Have you ever felt like your relationship was… failing? When our love life goes through a difficult moment, when we are on the brink of a breakup or divorce, fear of failure may take over.
The prospect of facing our failure, and having to admit it both to ourselves and to others, can be truly terrifying.
In this paralysing state of mind, it is difficult to embrace change, especially if it goes in an unplanned direction. When failure finally happens, we try to resist, and if we can’t—then we start looking for someone to blame for things having gone wrong.
Why is that? Where does this fear come from?
The notion of “failure” can only exist because of its opposite and complementary idea: success.
Most of us strive to have “successful” relationships. Many of us secretly hope that those around us will look at our love life with admiration and perhaps a bit of envy. When this image of perfection is threatened, we feel scared and frustrated.
In the long run, evaluating our relationships in terms of success and failure can turn our relationships into something more similar to a mission, a project, an endeavor. And obviously, if we are concerned about success, failure is lurking just around the corner.
But who and what defines success and failure with regards to intimate relationships?
Relationship models are, at the end of the day, social constructs. We are constantly bombarded with representations of how a successful relationship should look. All sorts of advertisements, from food to cars to clothing, portray happy, healthy and generally heterosexual couples with apparently nothing to worry about. Not to mention movies, books and magazines; if they want to sell, featuring a successful love story is almost a requirement.
Being constantly exposed to these images of couples with perfect smiles, beautiful houses, beautiful babies, shining cars, we end up yearning to be them. Those images become powerful archetypes.
We gradually create an unconscious standard against which we measure our love life. While we would be reluctant to admit it, most of us, at least at some point, consider a relationship successful to the extent that it matches the models we see in the media.
For some of us, those standards can have pretty disastrous consequences on our intimacy, as we realize that real life is much more complex than those simplistic pictures.
The first step towards freeing ourselves from those hidden criteria of success is acknowledging them and making them explicit. Here’s a simple way to do it: