Why Relationships End

Obviously, our goal is to help you build strong relationships in all areas of your life that will last. The unfortunate reality, however, is that we do live in a fallen world. We’re all broken and sinful people trying to build and maintain relationships with other broken and sinful people. While we can do our best to hold up our end, we all know that relationships don’t always work; friends can have a falling out, couples break up, marriages end in divorce. This is the world we live in and just as important as learning how to build healthy relationships from the start is learning why they fall apart and what to do when that happens.

If we want to figure out why relationships fail, we need to understand our motivations that brought us to the relationship in the first place. What brought us together? What were we looking for? What is the unmet expectation? When I am speaking to students in high schools, I ask them the question, “Why do teenagers date?” I have heard a lot of … interesting responses to this question ranging from, “Popularity, status and fitting in” to “experience, practice, and sex” to “free food, gifts, and even drugs!” These public school kids have NO filter! I’ve been working with kids in schools for over 10 years now and I have heard countless answers to this question, but as different as all of these motivations are, they actually all come down to the same root that’s driving them. All of these different things are actually basically the same one thing and the thing they share is why they fail. Now, for those of you watching, you might be a little bit older and possibly more mature than my students in high school, so you’re motivations might be a little bit more sophisticated than theirs. Maybe you’re dating because you are looking for someone to share you life with, maybe you’re dating to find someone you could potentially marry or someone you can build a family with. Some people are dating because of social expectations or even just loneliness. Of course, there are still people dating for similar reasons to the students I work with, but you might be surprised that depending on how you define your expectations, your reasons for dating may not be that far removed from the high schoolers and still come back to the same root motivation. When we can understand our motivations, they can give us an important clue into why our relationships fail.

So, what do all of these motivations have in common? What is the underlying thread? Well, in a word, selfishness. I want to fit in, I want to be popular, I want to have sex, I want to get married, I want to have kids. In all of those different motivations, who is it really about? Now, marriage is supposed to be different. The biblical expectations for married couples show us that it is supposed to drive us to love, serve and honor the other person.

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. - Eph. 5: 22-33

Even the traditional wedding vows state; “For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do we part.” What those words really mean are, “No matter what challenges we face, no matter our financial situation, no matter if you get sick and you can never do a single thing for me, it does not change the promise that I am making to you today.” And that promise is saying that you are going to give 100% everyday for the rest of your lives to make their lives better, even if you never get anything in return. That is what all of those fancy words really mean. Now, marriage is just one type of relationship that can fall apart due to selfish motivations. Think about the reasons that you became friends with the people in your life. There are friendships of convenience, friendships of proximity, even friendships of advantage. What has become extremely common in our modern culture is to view relationships as a means to an end, where we use one another in order to achieve whatever end we have in mind and when we are no longer getting what we got in that relationship for or we think that there is somebody else out there who can do it better, we’re out. Key words here: we’re using each other. Now, we may not like the way that sounds, but that doesn’t change what it is. Of course, we hate when we realize that we were being used by someone who we thought we could trust, but how often are we doing that to others without even recognizing it?

So, what is the antidote? If selfishness from one or both of the people involved is what causes the relationship to breakdown, how can we guard against that? Well, we are made to love one another. In fact, as followers of Christ, we are commanded to. Now, that wouldn’t make sense if you understand love in the way that many of us define it today; as an emotion, a feeling, that specific release of hormones that makes you feel all nice and warm... momentarily. If we stick with a shallow definition of love, it’s no wonder that our relationships don’t work out. Love, however, is a choice. It’s something you can choose to do towards someone regardless of how you feel in the moment. The greatest love is laying your life down for a friend. This love was perfectly displayed for us by Jesus when He laid down His life for us.

In our relationships with fellow believers, we are not only commanded to love them, but they are also commanded to love us. When we don’t live out this command to be loving, we are guilty of sin, which means that we should expect to be held accountable for it as well as having the ability to hold of believers to that same standard. The process for this was laid out for us by Jesus in Matthew chapter 18, starting in verse 15.

“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

Loving one another does not mean accepting toxic or abusive behavior from someone for the sake of not losing a friend or partner. We have clear expectations for how we are to treat one another and we are given clear guidelines on how to respond when someone is behaving sinfully. This is also another reason why the Bible tells us in 2 Cor. 6:14 to not be unequally yoked with non-believers. In order to be able to hold eachother to the same standards and expectations, we have to both be coming from the same place to start.