Stop Promising Your Sad and Angry Partner That You’re Going to Change
Until you learn WHY you do whatever is hurting them in the first place.
Please stop promising your spouse or partner that you’re going to change behaviors which result in them expressing hurt, sadness, and anger, and then NOT actually changing.
Every time you do it—no matter how sincere and well intentioned the promise may be—trust is being destroyed between the two of you, and they’re going to want to end your relationship (and it makes sense for them to, no matter how painful and inconvenient that may feel to you).
Bad marriages and partnerships aren’t comprised of a bunch of malevolent villains plotting ways to inflict pain and suffering on their relationship partners. Bad relationships tend to involve super-regular people who love one another and with the best of intentions are hurting one another due to two factors:
1. They have radically different experiences around whether something is painful or important.
2. They do a piss-poor job communicating about it. (To be fair, this is sometimes because of just one of the partners, and if we’re going to be most fair about it, the shithouse communicator is usually a man. Sorry guys—I promise I don’t think 95% of you are doing it on purpose.)
For the partner who doesn’t feel pain from a certain situation or doesn’t consider a particular subject or event important, they’re usually not thinking about anything at all.
Some small percentage of relationship partners out there don’t care about the mental, physical, and emotional wellness of the person they’re sharing a life with. (Antisocial personality disorder in the general population is estimated to be between 1% and 5%, increased in people ages 24-44. The stats on narcissistic personality disorder are nearly identical. Well over 90% of the time, you are not dealing with sociopathic narcissism.)
If you find yourself somehow mixed up with someone who truly doesn’t care about you, I hope you’ll find a safe path out of the relationship. We should not subject ourselves to pain being dished out by people who would do so intentionally or via willful neglect.
We ALSO should not subject ourselves to pain being dished out accidentally by people we love, but therein lies the rub: Many very smart, very decent people behave and speak in ways that can result in pain for their relationship partner, and it’s the communication and decisions we make around those moments that determine whether a relationship will remain healthy and last, or die the slow painful death so many of us have lived through.
We’re already neck-deep in the shit festival that is political season during a presidential election year in the United States. Few life experiences better highlight how two different individuals can ultimately wish for the same thing (the best country possible) but have such divergent and opposing ideas about how to achieve it.
Two marriage partners, or committed long-term romantic partners, almost always want the same things—a life full of peace and contentment and connection with the person they want to spend the rest of their lives with. More than half the time, that doesn’t work out for people. (All of the divorces, plus all of the people in relationships they consider bad or are actively planning to exit.)
Your #1 Priority Should be Increasing the Amount of Trust in Your Relationship
What’s the thing that correlates most directly with relationship success and longevity?
Not love, certainly. People who love one another get divorced thousands of times per day.
It’s trust.
And trust didn’t erode over the past five, 10, 20 years of your relationship because you’re some dirty liar who can’t tell the truth. Trust eroded largely in your blind spots around conditions in your life that you weren’t paying much attention to, combined with your partner experiencing you not taking their expressed concerns seriously whenever you talked (or more likely, argued) about it.
Group Coaching is Now Available, Extended 1-on-1 Scheduling Options
After several years of one-on-one coaching, I’ve launched a new support group/group coaching project for you to consider joining. I hope you will. To start, we have a men’s-only group meeting on Mondays at 12 p.m. ET, and we have a mixed group (women and men) meeting on Fridays at 12 p.m. ET.
I am making myself available five days per week, and both earlier and later in the day, for individual coaching if Eastern time business hours are a non-option for you.
It’s inevitable, I think, that there will have to be evening times available for group coaching to work effectively. If you’re interested in joining, but can’t meet during the middle of a weekday, please let me know what time of day would work better for you. I’m currently thinking the addition of an 8 p.m.-9:30 p.m. ET time slot on Tuesdays and Thursdays might make sense.
If interested you can learn more about joining Group here. - MF
How does one achieve trust in relationships?
Every day, we do things and say things which result in our spouse or partner feeling respected, loved, listened to, paid attention to, as if we’re interested in them and their experiences.
