Relationships are very complex entities and there are many reasons why they fail. In this article, I will be discussing two important ones. One is unrealistic expectations and the other is fear of rejection.
Whether the relationship is a business partnership, a close friendship or a romantic relationship including marriage, expectations are an important dynamic. Since relationships often end due to the dissatisfaction of one or both parties with the performance of the other, expectations are the key parameter. We need to face the fact that if we expect too much then we are bound to be disappointed. On the other hand, if we expect nothing we can hardly be disappointed. As the Buddha wisely observed more than two thousand years ago, the key to happiness is not having any desires. Although that may be true, it seems to me that having no desires leads to quite a boring and meaningless life for those of us who do not aspire to be a godlike figure but are just trying to have the best life possible. Therefore, since having realistic expectations is our goal how do we achieve this desired end? There may be no easy answer except to avoid the extremes and by default wind up somewhere in the middle in a practical zone. So how and why do we create unrealistic expectations? Wishful thinking is one reason and the unwillingness many people have of accepting reasonable compromise (and we are all guilty of this in some areas of our lives). If we are not willing to accept anyone or any relationship that is not perfect then we will inevitably be disappointed and the relationship will fail. The simple fact is that ?perfect? is a storybook concept not a real one. For the person who wants the perfect mate, for example, they will search high and low and reject all who fall short until they find the one.
However, this ideal individual is only a figment of the imagination of the seeker and no real person can truly fill the bill for their ideal. The ideal is often based, at least partly, on fairy tales and other stories the person has read or seen as a child and, as in a fairy story, is an idealization of reality and requires tempering with truth and experience in order to be useful as a true model of human behavior. So what eventually happens to those who will not give up on their ideal? There are two likely outcomes. One is that she/he will get tired of looking and finally compromise on a real person or will fall for some charlatan who, by appearances at least, incorporates just about all those perfect attributes the person seeks. The one who compromises will always feel that they are superior to their mate and go through life, as the song says, vaguely discontented and unfulfilled and always blaming it on someone else. In the case of finding a charlatan posing as the ideal, the truth eventually comes out and the hoodwinked mate may wind up in divorce court and eventually in therapy endeavoring to figure out exactly what went wrong. Hopefully, with the help of a wise and talented therapist, the person may find themselves a bit more attuned to banal realities of life. The second reason relationships fail is fear of ultimate rejection. In the book ?Games People Play,? by Dr. Eric Berne, the author describes different stages of the relationship of couples. The ultimate stage is that of emotional intimacy but unfortunately most couples never reach that goal. Most couples, whose marriage survive for more than twenty years or so, wind up at a stage called games (ergo the title for the book). In the book, the author discusses the various games people play in order to stave off and avoid intimacy. So why go through all that trouble to avoid the ultimate expression of love and affection in a relationship? The answer comes back to my original premise, fear of intimacy due to the ultimate fear of rejection.
So how and why does this happen? The reason is that in order to reach emotional intimacy you must first make yourself vulnerable and being vulnerable to another means risking rejection. If your self image is not what it might be then the fear of rejection easily trumps the pleasure of intimacy and in fact that is the way most relationships of this duration or longer wind up (individuals with low self esteem feel rejection is likely because deep down they believe it is what they really deserve). Now you might not consider a twenty-year plus marriage a failure but if the game stage is as far as it gets you can call it surviving but in my opinion it is definitely less than successful. The same phenomenon holds for others? relationships among say friends. Naturally, the details differ but even in a friendship at least one party often will not get too close to the other for the same reason-fear of ultimate rejection. This is why people often have many ?friends? but do not have anyone who is really close, which is analogous to intimacy in a marriage. In addition, if the friend tries to get too close to one who has the fear of rejection, he/she often winds up the victim of behavior that is unpleasant and is often perplexing. In other words, the insecure person will push the friend away to create that ?safe? emotional distance between them. Another common behavior that insecure people use to keep themselves ?safe? from the impending fear of rejection is to reject the other first, so that they now become the perpetrator as opposed to the victim (as in the crude expression ?Dick Nixon before he dicks you!?).
The initial rejection technique also serves to test the potential friend to see if they are willing to put up with this negative behavior going forward. In other words, if they are willing to put up with the guff the person dishes out, then they are deemed safe and less threatening. In any case, these relationships will never reach any real level of closeness and the friend will remain in a buffer zone, not too close and not too far. Therefore, unrealistic expectations and fear of rejection are often the main causes of failed relationships. And perhaps the two are related. After all, why would someone hold on to unrealistic expectations if not to assure a ?perfect? union? So why do people harbor unrealistic expectations? When someone suffers from low self-esteem and therefore feels inadequate, they often wind up creating a false persona for themselves and endeavor to hide behind this mask so that others will not feel the same way about them as they feel about themselves. This false persona, will necessarily then represent some ideal individual that they would like to be, if they could. After all, why would one not create an ideal type of individual to be their creation if you have the power to create one anyway and this likely leads to searching for another who matches their made up ideal for two reasons. First, why would someone of their stature (imaginary though it may be) settle for anyone less and second, (and this is likely closer to the actual truth) if the other party is perfect as well, they are less likely to bust the bubble of the chooser because the chosen one is living in a similar fantasy. Therefore, fear of failure, specifically in the form of rejection, appears to rule the day, and can control our behavior to such an extent that it can and often does, determine the course of many of our lives.
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