A Must-Watch Before Making a Decision to End Your Relationship | Jay Shetty and Esther Perel

How do you know if a relationship is worth saving? Shall I stay or shall I go is one of the fundamental questions. Even if you decide to stay or even if they decide to go, you may do so while at the same time having a part of you that actually holds the other side. If you think that the decision is 100% perfect, no doubt, no hesitation, then it's a setup. If you leave, you need to be able to leave while experiencing the loss of some things that may have been good, even if it's just a dream of what was. If you stay, you have to be able to grieve the part of you that will never know what it would have been like if you actually left. Every choice comes with loss. The consequence is the choice you didn't make. And even though you think this is the right choice and this is what I must do, the grief may be the fact that you were not capable of making this thing work or that you had such high hopes and it didn't materialize or that you have wished that you didn't make some mistakes that you made or that you wish you had left sooner. But there is no choice that doesn't have loss and therefore some grief attached to it. That does not mean that you didn't make the right choice. Some people experience heartbreak with such an ache, with such a sense of longing and such a sense of fracturing on the inside that their longing becomes obsessive, that they are trapped in rumination. It is experienced like a withdrawal. That is not all breakups, but that is the extreme kind of breakup which has been compared to an addiction because of the intense sense of withdrawal and because it takes place in the same centers in the brain. Let's say someone does want to save their relationship. They want to make it work. What have you seen over the years of what it really takes? I think we often think of saving a relationship as like, let's do more date nights, let's spend more time together, let's do more this. But what have you seen it really takes? It's actually not asking the other person to do all the changing. We often get to a place where we think you need to change. Here, I'm going to tell you what you could do differently that would make this relationship better. And the hardest thing to do is to actually say, what can I do? Because if you change, it is quite sure that it will also create change on the other side because we are interdependent parts. In a relationship, I start to do something which makes you do something which makes me do something. It's a figure eight. But if I start to do something else, sooner or later, you cannot continue to do the same. If I no longer answer you when you say something, there's a good chance that at some point you're going to stop saying it because you don't get the reaction that you've been used to get. So there's no better way to change the other than to change ourselves. But that's not a hundred percent thing. It's just a good principle to keep in mind. What is it that I can do differently? What's one thing I could choose that I know would improve the relationship? Because I've heard you or because I know us. And if I don't instantly walk out every time, but I actually stay and I listen and I pay attention, will that create something rather than thinking about, you know, all the good reasons why I should get out or leave in that moment? You talked about there how, you know, trying to change the other person isn't necessarily the focus. But for so many of us, that seems to be the problem. The problem seems to be the other person's behaviors, their attitude, their approach to life. I hear some people say they don't dream enough. They dream too much. Yes. I hear people say, oh, they have too many friends. They have no friends, right? I see people at both ends of the spectrum. We always seem to have issues with how our partners live. In my relationships, I often projected the way I lived onto my partner. We so strongly believe that the way we live is right. The way we were brought up is right, that we want our partner to kind of follow suit. In my house, we used to eat, hang out, and then at the end of the night, we'd wash the dishes. In my wife's home, they used to eat, wash the dishes, and then hang out. And so when we got married and we started living together and when we were having friends over or whatever it may be, in my mind, we're going to eat, we're going to hang out, and then we're going to wash the dishes. In my wife's mind, she's thinking, we're going to eat, now we have to clean up, make sure everything's clean, and then we can hang out. And something as little as that can cause so much friction and bad communication and feelings of, oh, you don't care about me, and you don't love me, and you don't appreciate me, or you don't value the work. And there's so much that comes from something, and that's just a very small example. In that scenario, we both had not created a new belief system for our relationship, but we're operating based on two old belief systems that we'd simply adopted. So many of our challenges exist because we project our operating system onto someone else rather than creating one with them. I like the way you call it the operating system. So I'm going to take a sentence that you highlighted and start from there. You said, here we were fighting about what's the right moment to do the dishes, but in fact, what we were talking about is, you don't care, you don't see me, you don't appreciate me, you want it your way. It's not what you fight about, it's what you fight for. You were fighting for recognition, you were fighting for power and control, you were fighting for respect, you were fighting for trust and closeness. Underneath the fight, there are usually three sets of issues that we are actually fighting for, and that is power, trust, and value. I've made this nice meal, I prepared, I tried to be kind to your friends, and you don't value me. Once you've understood that what is the hidden dimension that you are actually fighting for, the fight, the dishes, the when to do them becomes a lot more clear. It's not just, I'm imposing my belief on you and I want it to do my way because my way is the right way. You may think this way. The question is, what happens when you have to confront yourself with someone who is different? I mean, everything about relationships is about straddling sameness and difference. And when you are a couples therapist, it's very typical that people come to you, they tell you, here, my relationship, here's my partner, let me tell you what's wrong with them and maybe you can fix them and I'll help you. Make my partner understand why my family's way of doing things is the best way of doing things. It's a very good way. If you have to change your mind, does that mean that it's a loss of your identity? Or can you actually experience that as an expansion, as something that you let in? How do you let the other person influence you without being constantly in the defense of your, you know, this is my flag and here are my values or my operation system. At first, it was a nice thing you didn't fight about. You just said, we do it. Oh, that's so interesting. No, let's do it now. No, let's. And then slowly, because you couldn't come into a unified agreement, it became a point of contention. And then that point of contention became the go-to every time you need to talk about your backgrounds, your values, your style, your priorities, your way of doing. People feel robbed of their power that if I give in to this other person, my partner may be the more powerful one in the relationship. Or if I concede, then in the future, when we're making decisions, they're going to think I'm going to concede. And often that is the case that people get into relationships because they think the other person is submissive or conceding to them or agrees with them on everything they say. And then one day that person goes, wait a minute, I didn't realize I just gave up everything I care about for you. And so how does one learn how to practice that humility and giving up of power? Or is the solution a unified agreement? In every relationship, you will find that there often is one person who is more afraid of losing the other and one person who is more afraid of losing themselves. One person more afraid of abandonment and rejection, therefore more likely to acquiesce, to pacify, to placate, to say yes until maybe one day not. And one person more afraid of suffocation and therefore they fight for their ideas, their ways of doing it, the timing of the dishes. That is less about power. That is more about the nature of connection. The majority of power struggles in a relationship are not power struggles. Power is the defense. The control battle is the way people are defending, trying to get something for something else that they are worried about. It's the surface behavior. Some people, when they're afraid, they fight. But the issue is not fighting. The issue is that they're actually afraid and they're trying to deal with their fear by gaining control. Don't just go for what you see because what you see isn't necessarily just what it is. Go always looking at a level below. Otherwise, you're going to have a lot of this. Who did you have to fight with that you had a sense that if you don't go all the way and with fists, that's the motion of fighting, right? It's not this, you know. But you enter the relationship with that and yet you live it with this. What happened to you that is making you continuously interpret every situation as a fight, as a power struggle, as I have to stand up and hold on because if I give in, this is the beginning of a slippery slope. That's a frame. That is not the truth. Now, maybe you picked somebody with whom this is sometimes what is going to happen. So then you ask this person, what happens if you don't get your way? For you, the question is, what happens if the other person gets their way? And for you, the question is, what happens when you don't get your way? Can you still feel confident even if you don't trample somebody?