If you were to ask people who have experienced a break-up or divorce why relationships fail, you may hear a number of answers. They fought all the time. Their partner was too controlling. They grew apart. They didn’t know how to communicate.
But according to relationship expert and author, Dr. Margaret Paul, the number one reason why relationships fail might surprise you.
Relationships fail not because of what your partner did or didn’t do. What they said or didn’t say. It’s not about your partner at all, it’s about the person you take with you into each of your relationships…you.
You bring your issues from relationship to relationship, which means you’ll go on to recreate unhappy circumstances with someone else.
The biggest issue we all bring—and the one that can and will bring a relationship down—is self-abandonment.
Self-abandonment is what happens when you make someone else responsible for your feelings and sense of self worth. You’re essentially looking to someone outside you to take away your uncomfortable feelings and make you feel okay.
We are all prone to this, and it starts in childhood. If your parents or caregivers didn’t know how to love, or couldn’t see your beautiful essence, you may have grown up to doubt your lovability and self-worth.
What’s more, after counseling couples for more than 50 years, Dr. Paul has seen, over and over again, that individuals who have relationship issues will likely carry those same issues into the next relationship…because ultimately, they’re looking to get the love and acceptance from a partner that they need to be giving themselves.
It’s why relationships fail, and why we carry the same issues from relationship to relationship: self-abandonment and a lack of self love.
Making Someone Else Responsible For Your Self Worth
According to Dr. Paul, relationship troubles can bring up many uncomfortable feelings that cause us to question our self-worth.
You may find yourself thinking, “Is there something wrong with me? Why do my relationships keep failing?”
This is why it’s very important to learn how to create our own sense of worth rather than giving that power to your partner.
When you make your partner responsible for making you feel okay, you’re going to “pull” on your partner. You will place an impossible burden on them to take away all your uncomfortable feelings. As a result, they will feel pressured, smothered, and controlled.
What happens when both you and your partner bring self-abandonment to the relationship? Then both partners engage in destructive behaviors that lead to fighting, disconnection, and infidelity. All of these are why relationships fail.
For the past 50 years (yes, 50!), Dr. Paul has been teaching individuals how to take action with regard to self love by listening to their inner guidance and taking responsibility for their feelings. When they do so, they stop waiting for others to change and instead, do what’s truly loving for themselves in order to feel happy. They free themselves from the thought that their happiness is dependent on how others treat them.
Dr. Paul has partnered with Flourish, to extend that help and guidance to as many people as possible, since almost everyone can benefit from learning about how to take action on self love.
When you subscribe to our FREE Relationship Advice Newsletter, you get access to an accomplished community of carefully selected experts giving you their best insights and strategies to overcome personal and emotional challenges. You’ll learn:
- The 3 common myths about self love and self-acceptance, and what you really need to do to have more self-assurance and inner confidence in your life
- What to do when you find yourself sabotaging your life through fear, doubt, and endless second-guessing, so you can finally free yourself to live the life you were always meant to live, and be the person you were always meant to be
- The 5 skills of happy couples and the specific behaviors, attitudes, and actions you can take to turn any relationship problem into an opportunity to get close and stay close
- The single, most powerful catalyst for happiness and healing in life and love that you’ve never considered, and how embracing this can help you tap into one of the greatest generators of love on the planet
- The often subtle ways fear of rejection and fear of intimacy show up and create painful consequences in relationships
- And much more!
Your love for yourself provides the foundation for a long lasting, healthy, and happy relationship.
And the good news is: thanks to the experts that Flourish has brought together, you can learn the skills that will help you heal from within…and save your relationship.
Heal Yourself and Your Relationship