Our best advice for the hard times in long term relationships: what you need to know
Episode 7
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE
“Love sometimes wants to do us a great favor: hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out” -Rumi (13th century Sufi poet and mystic)
How can you tell the difference between a relationship that’s going through hard times because the relationship itself isn’t working versus a good relationship that’s just going through hard times?
If there’s one thing that we really, really want people to know about relationships, it’s that all long-term relationships go through hard times …and that this doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
In fact, entering a period of hard times in a relationship can actually be a good sign for your relationship. Once a relationship has become a solid, stable container for a couple, what often happens in that each partner’s old pain (from past relationships and childhood wounds) begins rising to the surface of the relationship, with the hopes that it can be healed and transformed within the context of a loving relationship.
Of course, that’s not the only explanation for hard times in relationships. Sometimes hard times are more like a flashing red light. They’re a warning sign that needs your careful attention, the sooner the better.
In this post, we’ll tell you what you need to know in order to navigate hard times in a relationship. We’ll be exploring the three main causes for hard times in relationships, how to know what the hard times in your particular relationship might mean, and what to do when the hard times arrive.
In Episode One, we talked about the fact that we, as a culture, don’t actually have a model for long-term relationships, after the honeymoon stage. Basically every love story ends with the couple falling in love, deciding to be together, and supposedly living happily ever after, after the credits roll or the storybook closes.
In reality, of course, we know that’s not a particularly useful expectation to have for a relationship.
But it does present us with a quandary, which is knowing what it means about our relationship if (or should I say when) our own relationship hits a rough patch. We ask ourselves, is this normal? Is this a bad sign for the relationship? And what on earth am I supposed to do now?
The answer to that last question really depends upon why a relationship has come upon hard times. This is because, in our experience, there are really three different situations in which relationships will start having hard times.
So let’s start with the situation we already mentioned, which is when hard times are actually a good sign because it means that the relationship has become a stable container that can support each partner in dealing with hard things from the past. This is the stage of a relationship that we call The Difficulties … difficulties with a capital D … because this stage, even though it’s actually a positive sign for the relationship, can still be really difficult to navigate.
To talk about The Difficulties, let’s first imagine a relationship as a journey that we can chart on a map. The relationship begins with a lovely stroll through a glorious meadow. There are some gentle hills and … oh look, there are some unicorns frolicking off in the distance.
This is the territory of Honeymoon Meadows. It’s a land where the sun is nearly always shining and the weather is perfect. And yet … if we zoom up and take a bird’s eye view, we can see that, off in the distance, there’s a dark wood lurking up ahead. …But down on the ground, the flowers are blooming, the birds are singing. It’s a beautiful day.
Eventually, if the relationship keeps going and things are good, if we’re headed in the direction of this being a relationship that might go the distance, the path suddenly bends toward the dark wood. On our relationship map, this dark wood is marked as The Difficulties. If you’ve ever been here yourself, then you might know just how much this turn of events in a relationship can take you by a surprise. Most couples don’t see it coming. They’re taken by surprise because it’s a quite different relationship terrain than Honeymoon Meadows. They wonder if they’ve taken a wrong turn. How did we end up here?
And the answer to that question, most often, is that they’ve made a deeper commitment to the relationship. And it’s the commitment that takes couples into the dark wood of The Difficulties.
A deeper commitment can take many forms. It can be moving in together, or buying a house together, moving to a new city, having a child, getting engaged or married, or creating a blended family together. Whatever the particular commitment is varies depending on the couple … but the common thread is that the couple has just made what feels like a big commitment to the relationship. They … are … in it.
And here’s the thing that no one ever tells you about relationships:
Once you’re within the container of a healthy, solid relationship, anything from your past that you haven’t yet processed, from childhood or past relationships, starts to rise up to the surface. And on the surface, it’s not necessarily pretty.
That said, it’s important to remember that the impulse behind this process is very healthy. Because you’ve created the safe container of a relationship, the parts of yourself, and those of your partner that have been wounded in the past—those parts yearn to be healed and recognize this relationship as having the potential to do so.
And there is nothing, nothing that we know of anyway, that is more profoundly healing than love.
All of this is true, but it doesn’t necessarily make this process of walking through The Difficulties any easier. But since no one ever really talks about it, we think it’s a million times worse when you can’t locate yourself on the map, when you don’t know you’ve entered The Difficulties, when you have no clue what’s happened to the relationship that you thought was so solid.
We’ve worked with lots of people who’ve just made a major commitment, and then it feels like everything sort of falls apart all of a sudden. Partners find themselves panicking, because they’ve just made this big commitment and they’re wondering if they made some kind of mistake.
It can be incredibly reassuring just to know that this experience is normal and that it’s healthy, even when it’s still difficult.
