~ MamakTalk ~: Why Trying To Solve All Your Partner’s Problems Will Ruin Your Relationship

It doesn’t take a couple’s therapist to tell you that the likelihood of cheating or divorce is directly proportional to how miserable the relationship is. Relationship-killers are built on two pillars.

Both involve poor boundaries. Both can create Facebook posts that paint a picture-perfect relationship, when in reality, the relationship is like living in constant turmoil.

The first pillar involves doing “everything” for the other partner. You take care of your partner’s problems, you give your partner everything he or she desires and, sometimes, you support his or her dreams at extreme cost to yourself. You do everything you’re supposed to do.

But then what happens? You find out your partner has cheated on you.

Romantic sacrifice is the religion of our time. Show me any romantic movie, and I’ll show you a needy, desperate character who treats him or herself like horse sh*t, simply in order to be loved by someone.

Being everything to someone is actually toxic. When you show someone that no matter what happens, you will always make it better for him or her, you are teaching that person that there are no repercussions for his or her actions. You show that person that he or she is not responsible for the problems in life.

If your partner can’t get a job and spends the next three years lounging on the couch while you work three jobs to make ends meet, what lessons are you teaching him or her? It doesn’t matter what you say to your partner. If your actions reinforce that you’ll take care of him or her no matter what, what makes you think your partner is going to change?

Imagine that you had a cat who scratched your eyes out each time you picked it up. If you don’t enforce better behavior, then why would the cat ever stop scratching you?

So, why do we do this? We do this because fixing someone’s problems is an easy way to avoid revealing our true needs, as well as a way to avoid unpleasant conflict. By solving our partner’s every problem, we feel needed. While we think we are making ourselves irreplaceable by being Mr. or Ms. Fix It, we are actually making the intimacy replaceable.

Solving problems is easy. Cultivating intimacy is not. When there’s no friction or discomfort, there’s no need for growth. Neither partner grows, and the relationship starts to taste like stale Doritos: cheesy and manufactured.

Pretty soon, our partners take us for granted. After all, when we try to parent them to success, they never reach success. They never learn the value of the struggle and pain that is required to become a healthy, mature adult.

Believe it or not, a loving and healthy relationship requires that partners say “no” to each other on occasion. It requires conflict. It requires each partner deciding what is and what is not allowed in the relationship. It requires you to stick to those spoken commandments and follow through on them, even if it hurts your partner.

When our top relationship goal is to always feel good, no one feels good. So we avoid conflict, and pretty soon, the relationship falls apart. We’re left staring out the window, wondering what went wrong.

Healthy couples understand that good feelings are a byproduct of getting the more important things right: needs, trust and values. Sometimes, developing these things requires discomfort.

Oftentimes, when people seek someone to solve their problems, they are really seeking someone who can emotionally support them during the hardships. Kids don’t want you to take their crayons and draw outside the lines of their coloring books in the same way adults don’t want you to take their lives and solve everything while they take a back seat.

Pretty soon, they’ll become bitter and frustrated by the lack of control you give them over their own lives. Pretty soon, they’ll resent you and leave you.

The goal of a relationship is to not have all of your life’s problems fixed by your partner, nor is to fix all your partner’s problems. The goal of a relationship is to have two individuals unconditionally support one other as they deal with their problems themselves.