Is your relationship going to last? Unfortunately 50% of first marriages don’t last and 70% of second marriages end up in divorce. These are staggering numbers. So what happens? You fall in love and everything is wonderful. Life is exciting, fun, and new at the beginning of a relationship. It seems like this person is perfect. You enjoy doing things together. You spend as much time as possible together and you can’t keep your hands off each other. But over time as the newness and excitement wears thin, other dynamics enter the relationship. Differences in values show up. Communication issues surface. Sometimes one partner begins to take the other for granted. Minor bickering can creep in and frustration or anger can build leading to arguments and hurt feeling. Some relationships can withstand arguments, after all, no two people can agree all of the time, right? But at this point, many relationships begin to fall apart and as they slip further and further into anger, frustration, and resentment it becomes harder to get it back on track. You find yourself wondering if your relationship is going to last?
So let’s take a look at why this happens and to do that we need to understand what makes a relationship healthy. A relationship has three phases
- Initial Attraction
- Establishing Relationship Patterns and Themes
- Real Love
Sadly, many couples never get to experience the third phase, real love, because the relationship can fall apart after the initial attraction. So let’s look at each of the three phases a little closer.
Attraction
What attracts us? Good looks? A great personality? Actually, we are attracted to people that bring energies into our energy field that match up with our energies and compliment them. It feels good to be in the presence of the energies that compliment what we have. It adds energy, vitality, excitement, even sexual energy. It feels like this person is the perfect match and in some ways they are. But just because you are attracted to each other’s energy, it doesn’t mean the relationship will be a good one. The attraction becomes less exciting over time, even though it still feels good and this is because the relationship is moving to the second phase where other factors become more prominent.
Establishing Relationship Patterns and Themes
As we begin to establish patterns and themes in our relationships, differences in values will surface. If these differences are around important and nonnegotiable core values and there is not a good match between the partners, this can be a big source of dissatisfaction in a relationship. Some of the larger values issues come from values like integrity, money, faith, equality, contribution to name a few.
Secondly, we are attracted to energy that is similar to the energy our parents have. There may be lingering issues, even trauma from our childhood around these energies that get carried into the new relationship. Sometime we expect the other person to fix the hurts we endured in the past from these childhood or teenage patterns. But no one can fix these hurts but you. When you set the expectation that your partner will be able to make all the hurt better, you set your relationship up to fail. What is necessary is that you do the inner work to love yourself despite the hurt from the past and you have open and honest communication about this issue with your partner rather than expecting them to fix it and blaming them for your hurt when they can’t.
Doing the inner work is about shedding the layers of conditioning you are living under and getting to the authentic you. It’s about overcoming feelings of low self-worth or not being enough that you may be projecting into the relationship in the hopes of getting rid of those feelings. It is about living in the highest expression of your energies and not living out the shadow side of the energies you carry. This phase is phase where even the most compatible people can bring baggage into a relationship that causes it to fail.
Achieving Real Love
Real love is the third phase of a relationship and it occurs when there is appreciation for the other, self-love, and honest communication. It is about acceptance of self and the other, releasing the conditioning and old patterns that interfere with being who you and your partner truly are. Each of us is divinely designed the way we are when we live in the highest expression our energy and liberate ourselves from the conditioning we have experienced from well-meaning parents, teachers, and society.
No one is perfect, but if you know people for who they truly are and cut through the conditioning you both have experienced, then the question to ask is are they perfect for you? It is the honest acceptance of self and the other that makes a lasting relationship.
If you would like to learn more about the potential red flags in your relationship, sign up for a Red Flag Relationship Reading under services on my website https://www.nancyokeefecoaching.com/red-flag-relationship-reading