Leaving a partner can be a sad and difficult thing. Deciding to do it may feel to you like a failure, but, it is a positive result if your partner has traits or behaviors that were going to make you miserable for the rest of your life. Knowing that each person you let go of was wrong for you and that there is someone else better suited who will likely manifest in the future should be hopeful and encouraging.
However, you may not be ready to make a decision just yet. And that is okay. You are not alone, as they are many people reading this who don’t know whether or not their partner is right for them.
Please take your time and keep following the steps of this program. When it comes to relationships, I believe that what’s more important than making a decision is to make the right decision. I encourage you to wait until you have enough information and are sure of what you want. You will get closer to your answer as you go through this program.
Recap
Let’s recap what you have learned so far:
- In Part 1, you learned why deciding whether to keep or leave your partner based on feelings alone is a mistake. I told you my story and how at one point in my life I let my feelings interfere with my ability to see who my partner really was… and what I learned from that experience.
- In Part 2, we looked at the 2 reasons why you must focus on your partner’s negative traits rather than on their positive characteristics if you want to be happy.
Now in Part 3, we will examine the traits and behaviors in your partner that do not fit with you. These are the ones that you don’t like and are contrary to what you believe in. We are not going to focus on unhealthy or potentially harmful traits and behaviors yet as that will come in Part 4.
Not Forcing Fit
What are the traits and behaviors in your partner that do not fit with you? Although there are many categories that we could include, there are 9 that commonly surface during my Coaching sessions:
- Belief systems: This category includes anything your partner believes in. This can relate to religion or politics for example. Let’s your partner insists that you go to church with him or her 3 times per week as a family and this presents an imposition on your own beliefs. It would then be necessary to ask yourself if you can live happily with those beliefs in your partner.
- Habits or interests: It could be something such as “your partner going sailing every weekend or staying up until 4 am and then waking up at noon the next day. That may be a problem for you.
- Family constitution and planning: It may be an issue for you if your partner has children from a previous relationship for example, or if he or she does not want to have a large family and you do.
- Cleanliness and level of physical fitness: You may have specific wants and needs about bathing, standards of cleanliness around the house or keeping in physical shape.
- Goals: For example, your partner may have as a goal to live in a third world country for a few years or to move to another state and this may not be in line with your goals.
- Habits, sexual or otherwise: Your partner may expect you to be intimate with them every single night or on the contrary only want intimacy once per month. Or your partner may be in the habit of watching television in bed until 2 o’clock in the morning on weekdays when you have to go to work the next day.
- Scheduling and time management issues: Your partner may always run 1/2 hour late or procrastinate to the point that half of the things they plan are left undone.
- General personality issues: Your partner may dislike large groups of people and you may be very social or vice versa.
- Core values: Your partner may have a different relationship with money than you do or believe that your children together must go to college even if they don’t want to and you may feel that it is up to your children to decide.
As you can see, there are many traits or behaviors in your partner that may be incompatible with yours and some of them may be more important to you than others. You need to identify the ones that you would have a hard time accepting.
In order to do that, I suggest that you:
- Make a list of all of the traits and behaviors in your partner that do not fit with you, and
- Rate them in order of importance on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being the most bothersome to you and 10 being the least bothersome.
You can download a simple workbook I’ve setup for you to complete this exercise by clicking the button below.
At this point, you may be asking yourself why you need to decide how important your partner’s negative traits are? After all, if we love someone, aren’t we supposed to accept them as they are? That is a common belief, and to some extent that is true. But before you accept your partner as is on specific issues, you need to decide how important each of their negative traits or behaviors is for you. Because accepting a negative trait or behavior that you feel does not fit with you and that you have rated a 1 and consider very bothersome is not the same as one that you rated a 10 and that is not nearly as bothersome to you.
Living with negative traits or behaviors in your partner that are going to make you miserable is not necessary. This is why you are rating them. My suggestion is that you consider overlooking or negotiating negative traits and behaviors in your partner that do not fit with you and that you rated a 7-10 but not the ones that you rated at a 1-6.
I hope that knowing that you have a system to help you decide what traits and behaviors in your partner to accept is relieving. There is no external measure by which to decide what you will put up with in your life. What you accept or reject in your relationship depends on what you know will make you happy or unhappy. And that is different for every person. What makes you unhappy may be OK for someone else and vice-versa.
I know by experience that doing this exercise may fill you with anxiety. Trying to decide what you are willing to accept in your life is not easy. We often have childhood scripts that make us give more than we receive and we also have insecurities that interfere with our ability to set the expectations where they should be. And when you struggle with these issues is when you begin to feel unhappy and resentful.
Let me ask you something: Do you believe that it makes more sense to be resentful of your partner than to say “that is not acceptable to me?” You probably can see the logic here and yet, many of you have been doing precisely that, to the point of ending up feeling discouraged and looking for a way out.
I encourage you to trust and honor yourself during this exercise. It is simple but has powerful ramifications, as it will show you where that line is between what you are willing to accept and what you are not.
After you have completed this exercise, you will have questions. You may ask yourself: What do I do after I have clarified what does not fit with me and what I am not willing to live with? How do share my needs with my partner and find out whether he or she is willing to meet me half way?
I have an answer for you. In Part 4, the last segment of this series, I will have a special offer for you to get the help and guidance you need.
I have designed an all-encompassing “Should You Stay or Should You Go?” system, in the format of an on-demand online program that walks you through what to do to reach your final decision of whether to keep or leave your partner, with clarity and certainty.
It will help you look further at the traits and behaviors in your partner that do not fit with you and make decisions based on what you and your partner are willing to negotiate. This will be a very important part of the process of deciding whether to keep or leave your partner. Although the program is available to everyone, there will be a coupon available at the end of the next post that allow you to get a large discount on the original price.
Before you can sign up for the program, I have a lot more information for you. In Part 4, I will share with you another very important piece of the system. We will explore the traits and behaviors in your partner that are going to be the most problematic for you. These are your partner’s unhealthy traits and behaviors. As you can imagine, you cannot make a decision on whether to keep or leave your partner unless you look at these extreme characteristics in them first.
Make sure that you are ready before you head to Part 4, and do not forget to print and complete the exercise located in the workbook for this video. I am honored to be part of your journey to avoid staying with the wrong partner and look forward to seeing you in Part 4, the final part of this series.