There are a lot of good reasons to work together with your significant other to make a relationship work.
If your relationship is running off the rails, it may just take more communication, compassion, and respect to get things back on track.
However, not all relationships are meant to work.
Not all relationships are built to last.
And I’ve identified a few reasons that I’ve heard friends and family cite for why they’re staying in relationships they really shouldn’t be.
…
1. You have history.
Your relationship is falling apart.
Your significant other is cheating on you with no plans of stopping.
You’re checked out of this relationship mentally.
You may also be cheating to cope with the relationship being so bad.
But you won’t leave because you two have history.
You’ve been together for so long that you have to make it work, right?
Wrong.
No, you don’t have to make it work.
The US has history with slavery and racism but that doesn’t mean we should keep doing those things just because we have history.
2. You have kids.
Similar to having history, many married couples who are considering divorce end up not divorcing at all or delaying divorce because they have kids.
They’re nervous that the divorce will negatively affect the kids, and it will.
They’re not wrong in thinking that because divorce absolutely takes its toll on kids.
But arguing with your spouse in front of your kids and being catty and abusive towards each other also negatively affects your kids.
So either way, your divorce or your modeling of a toxic relationship will affect your kids negatively in the long run.
It’s better to split up and give your kids access to two healthy homes than to stay together and keep them in one toxic one.
3. You don’t think you have options.
In our own ways, we all struggle with self-esteem issues.
We don’t think we’re good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, capable enough, talented enough, enough enough for anything and anyone sometimes.
I know when I dated my first serious significant other, I didn’t break up with him when I should have because I didn’t think I had options.
I didn’t think anyone else would be interested in me because, up until that point, it didn’t seem like anyone else had been interested in me.
But aside from that, I almost didn’t even feel like I had the option to break up with him. In my mind, it was either stay and make things work, or stay and make things worse.
If I did anything other than stay, I thought I’d be letting my significant other down, and I hate letting people down.
The truth is, you’ll always have options.
Yu have infinitely more options than you think you do.
Even if you don’t find a new significant other right away (and honestly, I recommend not jumping into another relationship right away after leaving one because I think some amount of time spent healing and reflecting is healthy), breaking up, in and of itself, is still an option, too.
And it’s an incredibly healthy option in the case of a bad relationship.
4. They want you to stay.
You don’t want to be in the relationship anymore, but your significant other wants you to stay.
So, you stay without realizing that you’re putting their wants and needs before your own.
No one deserves to have to subject themselves to something they don’t want to be subjected to.
And on your significant other’s side of the token, no one deserves to be in a relationship with someone who isn’t into them.
It’s two crappy sides of the same worthless token. Neither side is truly happy when things turn out like this.
And though a breakup would still be painful, it’s what’s best for both parties in a case like this.
…
The Bottom Line
There are many more crappy reasons why people stay together (i.e. abuse, manipulation, etc.), but these are some common ones I’ve come across in my own circle of friends and family.
At the end of the day, if a relationship is not serving you, it’s okay to leave.
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
***
You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
 White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism |
 Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box |
 The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer |
 What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
—
Photo credit: iStockPhoto.com
The post 4 Bad Reasons Why You Stay In Crappy Relationships appeared first on The Good Men Project.