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Are you unhappy in a relationship? What are some common reasons people struggle to find happiness in their romantic relationships?
Relationships can be tricky when personalities and communication styles clash. However, you shouldn’t rush to end a relationship at the first sign of friction. First, identify the reason you’re unhappy with your partner and then make an effort to reclaim your love before you decide to break up.
Keep reading to learn about the most common reasons for being unhappy in a relationship and what you can do about it.
Fixed Mindset
Of course, everyone wants to be in a happy and harmonious relationship. However, even the most compatible people will clash sooner or later. But, it doesn’t mean you should necessarily call it quits.
According to psychologist Carol Dweck, the author of Mindset, one of the reasons people struggle to find happiness is because they have a fixed mindset about being in a relationship. The following are some of the most common, dysfunctional beliefs people with fixed mindsets hold about romantic relationships:
Relationship Belief #1: It’s Magic
People with fixed mindsets believe that if two people are right for each other, their relationship should always be smooth sailing. Compatibility means everything should come naturally and you shouldn’t have to work on your relationship. If you have troubles, then the relationship wasn’t meant to be.
In contrast, the growth-minded view is that they’ll work together to learn relationship skills, solve problems, and grow. Success comes from work and commitment, not magic.
Relationship Belief #2: You Both Can Read Minds
People with fixed mindsets believe partners should be so in sync that they can read each other’s minds. Of course, this is delusional: You need to communicate, not try to read minds. It’s easy to misinterpret what the other person says or means.
For instance, when Dweck’s partner asked for more space, she thought he was talking about changing or ending the relationship. But he only wanted more room where they were sitting.
Relationship Belief #3: You Should Agree on Everything
In addition to mind-reading, many fixed-mindset people believe two people in a relationship should have the same views about everything. A study showed how this works. Researchers asked couples to discuss their views of the relationship. People with fixed mindsets felt threatened and irritated when even tiny discrepancies in how they each saw the relationship came to light.
However, it’s impossible to share the same beliefs and assumptions about everything. That’s why this is a common relationship myth. It takes effort to communicate honestly and accurately, to understand each other’s views, and to resolve conflicts. You can live “happily ever after,” but it takes work.
Relationship Belief #4: Problems Equal Character Flaws
Those with fixed mindsets see problems as a sign of a character flaw. When conflicts occur, they look for something to blame—often their partner’s personality. They can become angry and disgusted with their partner, an attitude they extend to the whole relationship. Since they believe traits are set in stone, the problem is unsolvable. Or, to avoid believing the relationship can’t be fixed, they may deny problems instead.
Some people keep dating one person after another because they’re trying to find the perfect person. But everyone has flaws or things that look like flaws to us. Problems are normal occurrences in relationships. Growth-minded people accept flaws—they believe a person or relationship can still be good without being perfect. They also believe people can grow.
Relationship Belief #5: Your Partner Is Your Competitor
In a fixed mindset where you have to keep proving yourself, it’s easy to get into a competition with your partner over who’s more talented or intelligent. Here’s an extreme example: Cynthia always felt competitive and had to outdo her partners in the areas most important to them. For instance, when she developed a relationship with an actor, she started writing successful plays. These actions chased the men away. She didn’t allow them to have their own identity. She said she was just showing interest in their interests, but in reality, she needed to equal or surpass them at everything.
TITLE: Mindset
AUTHOR: Carol S. Dweck
TIME: 42
READS: 33.1
IMG_URL: https://www.shortform.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mindset-cover.jpg
BOOK_SUMMARYURL: mindset-the-new-psychology-of-success-summary-carol-dweck
AMZN_ID: B000FCKPHG
Stagnation
If you don’t hold any of these dysfunctional beliefs and are willing to work on your relationship, there are, of course, other reasons you may grow to be unhappy in a relationship. For instance, it’s common for relationships to stagnate over time. This is because people fail to adapt to each other’s changing needs as the years go by. To ensure your relationship evolves with the changing needs of both partners, dating coach Logan Ury (How to Not Die Alone) recommends two techniques:
1. Write a Relationship Agreement
In this agreement, articulate your relationship values and how you’ll express them. Revisit this agreement regularly at intervals that work for you—whether that’s yearly or biannually—to review and update it as needed. By doing so, you’ll deal with potential issues early instead of letting them fester and damage your relationship long-term.
