Relationships with Expiration Dates
Earlier this week, during a visit with my friend Ken and his twenty-something daughter, the two of them recounted the blow-up that finally ended his second marriage. Back then he had not yet developed the degree of self-respect needed to end an abusive relationship early on. His wife had always been verbally abusive, but this time she crossed the line and grabbed her stepdaughter by the throat. Ken had to separate them; it got uglier; Ken and his daughter walked out for good.
Should he have left earlier? How do you know whether your partner–or friend, as this situation isn’t limited to intimate relationships–is still worth holding on to? How can you tell if they are really working on letting go of dysfunctional behavior?
In my first marriage, I knew after three years that I wasn’t happy, but the “D” word got stuck in my throat and I couldn’t cough it up. We went through the motions for another year and a half. Ironically, this was when I began teaching classes in personal growth! Physician, heal thyself.
I can’t honestly say how much longer I would have prolonged the charade if my husband hadn’t handed me a free pass out the door. Yes, the creakiest of clichés–I came home early from work one day to find him engaged in an extracurricular activity with a 19 year old girl from the neighborhood, etc.
Why do so many of us seem to insist on holding on to relationships long after their expiration date? There are tons of personal reasons of course, but at the root of all those reasons is this commonality: Humans fear change and will avoid it at almost any cost. Sometimes the price is very high indeed.
Doesn’t it come down to self-love in the end? If Ken had loved himself more; if I had honored my gut feelings, which is the same thing–we both would have accepted the truth that not all relationships are meant to last a lifetime. Not by a long-shot.
Everywhere in the media these days I read that the sharp rise in the divorce rate is a sign of oh so many negative trends in our society. I would suggest there is another angle from which to view this phenomenon: More and more people are waking up. And what happens when you wake up? You look around, see everything in your daily environment with new eyes, and suddenly the thought surfaces: “I have no business being here one minute longer.” Whatever “here” means–job, friendship, marriage, addiction–you just know it has to change. It may take you a while longer, but you’ll go.
I know that the person Diane is now would never stay in that earlier marriage; nor would my friend Ken stay in his. We’re waking up. The price we pay for increasing awareness is the often painful letting go of those things and people that no longer fit who we are becoming.
To my mind, that says that we can expect some relationships to expire sooner as we begin to honor their natural expiration date. As we become more discerning, perhaps our criteria for gauging the success of relationships will change. Will we find it easier to move on if we feel an intuitive knowing that a particular relationship has reached completion, for better or worse?