3 Signs Your Relationship Is Never Going to Work

I hate this aspect of my job. I hate thinking about it, talking about it, and in my own life I hate facing it myself because it's depressing. But my last article was on facing the reality of your relationships and to be clear, I feel obligated to share what criteria you should look for as signs that your relationship will never be perfect the way you want it to. My material comes from an article published in the Journal of Family Psychology back in 2012.


There are three things that are strongly correlated to divorce, separation, break up,  and as I like to call it, "relationship endings." Those three things are:

1. Poor Communication
2. Poor Emotional Management
3. And a lack of perceiving that your needs are being met

Poor Communication often comes down to conflict management. How do you resolve your conflicts? Do you insist that you are right and the other person is wrong and therefore the discussion is over? Do you avoid discussions with the other person because you don't want to upset them? Do you avoid conversations with them because you don't want them to hurt you? Do you cave every time they want something from you because you don't want to upset them? Do you get upset that they don't remember things? Do you get upset because they don't appear to value the same things as you?--All of these issues are a symptom of poor communication. --I'll write an article on this eventually, and have in fact devoted a significant portion of my book to this very topic, but if you know your relationship suffers from poor communication then expect it to fail sometime in the future. That is, if you don't commit now to improve your communication.

Poor Emotional Management is all about feelings. How do you feel in the relationship? If you were to take an hourly log of how you are feeling in a week, how many hours would you classify as you feeling "satisfied" or "happy" with your relationship? If you feel stressed, if you feel sad, if you feel angry, if you feel scared more than 50% of the time, expect your relationship to come to an end eventually. In fact, if you are in that situation, let me remind you that the only reason you still have a relationship of any kind with that person is because you are keeping it alive.

Lack of Needs Fulfillment I stated above that it was the perception of your needs being fulfilled. This is a tricky issue to attach to relationship endings. For starters, it is not your responsibility to fulfill other people's needs. Ever. However, we form relationships because it makes it easier to fulfill our needs and wants. If you aren't helping them meet some of their important needs, or you are blocking them from meeting those needs (or making their life more stressful), you might need to reconsider why you are in the relationship in the first place. And, if your needs aren't getting met, you shouldn't blame the other person for not fulfilling them, but you should consider developing other relationships that can help you fulfill those--if not fulfilling them on your own without complaining.

It's not unlikely that at some point in the life of your relationships you will experience each of these things. You might recognize that the communication in your relationship is terrible, or that you are projecting your emotions on the other person or feel that they have made you upset or angry. You may even think that you aren't getting any of your needs met by the other person. This is fine, so long as it is temporary--that is when you try to work on those things.
If your relationship doesn't communicate very well, work in it. If you keep feeling the same emotions, focus on resolving those emotions. If you aren't getting your needs me, you REALLY need to find ways to get those needs met. No, you don't need to put your relationship on hold, but you need to commit more to resolving these things. You can still maintain the same level of relationship with them and, on the side, be improving your personal ability to communicate, handle your emotions, and get your needs met.

With that in mind, if you try your damnedest, you're committing to the relationship and you're working on yourself, and you're still having these problems, then it's time to admit defeat. There is no shame in ending a relationship that isn't working out. If it doesn't get you closer to that dream relationship you're working towards, or if it keeps slipping back into those three negative areas, then set up some boundaries and move forward.

There is really only one sign that your relationship will never work, and that is that you or the other person no longer wants to improve your communication, no longer want to manage the emotions, or no longer wants to find a solution for helping the other person get their needs fulfilled. No matter what happens, no matter what mistakes are made, the hurtful things said, actions taken, or the decisions made, if you both want to keep working on these three things, then you will maintain a relationship and hopefully it won't be bogged down with so many boundaries that it can become a great relationship.

5 Reasons You Shouldn't Do Everything With Your Significant Other

I wanted to do a followup to my last podcast about compatibility. Perhaps you're under the impression that you need to have a lot of common interests with your significant other and that you need to include them in your hobbies or with your friends (or even your family)? This podcast gives 5 reasons why you shouldn't get carried away into thinking your significant other has to be your twin.

Here's the Player:



& Here's the Download: download

1. People need avenues for releasing stress.
2. Doing things alone and achieving things builds confidence.
3. When you are exposed to people outside of your norm, you learn new ways of thinking and can apply the best parts to your preferred relationship.
4. Having your own friends helps you see that you have "options" and are in your relationship by choice.
5. You can't meet all of your needs in one person!

We need to live the life that we want to live rather than the life that our significant other wants us to live; and then we can include our significant other in that life, just like they should include us in their life. The best relationships are those created when we have a complete choice and not because we were forced or because we desperately needed them. 

We Hurt Others After We Have Been Hurt

(Hurt People, Hurt People)

We hurt others after we have been hurt. This is another type of cycle; when we get hurt it is natural for us to want to retaliate or take it out on other people.

