When Heart and Head Collide: Do I Stay Or Go in My Relationship?
BY JASON FIERSTEIN, MA, LPC
Out of anxiety or fear, guys sometimes reside in this perpetual state of limbo when it comes to figuring out if they want to stay in their bad intimate relationship or marriage. Men make excuses for staying, like, “I don’t want to hurt her,” or “We used to be so good – there must be a way to get back to that point.” Do these questions reflect the truth of the matter, or simply make for excuses to keep us from changing a bad deal in our lives?
Often times, fighting relationships have a happy ending. And sometimes they don’t. Then there’s other times where a weird combination of the two gets created. Guys find themselves staying in relationships that they otherwise would have gotten out of a long time ago. Then, they make up all sorts of things in their head to keep them stuck in their bad situations. Men tread water to cope, as to not swim away or drown.
It’s hard to summon up the resources – courage, strength, intuition – to do a sea change in life, and negative relationships can truly be the hardest. Even if we’ve gotten comfortable in our relationship suffering and misery, at least we’re familiar with it. It’s like a security blanket. Change, on the other hand, is a whole separate thing. We’re not predisposed to change as human beings, and relationship adaptation is often times a sea change many are not willing to make. So, we grin and bear it, sometimes for several years or decades.
Time gets lost really quickly when we live in this state of relationship flux. When we live like this, we’re not listening to ourselves, or our true desires for intimacy and happiness. We deny both ourselves and our partner a chance to find happiness in another relationship, or just to simply to not be trapped in the current one.
Here’s some ways guys get stuck in bad relationships:
- Fear kicks in, and we think “I’ll never attract someone like her/another woman/anyone else again.”
- We “accept our fate in life,” (victimization)
- Money fear kicks in (e.g. finding a new apt./condo, front bills alone, split up furniture, paying child support)
- We make excuses for ourselves and for her, and tell ourselves that our situation is better than it is (we rationalize it).
- Head takes over (logic), and heart gets banished (gut, or intuition). The two simply aren’t talking.
- We tell ourselves that our partner won’t be o.k. on her own, or that we’ll devastate her if we break up the relationship.
Strong messages take over, like:
- Staying a stand-up guy
- Being a good relationship partner
- Feeling guilty
- All the above
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