Because we’re not psychic or all-knowing, we sometimes do and say things which our partner experiences in ways they don’t like. Sometimes, we don’t realize, that thing is actually hurting them. And when they communicate that pain to us, we listen, express care, express remorse if appropriate, and then enact whatever changes might be necessary to ensure we won’t repeat the behavior which results in some type of injury to them.
And that’s pretty much it.
But that’s not what usually happens, obviously. Most people (often men) tend to argue that their spouses or relationship partners SHOULDN’T be responding to their behavior the way that they are. The problem, these people say, isn’t what happened, but the reaction by their partner to what happened.
If you just think about it the way I think about it, or feel about it the way I feel about it, then we won’t have this problem anymore!
The vast majority of the time, there’s no maliciousness there. Just an honest assessment that a mental or emotional adjustment by the other person will eliminate the problem.
That’s almost always where trust breaks down slowly over the longevity of a committed partnership or marriage.
If we can’t communicate to our partners that we’re having a problem and ask them for help with the expectation that we’ll actually receive any, then there’s just no long-term path to relationship health. And that is so hard to realize when you’re in the middle of another disagreement about wearing shoes in the house, or whether you’re going to spend Saturday visiting the in-laws.
Eventually, the person on the receiving end of the hurt over many years says they want out of the relationship. About 70% of the time, women (in male-female marriages/partnerships) are opting out.
And when that happens, it’s super-common for their partners to say: “Wait! I promise I’m going to change!”
And they kind-of mean it, even though they rarely can define the problem their spouse or partner is having—because if they COULD define the problem, one might argue they’re doing all of this painful behavior on purpose.
But what happens when no change occurs?
It’s akin to a broken promise.
And broken promises yield trust erosion, if not outright destroying it.
…
Addiction issues related to drugs, alcohol, gambling, and sex often come with promises to change. Addiction specialists and some type of support structure can help people battling their addictions.
My work is rooted in more invisible, more nuanced, less dramatic broken promises around seemingly minor circumstances like promising to be home at a certain time, or where we put our dirty laundry, or leaving a used dish by the sink.
The problem with “I promise I’m going to change!” comes in when the person doesn’t believe they’re doing anything wrong.
There’s nothing inherently wrong or evil about getting stuck in traffic, or getting held up at the office, and then getting home later than you’d said you would.
There’s nothing overtly sinister about thoughtlessly throwing a shirt or pair of pants somewhere in your bedroom that your spouse doesn’t like.
And leaving a dish by the sink when you’re in a hurry and believing you’ll get to it later isn’t the behavior of some terrible person who deserves to be divorced or broken up with.
But if behaviors like this are the very behaviors which communicate to your partner that they’ll never be able to trust you to care about or honor the things that matter to them, you’re always going to have a trust deficit in your relationship.
And if any time they try to talk to you about this, your response is that what you think and feel about it trumps what they think and feel about it, and that you’re more concerned with your intentions instead of their experiences, your behavior is always going to be painful to them.
Trust is eroded over time.
Trust is also earned and restored over time.
Consistently considerate behavior over time = Trust.
Maybe you do what you do because you’re really busy and stressed out at work. Maybe it’s ADHD or another neurodivergent condition. Maybe you have some emotional baggage because things happened to you when you were a kid that were not okay and are not your fault. Maybe you have trust issues yourself because the people you were supposed to be able to trust betrayed you. Maybe you simply have habits which get under your partner’s skin.
There are so many reasons WHY we might do the things we do.
And until we understand those reasons, we can’t be promising our partners that we’re going to change. Because until we learn how to see what’s happening through the other’s lens, we won’t.
More trust erodes.
More evidence or reasons to end the relationship pile up.
Not because anyone’s bad, necessarily. Certainly not because anyone is intending harm.
But simply because trust is gone, and in relationships, trust is a finite resource.
Matthew Fray is the author of “This is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships”, a relationship coach, and formerly the blogger at Must Be This Tall To Ride.
I really need to figure out the why.
Excellent article!! You really hit the nail on the head.