Fixing a Broken Relationship

Not every relationship is designed to succeed. One could argue that most relationships are supposed to fail, because they can only succeed once. When you have been in a relationship for a long time and it appears to be struggling, you may find yourself at a crossroads. On the one hand, you love your partner and your relationship is extremely important to you. On the other hand, sometimes two personalities are simply not mean to be together.

Sometimes it is worth fixing a broken relationship, sometimes it is not. You need to determine whether the relationship you have is worth saving. If it is, then you need to take the steps necessary to repair it. If it isn’t, it may be time for you to move on.

How to Tell When a Relationship is Worth Saving

Deciding whether to stay together or allow yourselves to drift apart is not just a matter of how you feel at the time, because emotions can vary every day. One day you wake up and you love your partner more than life itself. The next day you might want nothing more than for them to be out of your sight.

No, when you make a decision about whether it is worth fixing a broken relationship, you need to try to take your current emotions out of the picture, and focus instead on your expectations of a future. Here are several criteria you should use to see if it is worth fixing your broken relationship.

  • Who They Are vs. Who They Will Be – Think about your partner. Do you truly love how they act and how they treat you every day? Or do you love only what you think they could be (for example, someone that is mean almost all of the time but occasionally has bouts of extreme kindness). You should never expect your partner to change. If you love who they are right now, even if they don’t change very much, then your relationship is worth saving. If you love who you wish they were, but they have yet to become that person, it may be time to move on.
  • Happiness Scale – Ask yourself how happy you have been throughout most of your relationship. Ignoring your current struggles, Were you happy the vast majority of the time? Some couples are unhappy right away, but stay together because they occasionally had a lot of happiness in their relationship. Other people were happy for a long period of time before the problems started. Fixing a broken relationship is worthwhile when there is evidence that you will experience a lifetime of happiness in the future.
  • Causes of Relationship Problems – The cause of your relationship’s problems is another thing you need to consider. When your relationship is struggling due to causes that are not entirely due to you or your partner (like financial stress, miscommunication, etc.) then once those problems are gone your relationship can start its healing process and you can be happy again. If it is primarily due to problems between you and your partner that will never change, then you may have to ask yourself what you expect the future to be like if you stay together.

Questions to Ask Yourself

None of these are set in stone. The above list represents just a small subsection of the things you need to consider when you decide if it is worth fixing a broken relationship. The goal is simply to focus on reasonable expectations of the future, rather than how you currently feel at that moment. If you have good reason to believe that your relationship will succeed, stay together, and do whatever it takes to start mending your relationship.