John SchneiderAre you thirty-something and single, wondering when you’ll be married with children?
Is your life a broken record, repeating the same cracked relationship over and over and over and over?
Some people get stuck in a vortex of relationship sabotage. If this is you, how can you identify the problem and correct it? Here’s what may be keeping you from that happily ever after.
Here’s what may be keeping you from that happily ever after — and what you can do to fix it.
You make it all about you.
As a gay man, the idea of being treated like a queen sounds fantastic in theory. Our
Our kings need attention, too, though. We love it when he brings home flowers and when he opens the door to lets us in first. But, without reciprocation, after a while, he’ll feel like a chauffeur and not a partner.
On the flipside, gentlemen, your lady friend may relish taking care of you, but if you act like you’re the only one at home, soon you’ll be home alone.
If you make it all about you being treated like royalty, you’re sabotaging your relationship.
A healthy relationship is a relationship of equals. At any one time, it’s never 50/50, but we should seek an average of making it as much about them as it is about us. Once you focus on your partner as much as you focus on you, things will improve.
Your ego is more important than peace to you.
If you’re more concerned about having your way than having peace, you’ll eventually have neither.
Our egos seek to be right. The desire to be right is at the heart of most wars, big and small. Our higher selves want peace. A priority of peace is the core of everlasting love. Thus, the age-old adage of never going to bed angry with your lover.
Practice leaving your ego at the door. Seek peace in your relationship and focus on the good in your partner.
You’re guarded.
Relationships require intimacy. Otherwise, they’re friendships. If you’re don’t let your partner connect with the deeper you, the relationship will stay superficial and then become unofficial.
If you want someone to be with you through the thick and thin, you must be brave enough to let them see the good and bad. If opening up your deeper self seems too scary, let sharing that be your first step in opening up.
You don’t value yourself.
It’s impossible for us to let others love us when we don’t love ourselves. If we don’t love ourselves, we’ll never trust the love we receive from others. We’ll either be cynical or skeptical of the love we’re receiving.
It seems strange to think that lack of self-love is sabotaging your relationship, but it could be.
If you don’t love yourself, any relationship you pursue will be an exercise in futility. Take time to work on you rather than becoming part of two. When you find the love inside that you seek from the outside, you’ll find better love than you ever imagined.
You become your partner.
Assuming your current S.O.’s likes and dislikes, interests and disinterests, is a byproduct of not valuing yourself.
As outsiders, we’ve all seen the person who changes as often as they change relationships. It can be hard to see this in ourselves because we so desperately want our current relationship to work. But, if we can’t be ourselves or don’t know who we are, we’ll eventually hit a point of unhappiness.
Plus, in healthy relationships, you don’t want a clone. It gets boring. You’re sabotaging your relationship if you try to be just like your partner. You love each other for the spice and the differences. Figure out you, and don’t be afraid to do things without each other sometimes.
Your actions don’t match your words.
Sometimes we think we want a relationship because that’s what we believe we should want. Our culture is obsessed with love and marriage. This obsession is why nearly every song is about one love, and every television show eventually has a wedding.
If you’re a single woman in your thirties, people wonder what’s wrong with you. If you’re a single man in your forties, people assume you’re gay. There’s nothing wrong with being single and thirty or forty or fifty and many people live lives of happiness as a solo.
If you’re in a relationship because you feel compelled to be, your words may say something, and your actions will say another. Eventually, your partner will catch on, and one or both of you will let go.
Figure out what it is you want and then live your life accordingly. Both you and your current partner will be happier.
You keep your partner guessing.
Being coy or playing cat and mouse may add to the excitement at the beginning of a relationship, but eventually, even cats get tired. If your partner isn’t sure where they stand from day to day or sleep from night to night, they’ll eventually seek more certainty even if it means being certainly alone.
Either know when to move your relationship from the romance phase towards the stability phase or figure out what it is you truly want and then live your life accordingly (see above).
You have unrealistic expectations.
If your expectations of your partner set them up for failure, your partner will fail. All successful relationships must enter the “get real” phase, and we should want this.
Getting to get real is the phase when we can each be our authentic selves. When we’re our authentic selves, we can gain the validation we all seek. Because, whether we admit it or not, we all want someone to say, “You’re perfect just the way you are.”
Whether you’ve sabotaged one or multiple relationships, the cycle will likely continue until to you do some introspection and change your thinking and behaviors. Until you change internally, nothing will change externally.
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