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Charting the Life-Span of Love: Seven Relationships and Why They Ended

WHILE IT IS TRUE THAT there are as many variations in relationships and reasons for their endings as there are couples who enter into them, there are also certain basic themes and issues that operate in both the creation and the dissolution of relationships.

What follows are the stories of seven relationships and the issues upon which they foundered and ultimately disintegrated. Although these are composites drawn from among the hundreds of disengaging couples I have seen in therapy, and although no story will exactly replicate your own, I have included them here to provide you with a sort of dictionary of the many kinds of developmental tasks which are consciously or unconsciously undertaken in relationships. They can give you a way of identifying the tasks that are being or have been accomplished in yours.

Because of our obsolete mythologies of love—in particular the myth that love is forever—our natural instinct is to feel as if our relationships have ended “out of the blue,” with no real reason whatsoever, or worse yet, for reasons single-handedly precipitated by our spouses or sweethearts. Yet, as these stories reveal, relationships always end for a reason—they end when developmental tasks have been completed by one or both partners.