pretensions. A future, which by the way, nobody assures us.
It’s funny, because when time passes and the grief is overcome, we usually remember the good moments of that relationship and not so much the bad ones. We are able to give it a meaning that would probably have helped us before. It is the sense that a relationship is worth it for what it gives you, not for what it will give you.
It is worth it for the shared walks, for the lovingly made dinners, for the silliest surprises or for the nerves before meeting the in-laws. You have probably bet a lot to make that happen, but really think if what you have given has not been returned to you by the relationship. Yes, the relationship, not the other person. Maybe he never prepared a surprise for you, but you didn’t have a great time repairing the ones you did, maybe he never went to pick you up at work but… .Did you enjoy it when you did it?
Viewing the relationship from this prism not only prevents a feeling of failure from appearing in the event of a breakup, but also motivates and stimulates us through something that we control. That something is nothing other than the pleasure of feeling how the other is protected with our jacket, when we shiver from the cold. That something is nothing other than what we do and it is in our hands, as well as moving forward in case the relationship ends.