Here's the player:

Here's the Download: download

People are initially fragile with their emotions until they are trained otherwise. We approach new experiences the same way a baby does and we default to certain feelings until we train ourselves to act differently.

It is common for people to default to: anger, sadness, fear or anxiety; which might lead us to a fight or flight response, or blaming ourselves or others when we ought not to.

A few things to take from this:

1. You can usually tell when someone has been hurt a lot in their past because they don't know how to appropriately cope with the hurt and tend to be more confrontational or blame others for their hurt.
2. When you are completely comfortable with yourself, you are more apt to recognizing your flaws, owning them, correcting them, and not letting others hurt you. You remain in control of yourself.
3.  If you have hurts that you haven't resolved, you need to fix them before you will progress in your relationships with others. You can "fix" your hurt places by acknowledging them, accepting them, relieving them, working on getting over them and finding a resolution to them. 
4. Most people carry around some hurt. You need to respect that other people have been hurt and may be hurt by things you say or do to them--intentional or not! And when someone else is suffering from some kind of hurt, don't let their reaction to the hurt affect you--recognize that their pain may be causing them to lash out at you. A little bit of empathy (read: understanding) will go a long way in allowing you to forgive them and not be affected by them. 

Cycle 1: Blaming others

I will be podcasting about 3 common relationship cycles.

The first is as follows:

1. Things are fine
2. Someone says or does something to trigger an emotion in you
3. You react by: A) retaliating, or B) blowing up at them
4. You do whatever you can to get back to normal.

Remember, cycles are patterns. These are things you do over and over with or without realizing it. If you do this pattern, you need to correct it before you're going to progress from okay relationships (or no relationships) to having good or Great Relationships. Meaningful ones that you want to keep.



Here's the player:

Here's the Download: download



3 Steps to resolve this cycle:

1. Address the emotion and name it
2. Think about what you were going to do or what would you do normally (or what DID you do?)
3. Think about what can you do differently to resolve this and come out ahead in the future? (Think: How can I approach this and get closer to the other person rather than further apart?)

A few other things I talk about in this podcast:
The Ad Hominem Fallacy - Where you infer or apply additional beliefs or aspects about the other person based on one instance of them saying or doing something in the present. Ad Hominem translates to: "to the person" and is referring to a persons character or your perception of their character. Resorting to Ad Hominem assumptions about a person can slow (or stop!) the progression of a good relationship.

Walking on Eggshells - When you set your relationship up so that whenever someone triggers an emotion in you, you attribute that emotion to the other person as if it is their fault. (Think: "You made me angry because you side with someone I disagree with" or "You made me sad that you don't care enough about me to call or text me")

Black and White Relationships - When your relationship becomes so extreme that it becomes a list of rules and if the other person breaks one of the rules they're out or they are at fault and you are in the right. This is bad because people will inevitably make mistakes and then you'll find yourself punishing them more often then enjoying them.

One Liners:
Your emotions are your responsibility.




This one is just over 27 min... I'm still working on the podcast medium and hopefully I'll be able to shorten these in the future (ideally to about 10 min)


Follow the links to the right to continue to the next podcast, or go directly there by clicking here.

Introduction to Relationship Cycles

Certain cycles in your life are holding you back, and it's time for you to take control and change them. This is part 1 of an in-depth series on relationship cycles. Step one is to recognize that relationship cycles exist, whether you want them to or not.

Instead of writing a full article, I decided to make my very first podcast. --I realize that it's not very emotional and I drift into a type of monotone that might sooth you to sleep, but the information is there so I hope you make it to the end!--In my next podcast I'll have to put a little more emotion into it. I was alone in a room this time so maybe next time I'll have a live audience for it?




[if this player doesn't work, try downloading the mp3 file: download]

Relationship Cycles are simple: 1- You go along like normal. 2 - Something happens that affects you 3- You react to it and then 4- there is some sort of resolution phase were you do something--anything--to get back to your normal state. Then you carry on like normal until something similar happens and you react the same way and resolve it the same way and return to normal again. You do not have control over what happens to you; and although you can train your subconscious out of the triggers, and the reactions you have to those triggers, it is very difficult to control that area of your life.
 What you do have a lot of control over is how you resolve these cycles. If you are aware of the relationship cycle, and you understand the triggers and how you normally resolve these cycles, then you gain control over the cycle itself and you can make a conscious decision about how you're going to let it affect you. If you control the cycle, you can improve your relationships and ultimately make them more fulfilling for you.
Cycles are an excellent way to keep you in the same spot in life, but most of us are not interested in staying in the same spot, most of us have goals and dreams that we want to achieve and so getting beyond the cycles is going to help you reach your relationship goals and dreams, including: growing closer to people rather than further away, really resolving conflicts so that they don't keep popping up, and getting more out of the relationships you presently have. Improving this area of your life will make a huge difference in EVERY area of your life because relationships are connected to every aspect of your life.


P.S. Sorry about the volume--I'll fix that later today. (be prepared to turn down your speakers)


Follow the links to the right to continue, or view the next podcast here.