For example, if you value time together, you might initially write that you’ll spend 12 hours one-on-one each week. Once you have kids, you may realize that you regularly only spend 30 minutes together one-on-one and work on adding more couple time to your lives. By doing so, you maintain your connection instead of growing slowly distant and thus unhappy in a relationship.
2. Scheduling a Recurring, Weekly State-of-the-Union Meeting
This meeting is a safe space in which you can communicate things with your partner that might be otherwise uncomfortable or brushed aside. By doing so, you maintain your bond and ensure that small problems don’t blow up into bigger issues because you haven’t dealt with them.
For example, you can express early on that you feel unappreciated when your partner doesn’t pitch in with household duties, instead of letting that disappointment sit without communicating it and feeling unappreciated by your partner in general. It’s critical that you actually schedule this ritual—if it’s already on your calendar and you don’t have to set up a time every week, you’re far more likely to have the meeting.
Self-Sabotage
Finally, there are people who are unhappy in a relationship because they don’t allow themselves to experience happiness. According to Gay Hendricks, the author of The Big Leap, this especially applies to “successful people.” Because they have already achieved success in other areas of their life, they are nearer their happiness threshold—what Hendricks calls the “upper limit problem,” so they can’t allow themselves to also experience happy relationships. Not only do they individually self-limit here, but in intimate relationships, couples will work in tandem with each other to create an intertwined happiness threshold and reinforce that.
Some of the common self-sabotaging behaviors in relationships are picking fights, communicating poorly, and engaging in power struggles. While each of these behaviors may be instigated by one partner, they all clearly take two people to create a cycle of conflict. Once both partners are engaged in bickering, vying for control, or dysfunctional communication patterns, the cycle gets very difficult to break. Thus, Hendricks emphasizes the importance of getting your partner on board in the process of addressing these telltale behaviors. In this case, two people are working together to reinforce the happiness threshold, so both partners need to commit to working on the problem, or one will continue sabotaging the relationship.
To prevent and fix these unhealthy relationship dynamics, Hendriks recommends a few strategies:
1. Both partners should regularly take alone time to recharge and reconnect with themselves. When we’re in a relationship, we need to maintain our sense of individuality and independence; when we don’t have this, Hendricks says that we will tend to create conflict to force that distance and avoid intimacy. So if both partners voluntarily take time away for themselves, they’ll be less likely to force that distance in unhealthy ways. Hendricks advises that any time you experience a high level of intimacy or happiness in your relationship, take a bit of time to do something “grounding” (connect with the earth in some way), in order to avoid falling into the pattern of bringing yourself and your relationship back down.
2. Both partners should commit to cultivating better communication skills. This involves practicing speaking openly and honestly about your feelings. Both partners need to allow all feelings to be expressed, without trying to suppress or avoid them in themselves or the other person.
3. Partners should remember to regularly show non-sexual physical affection to one another. This is just as important as sexual affection.
4. Hendricks advises creating a support network with a few friends, who would be willing to work together with you on the happiness threshold problems. You can support one another and hold one another accountable.
TITLE: The Big Leap
AUTHOR: Gay Hendricks
TIME: 22
READS: 44.6
IMG_URL: https://www.shortform.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/the-big-leap-cover.png
BOOK_SUMMARYURL: the-big-leap-summary-gay-hendricks
AMZN_ID: XYZ
If You’re on the Brink of Breaking Up
Finally, there are times when people are unhappy in a relationship with each other simply because they aren’t right for each other. Perhaps they weren’t right from the beginning, or they developed irreconcilable differences over the course of the relationship. This is sad, but it happens. Still, you should try and give your relationship a chance to recover.
