Stay or Leave: How to remain in, or end, your relationship
160
Stay or Leave: How to remain in, or end, your relationship
160Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Whether we should stay in or leave a relationship is one of the most consequential and painful decisions we are ever likely to confront.
What makes the issue so hard is that there are no fixed rules for judgement. How can we tell whether a relationship is 'good enough' or plain wrong? How do we draw the line between justified longing and naivety? Does someone 'better' actually exist? Should the feelings of children be counted (and what might they be in the long term)? Could one's partner change, perhaps with therapy, or should one assume that who they are now is who they will always be?
All these questions typically haunt our minds as we weigh up whether to stay or go. With no axe to grind or ideology to promote, Stay or Leave walks us gently through our options, opening our minds to perspectives we might not have considered.
This book aims to take the reader towards a time, presently hard to imagine, when the choice will no longer feel so agonizing. Using its lessons, we can understand ourselves deeply, consider our options, minimize our regrets and find the way ahead.
- REFRESHINGLY PRAGMATIC relationship advice for couples of all kinds.
- ROMANTIC REALISM a common sense way to look at your relationship.
- RELATIONSHIP TOOLKIT for working through your fears and anxieties.
- THERAPIST-RESEARCHED draws from The School of Life’s Therapy department and their experience providing couples therapy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781912891405 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The School of Life |
| Publication date: | 01/04/2022 |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Sales rank: | 470,825 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.70(w) x 7.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
The School of Life is a resource for exploring self-knowledge, relationships, work, socializing, finding calm, and enjoying culture through content, community, and conversation. You can find us online, in stores and in welcoming spaces around the world offering classes, events, and one-to-one therapy sessions.
The School of Life is a rapidly growing global brand, with over 7 million YouTube subscribers, 389,000 Facebook followers, 174,000 Instagram followers and 166,000 Twitter followers.
The School of Life Press brings together the thinking and ideas of the School of Life creative team under the direction of series editor, Alain de Botton. Their books share a coherent, curated message that speaks with one voice: calm, reassuring, and sane.
Read an Excerpt
1. Is it okay to want them to change?
We live in a culture that firmly suggests that the essence of true love is for one person fully to accept the other, as we like to put it, just as they are. In moments of quiet intimacy, the most romantic thing one could ever hear from a partner is, apparently, ‘I wouldn’t change a thing about you’, just as the most bitter and disappointed enquiry one could ever throw at a lover in a declining relationship would be: ‘Why can’t you accept me as I am?’
If things do end, we can be guaranteed to garner substantial sympathy from friends and onlookers by explaining that we left because they wanted us to change.
It sounds almost plausible until we pause and modestly remember what the human animal is: a largely demented, broken, agitated, blind, deluded and barely evolved primate. We are, each one of us, and with nothing derogatory being meant by the term, really rather mad. We are the inheritors of peculiar childhoods; we over-and under-react in a shifting set of areas; we fail to understand key aspects of reality; we get other people wildly wrong; we are unsure of our future; many of our judgements are questionable, and a lot of the time we have no idea what is going on.
Against such a background, to insist that there would be nothing about a person that one should want to change, that to be asked to change would be an offence, that we should be loved just as we are feels like the height of arrogance and unreasonableness. Given the facts of human nature, how could we be anything other than profoundly, tirelessly committed to changing a bit here and there? How could we not be embarrassed by who we were last year, let alone right now? How could we not embrace the idea of a lover kindly proffering suggestions as to how we might evolve?
It’s time to redefine a functioning adult. This isn’t someone who bristles at the idea of change, gently suggested; it’s someone who welcomes it as a path to redemption. The true adult knows they need to grow up. The truly healthy person knows they are ill (we all are). Conversely, the people who really need to change are those who think they don’t need to change at all, and who say it’s your problem when you float the idea. They become furious with you for even suggesting the concept and storm off, calling you weird or intense.
Of course, change has to be asked for in kindly and mature ways. We’re not talking here of a bullying demand for evolution. We’re talking about how much we are right to love our partners and still want them to grow up in particular ways: learn to listen more, learn to be more present, learn to be more affectionate or at least explain why they can’t be, learn to get better at fathoming their own sexuality, learn to understand their past and how it affects their present, learn to defuse what makes them irrationally angry, learn to admit to their addictive behaviours and seek the help that would be on offer, learn not to humiliate us in company or betray us with friends or our children, learn how to be loyal and kind and relaxed and present and good….
None of this is incompatible with love; it is the work of love. Love should be a classroom in which we mutually undertake to educate one another, in a spirit of support and compassion, to grow into the best versions of ourselves. Love should not be a cavern in which we endorse each other’s worst sides or suffer in silence around the difficulties the other is causing us. ‘What would you like to change about me?’ should emerge as the kindest and most mature of enquiries between partners. Rather than giving each other presents, couples should hand over the greatest gift of all, the sincerely meant question: ‘How can I change to make it easier for you to endure me?’ That would be properly romantic.
A good enough relationship should give us the bravery to confront our flaws. ‘I want you to change’ is not a sign of cruelty; it’s proof that someone cares. The right person isn’t someone without issues; it’s someone who is committed to getting on top of them. Let’s go even further: the natural response to being with someone who resists change, and who sees our attempts to change them as an insult, might be to wonder if it is time to make a serious change to our lives.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Is it okay to want them to change?
2. Are we just too different?
3. Can people change?
4. Is it worth breaking up over sex?
5. What about the children?
6. Have we tried everything?
7. What if I end up lonely?
8. What if I just repeat the same mistakes?
9. Can I cope practically?
10. Who is rejecting whom?
11. Why do I continue to feel so stuck?
12. Why are they so puzzling?
13. What can you tell me to make me less scared of leaving?
14. Does it have to be a tragedy?
15. But I don’t find them awful!
16. Do I have permission to do this?
17. Are my expectations too high?
18. How can I tell them?
19. How come they seem so lovely right now?
20. Why do I feel so nostalgic?
21. Is it okay to compromise?
22. How do I find closure?
23. Are there alternatives to staying or leaving?
24. Am I making a terrible mistake?