There’s an interesting aspect to who we choose as romantic partners. You might imagine that we’d choose partners who we’re very compatible with. In many ways this is true. But there’s another way of looking at it, which is that people are drawn to partners who help bring us to our growth edge as individuals, whatever that growth edge is.
Some relationship experts say that we’re specifically drawn to partners who are fundamentally incompatible. We don’t go that far, because we see it these differences as complementary rather than being incompatible.
But we do find that, by and large, we gravitate toward partners whose personalities, behaviors, and quirks all end up serving as invitations for us to grow individually, to become more of who we aspire to be, both as people and as partners in a relationship. And it’s the tension in relationships, often in the form of The Difficulties, that allows us to grow. It might be even more accurate to say that tension in relationships not only invites us to grow… but demands it.
So entering the period of The Difficulties is the first way in which we can experience hard times. But it’s not the only way.
Sometimes in relationships we really don’t want to leave Honeymoon Meadows. Maybe we see that Dark Wood of Difficulties off in the distance and we think no way … that looks dark and scary and I don’t want to go in there.
So we don’t. We try to hold onto the honeymoon phase … we try to stay in the land of sunshine and unicorns.
But, as we mentioned in episode one, the honeymoon phase of a relationship is like love’s childhood, eventually childhood ends. We have to grow up. And what that looks like in a relationship, as we leave the honeymoon stage, is becoming more aware of ourselves again as two distinct and separate individuals who are in relationship with each other, rather than that kind of two-halves-of-one-whole experience of the honeymoon phase.
By the time we reach the borders of Honeymoon Meadows, we’re beginning to become more and more aware of differences in the relationship.
And in order to have a long term relationship that flourishes, we’re required to navigate this process of individuation, the work of seeing yourself as distinct and different from your partner. To individuate within a relationship, you have to simultaneously be able to maintain your sense of yourself as independent from your partner while also remaining connected to your partner.
This experience of leaving the land of Honeymoon Meadows is a time in the relationship when there becomes more space between oneself and one’s partner. for many of us, once we recognize what’s happening, this increasing distance can feel scary.
We don’t necessarily know how to allow for that space while also staying connected. So instead, it can feel like an experience of drifting apart from each other. And for those of us who’ve experienced the loss of loved ones in the past, the experience of individuation can feel threateningly like abandonment, which sends our protective defenses into overdrive.
So the way that many couples respond to their fear of separation and distance is to fight hard to stay in that more merged, blended experience of togetherness of the honeymoon phase when boundaries between oneself and the other are fuzzy.
This is why many couples try to stay in the land of Honeymoon Meadows by eliminating differences between them, since individual differences are perceived as a threat to the feeling of togetherness. But since it’s not possible to remain in Honeymoon Meadows indefinitely, what happens in a relationship like this is that instead of continuing to move forward, there’s a loss of direction.
We humans have a very interesting quirk in our ability to navigate across landscapes that lack landmarks, which is that in the absence of landmarks, as we’re walking through a forest, or a field, or a desert … we actually incapable of walking in a straight line.
Instead, no matter how hard we might try to walk in a single direction, we walk in circles. Left to our own devices, we go around and around in circles, which is why people can get lost in a forest and not be able to make their way out.
Similarly, when you lose a sense of direction in your relationship, what happens is that you can end up just going around in circles with each other, wandering the no man’s land between Honeymoon Meadows and the potentially healing experience of the Dark Wood of Difficulties.
This is a very different kind of hard times than The Difficulties, because instead of the hard times taking you somewhere new, you’re just treading the same relationship ground over and over again.
You’re in relationship no man’s land.
As you may recall from high school history class, “no man’s land” was the term used to describe the uninhabitable zone between the trenches of opposing armies during World War 1.
Not only was this a dangerous space for all living beings, it also devastated the landscape and surrounding ecosystem. And it accomplished nothing positive. Similarly, finding yourself in the relationship equivalent of no man’s land signals the danger of becoming entrenched in hurtful patterns of relationship conflict.
Escaping relationship no man’s land requires going through the process of individuation, learning how to express yourself authentically, even when you’re different from your partner, and learning how to welcome your partner’s authentic self, even in the ways that they’re different from you.
When this process goes well, the couple learns how to be connected as two separate individuals with different perspectives. You learn how to balance the tension of closeness and the tension of conflict.
Here are some of the indications that signal that a couple is caught in the struggle to individuate. The biggest sign is a discomfort with separateness.
This discomfort can take two particular forms. The first form is to simply avoid talking about differences, to avoid sharing anything about yourself that’s different than how you perceive your partner to be … and to avoid asking your partner any questions or showing any curiosity about the parts of them that are different from you.
