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Tell Me About It: Not all relationship endings are failures

 
Published Nov. 5, 2015

Q: You gave some good advice on "paying attention to how hard you have to work" in a relationship, but is it possible to be burned anyway? My ex-fiance gave me the distinct impression that not only did we have a good foundation, but that our differences were tolerable. We would spend hours upon hours talking this stuff out and building good communication.

He called off the wedding anyway with no warning, saying that he couldn't do it.

I'm left asking why I made the effort. Your advice is sound, but it seems so hopeless.

Burned

A: If you're looking never to get hurt, then, yes, hopeless is the right word. Everyone who cares about something also gets "burned" by it, just by dint of caring.

You're asking why you made the effort when a loss was inevitable, and the answer is, you cared so you gave it your best. His leaving doesn't mean he didn't give it his best. Maybe he really was nuts about you, and unwittingly worked a little too hard to persuade himself that your differences were surmountable. Maybe that wore him out, and maybe he felt terrible about that, but also understood you'd both have better chances at happiness if you parted ways.

So why get involved with anyone? Because enough good can outweigh the inevitable bad. Plenty of people will happily choose 20-40-60 loving years with someone for the price of heavy grief when that person dies — and that's a happy ending, no? Till death do they part?

Even when it's not as pretty, when people stay together for X years then ultimately split, they can still look back on those years as mostly good, even valuable to them — be it in shaping who they are, in creating beloved children, in being the path that took them to the happy place they're in now. Not all ends are failures.

Ultimately it's about finding, sharing and counting on our own strength, versus the permanence of another person's feelings for us — especially since the former can help the latter along.