“How do I know when my relationship is over?”
If conflict is coming up within your relationship more and more frequently, you might be quietly wondering if it’s a sign that your relationship has run its course. Of course, all relationships have conflict, and conflict can even be a form of intimacy if you have the tools to move it with intention.
There isn’t always one clear sign that a relationship is over. It would be so easy and nice if there was! But just like the people inside the relationships, relationships themselves are a little more complicated and have a little more baggage and some messy history involved. It’s up to the people inside the relationship to look at the relationship as a whole and decide: is this a rough patch that can be worked through? Or is this a new normal and it’s time to make peace with the truth that we’re no longer compatible and walk away?
But there are some common indicators that can help you decide whether or not a rough patch can be worked through.
If you’re wondering if your relationship is over, consider:
Attachment and Connection:
Do you miss your partner after you haven’t seen them for a while? Do your lives feel meaningfully connected, or just sort of parallel to one another? When you get down to it, do you feel like a partnership, or do you only have peace because you’re detached from one another?
Being connected doesn’t have to mean spending every moment together. You can both live full lives independently of one another–separate jobs, separate friends, separate hobbies–while still wanting to be connected to each other by sharing moments that matter. Coming back to one another at the end of the day or calling each other on the phone to talk about the important moments you’ve had, talking through big decisions in your life. If you have no desire to share those big moments or talk through what matters–or if you even dread doing that–ask yourself why.
Is conflict constant and intractable?
There’s a difference between productive conflict–conflict that leads to a greater and deeper understanding of one another–and intractable conflict–conflict that will never be solved and seems to exist in an endless loop.
All relationships have some conflict, because people are messy with their own unique sets of baggage and deep wounds that often get poked at in our most vulnerable and intimate relationships. This is normal and even healthy! When you learn tools to work through these moments of conflict with the goal of understanding one another better, your relationship gets stronger.
If you’re not understanding anything more about your partner after moments of conflict and just feel like you’re tiptoeing around a minefield, that’s not a healthy relationship to conflict, and usually only leads to greater unhappiness and resentment.
Feelings of contempt and apathy:
Have you ever had the thought “do i even like this person?” Or maybe when conflict comes up, the fighting feels more important to you than the repair? And when you think about the repair you feel apathetic? Or maybe, when you think about your partner you feel apathetic? If you can’t think of why you’re even in this relationship or what you genuinely like or admire about your partner anymore, that’s probably a sign that your relationship is no longer serving either of you.
The role honesty has in your relationship:
Is it easy to be honest with your partner? Do you want to be honest with your partner? Is it even possible to share honestly with your partner anymore? Or does being honest only ever lead to fighting?
Do you fight about fighting?
Are you so exhausted by endless conflict in your relationship that you’ve started to fight about how much you’re fighting? This is one of those intractable conflicts, where you’re no longer having productive conflicts that lead to a greater understanding of one another, but fighting about how you each show up. When you’re fighting about fighting, what you’re really doing is seeing the ways in which you each show up as adversarial, and feeling contempt for the way you both showed up so much so that it leads to fighting about fighting. Neither is healthy or helpful.
If you want it to be over:
If you’re looking for a reason, that can be reason enough. Sometimes people wait until relationships get “bad enough” to end them, when the truth may be that it is simply not the relationship for them anymore. You may be doing both yourself and your partner a disservice by waiting until things get “worse” before ending things rather than ending the relationship now, when you both have a chance to part on more amicable terms (though relationships never end with both people feeling wonderful, so it’s okay if you can’t part as friends, you will both likely need some time to recover). If you know it’s time to end it and you’re looking for a sign, trust yourself.
These things don’t have to be a sign that your relationship is over–that’s only up to you.
There’s no magic formula that says if X then Y about your relationship, but these are warning signs that your relationship is doing more harm than good to you. If you want to learn to work through conflict better, you can learn the skills to do that in relationship therapy. If you want to get better at being honest with your partner about your feelings, you can work on that with a skilled couples therapist. It’s up to you and your partner to decide the future of your relationship and whether or not you want to put in that work!
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