The second form that discomfort with separateness takes is having difficulty expressing your own feelings and needs directly to your partner.
Instead, there can be a wish, or even an expectation, that your partner read your mind and just know how you feel or what you want or need …without you having to talk about it directly. Obviously, this can go the other way too. If you’re in a relationship with someone and you notice that they seem to expect you to read their mind or expect you to meet their needs without them ever speaking those needs aloud, this is usually a clear indication that there’s a need for individuation.
Sometimes it’s the case that both partners are struggling equally with this process of separating their own identities from the merged identity of the couple. But, oftentimes, one person is making more progress with this, while the other partner is trying hard to remain in the shared identity of the couple.
For some people, the lack of individuation in the relationship means that it’s hard to separate their own preferences, ideas, and thoughts from those of their partner … or recognize there might be differences between each person’s thoughts or feelings.
For example, they may never ask a partner, “What are you thinking about?” or “How are you feeling?” because it doesn’t occur to them to wonder if their partner might be thinking about or feeling something completely different from what they’re thinking and feeling.
But the biggest indication by far that you’re in a relationship that’s struggling to individuate is that you’re fighting a lot about differences.
Arguing about ways in which you’re different, whether that’s about preferences for weekend plans, activities that you enjoy, your political beliefs, your taste in music, how you like to spend your money … the topic can change, the tension remains. This means that any topic in which there are differences is a source of possible conflict when you’re stuck in relationship no man’s land.
Learning how to individuate is a big topic. One way to practice the process of individuation, of learning how to welcome individual differences in the relationship, is through low-stakes conflict, which we mentioned in Episode 3.
Low stakes conflict is disagreement about topics that don’t have any major influence on your relationship.
We developed our Date Night Movie of the Month program as a way to help couples practice having low-stakes conflict while also having spending quality time together.
The idea is that learning how to each share your own individual experience of a movie, your own thoughts about the characters, your own perspective on the relationship issues in the movie is a way of individuating through low-stakes conflict … while also talking about relationships at the same time. There’s some interesting research on how watching and talking about movies can be very good for relationships.
So now let’s talk about the third cause of hard times in relationships. This is in some ways the cause that’s in line with most people’s assumptions about hard times in relationships, because this last cause for hard times is that the relationship itself isn’t healthy.
When we talked about the lack of individuation as a source of hard times, we’re talking about two well-meaning people who’ve gotten stuck in a relationship pattern that’s hard to get out of … especially if neither of you understands what’s happening.
With this last cause of hard times, there’s actually something wrong in the relationship itself. This is a relationship that’s lacking qualities that are essential for healthy relationships and often it’s a relationship in which one partner has no desire to work on helping the relationship become healthy.
So what are the qualities of a healthy relationship? We’ve identified five basic but essential qualities of healthy relationship and we’ve created a healthy relationship checklist called the Relationship Yes! Test that can help you to distinguish a healthy relationship that might be in the Dark Wood of Difficulties from a relationship that’s at risk of going in circles in Relationship No Man’s Land from what might be a relationship that’s not currently healthy for you.
We’re going to go through each of the five questions on the Relationship Yes! Test and talk about how the answers to each question might be different, depending on what kind of hard times you’re experiencing in a relationship.
The first question is, “If you lean on your partner, are you confident they’ll have your back? Are you comfortable asking your partner for help?”
In a healthy relationship, there’s an overall sense that when you really need your partner to be there for you, they’ll be there. If you’re in a period of The Difficulties, when you’re having more conflicts, more issues from your past or your partner’s past are coming up, in the moment of those kinds of experiences, you may really feel like you do not feel safe leaning on your partner for help.
The important distinction with The Difficulties is that you’re able to work through the issues that arise in your relationship without feeling like the experience of having conflict or difficulty is actually causing damage to your relationship.
So, if you’re in the midst of difficulties, you might say, hell no I can’t lean on them, but … in a calmer state, when you’re not in the midst of conflict, and you have a broader perspective on your relationship and on your partner, you would be able to recognize that you do, in fact, feel supported by your partner.
For many people, their confidence in their partner having their back actually increases as they move through difficult times, because that quality of the relationship has actually been tested and is no longer being taken on faith.
On the other hand, if you rarely feel like your partner would be there when you ask for help … or if you don’t feel like you’re able to ask for help…this is an indication that you want to pay more attention to this aspect of your relationship. And again, you can check out the Relationship Yes! Test to assess the health of your relationship.
The second question is, “Do you feel like your needs truly matter to your partner? Is there room in your relationship for your needs to take up space?”
An enthusiastic yes to this question means that you feel cared for in your relationship … you know, at your core, that you matter to your partner, that they value your needs and make space for your needs. If you’re not so sure about this, the first thing to ask yourself is whether you feel comfortable expressing your needs in your relationship … because of course your partner can’t meet your needs if you’re not sharing your needs directly.
