It’s About Making Babies!

Hot Alpha Female on Baggage Reclaim wonders why more women don’t know when to leave a bad relationship.

But what if – you are hiding things. What if you can’t rely on friends, because you are afraid or embarrassed to tell them the truth about your situation? I think this would be a wonderful reason to decide “Hey, this feels pretty sick. Do I really want to be here?”

What if you never learned how to tell if things are worse than they should be? Perhaps someone feels that everyone is talking about some fictional Hallmark moment, not how a real relationship could be.

No one can tell their friends everything. That violates privacy and respect for your partner, and denies your partner important information and attention if you share with friends instead.

So how do you know? People take up boxing for a hobby or a professional sport. So obviously a person can get used to being hit, regularly. So how does one know when it is wrong? Depending on the movies, the TV, and the music you listen to, you may have no reference to what language is inappropriate and belittling.

I am not convinced there really is an easy way for the person involved to know – short of a series of hospital or emergency room calls. And that is usually for the anger stuff – not the cheating and lying and disrespect and emotionally absent problems.

There are varying degrees of wrongness, that should trigger a breakup. If you have kids, then you have to balance safety for all concerned as well as a nurturing environment against bad moral and behavioral examples. When it is just two adults, the decision to stay or leave gets fairly simple, either you are happy and stay, or unhappy and go. Add in finances, and joint loans (i.e., acting as a married couple) or marriage, and there must be a greater tolerance for temporary stresses and issues.

Where there is danger to someone, the decision to leave should be immediate and irrevocable. Don’t think twice, don’t look back. For more normal relationship issues you cannot expect to be happy all the time, depending on what you call ‘happy’. But you should respect and trust yourself and your partner. If not – fix it or leave. Don’t lecture, don’t nag, but to be a ‘relationship’, your partner has to trust and respect you, and you have to trust and respect your partner. Counseling can help, if you are both going to be trainable and you find a competent counselor. Married, competent, respected friends can be a help, sometimes.

It hurts to think that we give everything to a relationship to make it work. We adapt to our partner, we contribute our attention, our energy, our dreams. So we have almost nothing left to sustain us when we break up. Little money, no love and comfort and security. We almost have to accept becoming a ‘disaster refugee’ to imagine trying a ‘life after breakup’. When we are deciding to leave a bad relationship, the thought of finding someone better seems immense, and the thought of being alone is frightening. We don’t feel sure that the fault wasn’t ours, so how do we know we aren’t a ‘bad’ person? Or worse, we *know* for dead certain sure that the problem was our ex-partner, and we feel bitter toward him, and maybe all guys – and will have horrible expectations that will come true for us into the future.

How do you know when to leave? The best I can think of, that always applies, is ethics, respect, and trust. Beware of endearment and affection that may ignore lying, cheating, lack of discipline, or emotionally withdrawn problems. When there is disrespect and distrust, any love or affection will be cold comfort – and staying will be license for things to get worse.