The Bowling Ball – Why Relationships Fail

When I was wondering how I was going to be able to put this book into writing without losing some people along the way, I didn’t come up with a good solution.  But I promise once you start reading all of the pieces, you will be able to bring them together and by the end it will make perfect sense. At least, that’s how it has played out in my head. But, I digress.  There are many reasons why relationships fail but for the most part there is one basic flaw in the relationship that causes most issues.  Ah yes, communication.  Communication is the key to any successful relationship.  That is why there are countless books on it.  So why is it so difficult sometimes to communicate with your girlfriend, boyfriend, wife or husband?  The simple answer to that question is because communication leads to questions.  And questions lead to answers that we sometimes don’t want to give.  Aren’t things much easier when we just go about the day and just assume that our significant other knows exactly what we are thinking?  Or is it that sometimes we don’t want them to know what we are thinking.   Most would probably say yes to both if they were being honest with themselves.  I have a great example.  Let’s just say that you love to golf.  Of course I’m not using this example just because I am addicted to golf.  Why would I use myself as an example right off the bat?  That would be just crazy!  Anyway, imagine yourself early on in a relationship and the person you are dating doesn’t know about your “addiction” because you met in the fall and it really hasn’t come up that often. They know you play golf but what they don’t know is that you play a couple times a week during the summer and that you have a group that you play with every Saturday morning.  Okay, try and follow me on this one.  You know when you first meet someone that you really like and sometimes you may be a little guarded with what you tell them at first?  It seems reasonable.  I mean, you’ve only know them for a month or so and are just getting to know them.  Yes, that’s true.  But sometimes we take that a little further than we probably should.  We start to like that person so much that we all of the sudden become not ourselves.  We feel compelled to not be completely upfront with them about who we really are because, well, let’s face it, they might not like who we really are as much as they like who we have been pretending to be.  Starting to sound like you’ve heard this story before?  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this story play out.  People are so afraid of being themselves early on in a relationship because they like this person so much and they don’t want to screw it up by simply being themselves.  Are you kidding!  Okay, let’s bring this back to my example. I got a little off track.  So, back to your addiction to golf.  Fast forward to the spring and you are so excited about the warm air, the green grass, the smell of fresh cut lawns, the spring thunderstorms and you can’t wait to hit some golf balls.  You’ve been seeing someone now for five or six months and they are super excited about the spring too.  Just maybe not for the same reasons you are.  You decide to start off slowly and go hit some golf balls one evening after work.  But once you’ve hit that first ball it all comes rushing back to you.  You need to feed your addiction!  Now you are hitting balls a couple of times per week and your group is meeting this weekend for the first time this spring.  You are so excited that you just can’t stand it!  However, your other half doesn’t share your enthusiasm.  They knew you liked golf but they didn’t realize how crazy you were about it and that they weren’t going to see you all summer because you were going to live on the golf course.  Okay, I may have embellished the story for effect but you get the picture.  Now you are having your first problem as a couple.  But everything was going so well…what happened?  Remember way back in the fall when you first met?  You couldn’t have told them back then that you were addicted to golf, right?  That would have ruined everything.  There is no way they would have continued seeing you if they knew you were crazy.  Again, embellishing slightly for effect.  The point is that you should have talked about it sometime over the last six months so it wasn’t a complete shock in the spring.  Call me crazy, but maybe you could have compromised and talked about a plan for how you could still have some time on the course but just not the whole summer.  I know this example is extreme but I bet you could switch out the golf part of the story for something that applies to your relationship and relate to that example.  This one issue would probably not doom your relationship, but it is a sign of things to come if you don’t start to communicate.  Change is hard and old habits are hard to let go.  Relationships can usually survive the first couple of these situations because everything is still new and there is a good deal of lust on both sides that can make cover up how you feel.  But, sure as the sun will rise tomorrow most of you will continue down the same path until the issues are too much to overcome and the relationship is over.  I know that relationships are much more complicated than this and there are a boatload of reasons why they don’t last.  However, the list of them could be shortened tremendously if we could just learn how to communicate effectively from the beginning.  And this leads us finally….to the bowling ball.