The page is new, but the handwriting stays the same. Why we repeat the exact same mistakes in a new relationship.
Is breaking up during a crisis really a way out?
Relationships can be healthy, they can be troubled, and sometimes they reach intensive care.
When open questions go unresolved for too long at the troubled stage, the intensive care phase arrives, and it starts to feel much easier to end it all and try again with a clean page and someone new.
The problem is that the page is new, but the person’s handwriting stays the same.
In a new relationship, a person makes the exact same mistakes as in the previous one. At first, while there’s infatuation and no accumulated resentment or disappointment, it feels like everything got much better. But with time you realize that the new relationship brings just as much emotional pain and suffering — if not more.
I hold the view that if you start working on the relationship in your current marriage, you can fix the situation in 99.9% of cases. Move from intensive care to the stage where there are problems and occasional arguments, but life is livable. And then move all the way into a healthy relationship and be happy together.
Several hundred of our students have walked this path in detail in the “Healthy Relationships” program at the New Lifestyle school.
The moment a person starts taking the right actions in their current (seemingly hopeless) relationship, they gradually begin filling their partner’s emotional reservoir, and the motivation to separate starts weakening for both of them.
This is shown very well in the 2008 film “Fireproof.” Watch it if you haven’t. It clearly illustrates the model where only one person engages and manages to change the situation in their family.
And before you think or tell me it’s just a movie, I can show you plenty of my clients who followed this principle and saved their family when everything already seemed hopeless.
Thinking divorce will solve your problems is like being a bad driver and assuming that if you’re handed a new car (a new relationship), you won’t wreck it. But if we knew how to drive in the first place, the first car (the first marriage) might have survived too.
That’s why I believe almost any relationship can be saved if you genuinely start working on yourself systematically. And that’s why I work in education — because it’s through new knowledge and experience that a person’s life can change and never go back to what it was.
It’s better to go to driving school once and enjoy the ride than to spend your whole life swapping cars and living in a state of permanent collision.
Do you agree that it’s better to fight for your family than to look for a new person in the hope that things will be different with them?