Why Relationships End

A Perspective on Human Interaction

We’ve all been there, and it’s painful. When a meaningful relationship ends it can hurt the soul, even if you were the one to end it. This isn’t even limited to romantic partners for whom we have the most intense feelings. When I say relationship I mean the way any two people relate, be it lovers, friends, family, work, community, or anyone else. You have a relationship with any person you interact with, even the cashier at the store. 

Even the best relationships tend to end at some point. It leaves us wondering who we are, dazed and confused about how to be in this world. One of the most basic needs people have is the need for community and companionship, when it breaks down we’re left feeling lost. Almost everyone derives value from the sum of their personal relationships, and when a valuable one ends it causes deep pain.

So why do relationships end? I’ve been obsessed with questions of how humans relate to each other and I’ve come to one observation that seems true in every instance: every relationship is negotiated forever. 

Every single relationship with another person you’ve ever had has been negotiated, directly or indirectly whether you knew it or not. Every relationship is negotiated forever. How do you go about it?

Knowing that it’s a negotiation

You may be thinking “I’ve lived my whole life and I don’t think I’ve ever negotiated my relationship before”. It may certainly be true that you’ve never directly negotiated a relationship, but you’ve certainly been negotiating them the entire time. Negotiations aren’t just limited to suits in boardrooms, you’re negotiating every day. 

Why don’t we see this clearly? Culture hides this from us, it’s the water we swim in that we don’t even know is there. From culture we get all our notions of how to interact and relate with those around us. Without it we’d need to approach every relationship completely anew from the ground up, but with culture we can have basic ideas of what to expect.

Most of our relationships we navigate using our cultural instincts, but some relationships are pre-negotiated. I mentioned before about having a relationship with the cashier, a prime example of a pre-negotiated relationship. Most of the time when you go to a cashier you know exactly what’s going to happen: they greet you, you give them your order, they tell you how much it’ll cost, money is exchanged, and then they finish by giving you a receipt. No surprises, no asks. If you stay within that script you’ll never have an issue because both of you know what is entailed in the relationship between customer and cashier. 

But just because that relationship is pre-negotiated doesn’t mean it can’t be negotiated further. Once we know that our relationships are negotiated we can then move toward trying to get what we want out of them. 

Say you become a regular and keep seeing this same cashier. With the pre-negotiation you could keep acting like complete strangers every time you order and nothing would be wrong with that, but most people don’t act like that forever with someone familiar. After a while you might want a more personal relationship so you might make a small joke, comment, or observation to convey your familiarity. This is an attempt to negotiate a slightly more personal relationship, a sign that they are open to being more than just an anonymous business relationship. To get anywhere in getting what you want in a relationship you’re going to have to let them know what you want.  

Communicate your needs

I have spent many years on the internet reading people’s perspectives because I find them so interesting. I especially love how people relate to each other, the interaction between different humans. Why do we interact with each other the way that we do?

I can get clues to how people think and act by reading about what they see as their problems. A few of my favorite places to read those accounts are r/relationship_advice, r/sex, and r/deadbedrooms on Reddit. I’ve spent so many hours of my life reading these subreddits for the deep cutting insights into the human condition. They’re a place for people at the intersection between the desire to be loved and the desire to be their own person, a tension that’s faced by nearly every human. 

The first two, r/relationship_advice and r/sex, are relatively mild. Sometimes there are spicier situations for sure but most of the questions boil down to simply asking “is this normal” or “is this okay”. The standard response will be something along the lines of “if you’re okay with it, then that’s okay. If you’re not okay with it then you need to talk to your partner. Have you talked to your partner?”. A good amount of time the answer is no, they have not talked with their partner about it.

It’s such basic advice, I almost feel silly writing a section on the message “communicate with your partner” because it feels so basic and cliche. Yet, it’s so very important and we avoid it because it’s challenging. 

Many problems arise if we can’t communicate our needs. Even if we aren’t directly communicating with someone about our relationship we’re still negotiating indirectly. Say someone asks you to do something that you don’t want to do and you do it anyway, you communicate that it’s okay for them to ask you to do that. 

