When has a relationship failed?
I had a therapist tell me once that he didn’t consider any relationship a failure. Whether it lasted 10 years or one month, as long as we learned and grew from it he considered it a successful relationship.
I don’t think very many people feel the same way he did.
Somewhere in modern times, we came to measure the success of a marriage or relationship by the number of years it lasts. Collectively as a society, we decided a relationship's longevity mattered more than its members' happiness or health. And for many, especially those raised in conservative, religious households, it’s engrained from an early age that anything except a long-lasting marriage, til-death-do-us-part style is a failure.
It’s one of the reasons my family didn’t know there were major problems in my marriage until it was beyond repair. I mean maybe they knew but I didn’t tell them, because divorce didn’t feel like an option I had. My grandparents have been married 65 years, my parents 40, and two of my three sisters have already surpassed the 10 years I made it, and the other is still so in love with her husband of eight years I have no doubt they’ll be married for many more years. I could keep listing aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents passed and their long marriages too. I didn’t need any of them to tell me I was a failure. I felt like a failure. As if my inability to keep my marriage together was somehow a moral failing and would make my family love me less.
But all of that is a toxic load of bullshit. All any of that thinking did was keep me in a relationship that was slowly killing me for years longer than I should’ve stayed. If I’m being completely honest, my marriage never should’ve made it to that decade mark, we should’ve called it quit years earlier. And in case anyone was wondering, my family loves me just as much as they ever did.
It makes me think, however, why do we classify any relationship, especially a marriage, that doesn’t end with two people being buried next to each other as a failure?
Change is inevitable
Because here’s what I know, people grow and change dozens of times over their lifetime. If you find someone who will grow and change with you, who is committed to getting to know you over and over again through decades of life don’t ever let that go. Because even though this post may seem to suggest otherwise, I’m not advocating for people to throw in the towel at the slightest sign of trouble. I think relationships of all kinds will go through phases of growth and trials, and there will be times when fighting for or working on your relationship will be necessary and probably worth it.
Sometimes though, people change and grow in ways that aren’t compatible with the way their partner is going. Does that mean they should stick out miserably for decades?
I’ve joked on more than one occasion since my divorce that marriage certificates should have expiration dates and you have to make the conscious decision to renew them to stay married. Maybe partially because I was still a little bitter but also because not all relationships are meant to last a lifetime. Not because I think people need another excuse to give up but because I think it would be cool for people to regularly, and honestly, assess their relationships and if staying together is in the best interests of the parties involved. It would be really cool if we could do that without the prompt of a renewable marriage license, but I don’t think that level of vulnerability and honesty is available to most people, especially when it comes to people we love.
Because a relationship ending isn’t a failure, but two people staying together just for the sake of staying married is. My ex and I failed each other in that regard. I can’t speak to his reasons for not calling it off sooner, but I was terrified. Scared of losing the respect and love of my family. Scared of doing irreparable damage to my boys. Scared that no one else would ever love me. Scared that if I didn’t try as hard as I possibly could I’d regret it later.
So far none of those things have happened, but I know we hurt each other by “sticking it out” for a little longer. It hurt me a lot more to keep fighting when I should’ve thrown in the towel. And the hurt we’ve caused each other because we stayed when our relationship was no longer healthy now has real-time impacts on our ability to be the best co-parents we can be.
When is it okay to give up?
This begs the question, how do we know when we should keep fighting or when it’s time to move on? And how do we change the narrative and stop assigning moral failure to people who don’t have relationships that last four or five decades? How do we learn to grow and change together, on the same trajectory vs. apart in the first place? Or even better, how do we learn to pick partners better suited to us from the get-go?
I think the answers to most of those questions have to do with looking honestly at why we get into relationships in the first place and being honest with ourselves and our partners about who we are and what we want out of our relationships.
But we have to start by accepting that not all relationships are meant to last forever—that it might take one or two or a dozen times to get it right. And that doesn’t mean either party was a failure, or even that either person in the relationship did something wrong. It just means you weren’t compatible in the ways that turned out to matter most, or you grew in different directions, or the relationship ran its course.
We have to start by accepting that it is okay to give up on a relationship that isn’t working and isn’t adding to your life—and it doesn’t make any of us failures.
We have to create a new definition of what makes a relationship successful, one that has nothing to do with how long it lasts and instead has everything to do with how much love, respect, and happiness is contained within it.
Because I’d take a magically happy, love and passion-filled, two-year-relationship over decades of the silent treatment, keeping score, and bitterness any day.