To help your relationship heal, therapists Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt (Getting the Love You Want) developed a program of exercises around the core concepts of mirroring, validation, and empathy. These exercises fall into three broad categories designed to create feelings of mutual safety, explore your childhood needs and frustrations, and guide you to making the hardest changes of all.
1. Create Safety for Growth
Hendrix and Hunt insist that each partner must commit to the process and agree to remain a couple for at least three months. This creates a feeling of security for a partner who fears abandonment, while the time-limited nature of the commitment can be calming for a partner who feels trapped in an unhappy situation.
The next step is for both of you to identify and limit the ways in which you “escape” from the relationship. This can be by working late, staying out with friends, or spending excessive time pursuing hobbies. It’s also important to discuss the reasons and fears behind these escape routes.
Finally, in order to return the relationship to a state that doesn’t inspire the need to escape, it’s vital for a couple to have fun again, and to act the way you once did when you first fell in love. This can be very hard for couples who have been at odds for years. Hendrix and Hunt provides specific exercises to identify ways each partner can show their love and engage in spontaneous fun.
2. Learn Each Other’s Truth
Once a setting of safety has been established, it frees you to become open about your unmet needs. Part of this step requires individual work that begins when you visualize your primary caregivers. This can be either parents, grandparents, or anyone else who was responsible for your upbringing.
- Create a list of their positive and negative characteristics without differentiating between which caregivers the traits belonged to.
- Imagine your greatest childhood frustrations—what you wanted most that your caregivers never gave you.
Once you and your partner have established the general traits of your caregivers and the unmet needs left over from childhood, you’re ready to engage in the “Parent-Child Dialogue.” This scripted exercise is much like the Imago Dialogue, except that one person speaks from their point of view as a child, while their partner takes the role of a parent. The “child” speaks about a negative childhood experience, while the “parent” responds with validation and empathy.
For Hendrix and Hunt, what’s more important than any specific childhood issues is the way in which you and your partner interact. It’s vital that you listen to each other with curiosity and compassion so you can recognize each other as separate individuals and not merely placeholders for your unconscious parental images.
After exploring the ways in which your childhoods shaped you, you will then make a list of your partner’s traits as you perceive them. Many of these will match characteristics that you ascribed to your primary caregivers. With this information, it’s possible to consciously spell out the unconscious needs that you brought into your relationship.
3. Mutual Transformation
When we are unhappy in a relationship, we often wish our partner would change to meet our own desires. In a relationship where the couple are conscious allies, we commit to changing ourselves in order to meet our partner’s deepest needs.
The tool that Hendrix and Hunt provide to facilitate gradual transformation is the “Behavior Change Request Dialogue.”
- In this dialogue, one person brings up a broad-ranging desire that is followed by specific, actionable requests.
- The other partner can then choose from the options and agrees to follow through on one of the requests.
- The requests are made in the form of a scripted dialogue, with mirroring, validation, and empathy for each other.
Through this process, you and your partner will make incremental changes to your behavior. However, the Behavior Change Request is not transactional. Any changes you make must be done so freely, as a gift. You being able to choose which changes to make ensures that you don’t give up personal autonomy.
TITLE: Getting the Love You Want
AUTHOR: Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt
TIME: 17
READS: 20.8
IMG_URL: https://www.shortform.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/getting-the-love-you-want-cover.png
BOOK_SUMMARYURL: getting-the-love-you-want-summary-harville-hendrix-and-helen-lakelly-hunt
AMZN_ID: XYZ
Final Words
If you’re unhappy in a relationship, you may want to leave and find someone else. However, it’s quite rare for a relationship to be broken beyond repair. More often than not, you can mend your relationship by putting in the effort to learn about each other’s needs, find the common ground, and rekindle the lost intimacy.
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