In the cashier example earlier I mentioned making a small joke or comment to try and become more familiar, that would be characterized as an indirect approach. If you wanted to be blunt and take a direct approach you could say to the cashier, “I plan on coming here regularly and want to be on good terms with you, hello my name is Joe”. That’d be quite a forward move but that would be an attempt to negotiate directly. The cashier then could come back and say “Welcome to The Store, can I help you?” and that would communicate that they don’t want the more personal relationship. They could also respond back directly saying something like “Hi Joe, I appreciate the offer but I’d like to keep things purely business” and that would be a direct negotiation of their boundary.

Passive aggression, snide remarks, and bickering are all indirect negotiation tactics that we often unconsciously know we’re doing. While they are negotiating tactics they are almost never productive. 

If you’re wanting or needing something different out of your relationships you need to communicate as clearly as possible what those conditions are. Once communicated, then everyone gets to decide how to react.

You Get to Decide

In a relationship you get to decide what is acceptable or not. After needs are communicated decisions need to be made whether to accept them or not. If you and the other person can come to an agreement of what your relationship will be then the possibilities are infinite.

When it comes to your life partners there truly are infinite details to be negotiated and will most likely need to be re-negotiated overtime. Even then we often relate with life partners in pre-negotiated manners. We have millions of notions on what a romantic relationship should be that we’ve picked up from culture and our own observations. 

Say a man and woman get married, they haven’t lived together and didn’t talk all that much beforehand. The woman really doesn’t enjoy cooking at all but the man expects daily dinner because he believes it’s the woman’s duty to cook, and he just enjoys it. 

They can try negotiating this but they’re both quite firm on their positions. If she decides not to leave she can either a) do the cooking and let the resentment build within her or b) refuse and face resentment from her partner and possibly shame from friends and family. The man faces the choice of either not having the hot meal he enjoys so much or having a wife that resents him. 

The couple could try to stay together despite this big tension, many throughout history have. But my thinking is that they’d be much better off being apart if the gulf between their needs is that big. I’d also hope that if they do love each other and want what’s best for the other they’d be able to see that they might not be the best partner for them if the differences are that big and cause that much pain. 

One of the most powerful parts of negotiating your relationships that is often the most emotionally hard truth to handle is that either of you could opt out at any time. You should want your relationships to be as consensual as possible, meaning they really want to be around you. How good of a relationship could you have with someone that dreads being with you and only stays because of duty, law, or money? Sometimes even the relationship with the cashier needs to end with someone getting banned or fired. 

With our life partners we don’t always treat them as a relationship that you can opt out of  because for most of recent human history you couldn’t. Once you were married you were to be with that person for forever or face being shunned by the rest of society. This is where the questions of “is this thing they’re doing acceptable” or “am I okay at being mad about this?” come from. You couldn’t leave your partner, but if they were seen as in the wrong for their behavior they’d be the ones shunned by society for their bad actions instead. But in the modern era you don’t need to put up with it, you can decide.

In Conclusion

The third subreddit I mentioned at the beginning was r/deadbedrooms which brutally illustrates all of these points, especially the need and tension of deciding what to do. The subreddit is filled with people who are in long term committed relationships with someone they often love dearly yet don’t get enough sex and intimacy to fulfill their needs. These people aren’t just sex hounds, they need the intimacy and touch their partners used to give them. Many of them have decided what they’ve needed, communicated as clearly as they can to their partner, and yet the issues still persist. They get put into a situation that is unbearably complex and has no good solutions. Some choose to stay, some choose to leave, but a choice needs to be made. 

Relationships end when at least one person wants it to end, whether they’ve had enough or just don’t want it to continue. In the end everyone should have the ability to opt out of their relationships. Just because a relationship ends doesn’t mean it’s a failure. Lasting to the end of time is not necessarily a marker for a successful relationship, much less the only marker. Being able to mutually end a relationship can actually be a success because that means at least one of you learned what you needed and decided you weren’t going to go without it anymore. While I believe everyone deserves love and companionship, nobody specific in the world owes you that love and companionship. Most relationships just don’t work out and that’s fine, even if it’s emotionally tough to deal with.

Every human relationship is negotiated forever. It’s up to you to figure out what you want, communicate your needs, and then decide how you’ll react. You can’t force people to change if they don’t want to, but if they’re willing then the possibilities are endless. But even if negotiations break down and it has to end, it doesn’t mean it was a failure and neither are you. All of life is trial and error, and hopefully you learn something when one of your relationships ends.