In our experience this is where a lot of people really run into trouble.
The reason is that if you’ve learned in the past that your needs don’t matter or that your needs won’t be met, it can feel really scary to express your needs directly and risk the possibility that your needs won’t be met again.
We’ll be talking more about taking risks in relationships and learning how to be vulnerable in episode 8 so if this is something you struggle with, be sure to check out episode 8.
And, of course, it’s important to note that it’s not a fair expectation that a partner is going to be 100% available to meet our needs. This is why it’s so important to communicate that you value your partner’s needs, even when you say no to meeting a certain request your partner has made.
It’s not either/or … either you drop everything in your own life to tend to your partner’s needs or you ignore their needs entirely. There’s an art to saying a loving and compassionate no that we’re never taught how to do, but is actually vital to learn as you develop healthier intimate relationships.
The third question on the Relationship Yes! Test is, “Does it seem like your partner really gets you and loves you for who you truly are? Are you able to be your full, authentic self in your relationship?”
This question is really looking at the need to be known and loved for who you are. An enthusiastic yes to this question means that you’ve successfully navigated the task of individuation. You’re able to be your authentic self. And your partner is able to welcome and appreciate what makes you uniquely you.
If you’re not able to answer yes to this question, two other questions come up as a result.
First, if your partner doesn’t really get you and love you for who you are, have you given them the opportunity to get to know—and adore—the real you? Do you let yourself be seen in your relationship?
If the answer to this question is “maybe not,” make sure you listen to episode 6, which is all about how to be your authentic self in relationships. If the answer to those questions is “yes,” but you don’t feel known and loved for who you are, this might be an indication that your relationship is still in the struggle of individuation, where differences are viewed as threatening to the relationship. Or it may mean that your partner struggles personally with being able to accept differences in others.
The fourth question is, “Are your feelings welcome in your relationship? Are you able to share your difficult emotions and trust your partner will empathize with you?”
An enthusiastic yes to this question means not only that your relationship has successfully individuated, but also that you and your partner have developed the ability to talk about feelings openly and make space for the difficulties that come with sharing hard emotions.
This process is rarely easy … so we want to emphasize that the expectation that you should be able to calmly talk about difficult feelings might be unrealistic, particularly when you’re passing through the Dark Wood of the Difficulties.
Again, this is when a lot of past relationship wounds come up and get triggered in your current relationship, which can generate pretty intense emotions and a lot of sensitivity to the other person’s reactions. Trusting that your partner will empathize with your feelings means having a general sense that you can talk through hard things and eventually get to a place of mutual understanding.
If your answer to this question is “no, I don’t feel like my feelings are welcome or I’m not able to share my difficult feelings,” the first question to ask yourself is whether your no has more to do with this relationship in particular or a general discomfort with sharing your feelings.
It’s important to distinguish between difficulty talking about feelings and a pattern of feedback in this relationship that your feelings aren’t welcome. Making space for feelings in a relationship is essential for the long-term health of a relationship. So if that’s something that’s not available in your relationship, this is an area of your relationship to take a look at, to explore whether it’s an area of growth for the relationship … or whether it’s perhaps a red flag in the relationship, especially if your answers to other questions are also no.
The last question builds on the previous four and it is: “Are you happy in your relationship as it is right now? If your partner doesn’t change a thing, would you be happy in this relationship five years from now?”
In our experience, this is a really a question to help those in unhealthy, destructive, or toxic relationships to start to really pay attention to where things are at in their relationship and to really think about what needs to change in order to make it a healthy relationship. And, also, to be really honest about whether or not you believe that something can change in your relationship.
We want to end with some inspiring words on love from one of our all-time favorite poets, Rumi, who wrote what we interpret as the value undergoing the process of the Difficulties:
“Love sometimes wants to do us a great favor: hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.”
What’s your relationship archetype?
about angela Amias & Daniel Boscaljon
We’re the creators of the Five Relationship Archetypes and the hosts of the Alchemy of Connection. It’s been known for a long time that painful childhood experiences, including trauma, affect adults at many levels, from physical and mental health to emotional well-being to relationships. While the impact of early trauma on adult relationships is frequently noted by trauma experts, there’s been very little in terms of practical, useful advice or programs that adults with childhood trauma can use to improve their own relationships.
Our programs are designed to fill that gap—to help you understand how your own past experiences influence your relationship with yourself and your relationships with others.
Healthy relationships are an essential part of living a good life and yet, many of us (perhaps even most of us) have core wounds from childhood experiences that affect our ability to have the kinds of intimate relationships in adulthood that we long to have.