Why Couples BREAK UP ?
***BREAK UP DAY Special***
"When people try to account for why couples break up, the emphasis typically falls on the idea of difference: a disorganized creative type was up against a highly managerial ordered one; one of them liked hill walking, the other hated the outdoors. Someone was gregarious, someone else loathed parties. No wonder – it seems – they had to split...
This method of explanation is underpinned by an implicit and hugely dominant theory of love which goes as follows: the reason why couples function is similarity; what tears them apart is difference. We get an inkling of just how widespread this theory might be when we consider the operations of modern dating sites. In their wish to help us find what they term the ‘right’ person, they scour their databases in order to try to match us with a creature who will most exactly share the greatest number of our tastes, interests and attitudes...
However plausible this might sound, it skirts a fundamental truth about love which we ignore at enormous cost: no couple ever breaks up because of the differences between them. They break up because one of them is fed up of not being heard. What ultimately counts for the success of love is not whether or not there are differences, but how whatever differences there happen to be are handled...
We know that compatibility can’t be the basis of lasting love because, by its logic, it invariably ends up escalating absurdly. Pre-existing compatibility can only ever get us so far. At some point, inevitably, even the best matched partner will in some way emerge as unlike us in some way. What then matters is how the mismatch is handled...
This is what we need to hear above all when a conflicting perspective rears its head: I hear you; I understand what you’re saying, I am going to think about that, perhaps I will need to change. In other words, we need to feel that our point of difference has been witnessed and, to a degree, respected. On the other hand, what gradually destroys love in the long-term, even in the case of the most apparently well-matched couples, is the opposite of the above: It’s not the frustration that kills, it’s how it’s heard – or not...
The single greatest explanation for all divorces is, in the end, defensiveness, the inability to listen with grace to what another person is telling us without resorting to stubborn pride and denial. There are no sexual problems too grave that they ever make it too hard to stay. The lover we desperately need isn’t the person who shares our every taste and interest; it’s the kindly soul who has learnt to negotiate differences in taste without defensiveness or impatience."
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