How Looking at Others Hurts Our Relationship

When we fall in love with our person, we want to always feel that we are the most important and special being to them. I think this is the way most of us think about love.

We find our one true individual and then we want it perfect and wonderful all the time. Isn’t that what is supposed to happen? We see so many love stories and movies and ideas that many of us believe this is going to be how it will always be.

We fall in love and then love will take care of everything. But if you are reading this article, you probably have experienced something very different. Like wondering how your perfect partner really doesn’t know you as well as you thought they did.

All couples start out beautifully. Each person loves the other and there is a belief that the amazing union will last forever. But as we all know in a year or two things start to change.

It’s not that we stop loving our mate, it’s just that since our heart is so open, we get hurt when there is a misunderstanding. Sometimes these disagreements can separate us and keep us from connecting. This is pretty common too.

But when there is a mate who feels they have to leave the relationship in order to feel good about themselves well that is another situation entirely.

Broken trust in a relationship is something you and your loved one can come back from, but it takes delicacy, the desire to rebuild, and effort.

Sometimes in a relationship people do things that cause the trust to break. Let’s say one person calls or texts someone outside of the relationship. This can have a devastating effect on the other person.

Sometimes in a relationship there is a difficulty where one of the partners might be attracted to someone other than the mate. This can also lead to some flirtation, some exchange of emotion, and even even more.

When this happens, there is a big rift between partners. The one who was cheated on often feels betrayed and can’t believe their mate would do that to them. Their heart feels torn and they might even wonder, “How in the world can I heal from this?”

Being unhappy in a relationship is pretty common. Having an affair because of that unhappiness is also pretty common. When people feel lonely they will do almost anything to relieve the loneliness, including starting a relationship with another person.

I have counselled several couples where one of the mates turned to another to relieve whatever they were feeling. Usually they think they will never be caught by the other, but it often happens that the other already knows.

As someone who is interested in what causes behavior, I am convinced that the madder you are, the more wounded you have been. It’s hard to think of an angry person as in pain though. Most of us want to get away from someone who is angry. We feel their fierceness and we just want to back away and not have anything to do with them.

I tried to calm him down. I did so three times. The fourth time I just let him rage, and that’s exactly what he did. He raged and raged and raged. And when he was done he got up and left the room. I continued with the wife and soon after the session ended. I felt a lot of emotion in the session and a lot of it was mine. I felt helpless to help him. I felt very sad for his inability to find a way to be understood by his wife. I felt him trapped inside himself and having no way to express himself except with a big booming voice that no one could tolerate.

I was listening to a friend recently talk about temptation. You know that feeling of being tempted that takes hold of you and you just can’t put on the brakes and whatever it is that you are temporarily obsessed by seems like you just have to have it no matter what? Yeah, that’s temptation.

Being seduced by an idea, a substance, food, music, or person people is probably the most human experience we can all have. We all wake up on some days and crave something. Maybe it’s coffee or tea or soda or a donut. We start with an idea. We get tempted with a thought. The thought becomes a craving and then it is a must have it.

Relationships cause hurts. We don’t want them, but they occur. This is just the way it is when two humans live and interact in a close and intimate way. We have a different kind of openness with our partners and when we get stung by them we get really hurt, I mean really hurt.

It feels as if they never really knew us at all, because if they did, how could they hurt us so badly? And if we get hurt, how long do we hold onto the pain of being hurt? Some of us can’t let go and we carry that hurt around inside us for a long time. In some cases it can last for years.

If you are human, you have felt jealous. You might even have some early memories of really feeling the pain of jealousy when you were young. I like to think it’s pretty common for all of us as we grow up to experience the hurt associated with being jealous.

But why do we keep feeling it and how to do we deal with it when we grow up and are in what we consider an adult relationship? Why is it we often still get re-injured or we re-injure our mate and it always centers around jealousy?

As a couple counselor I work with people in relationships. Often the difficult issues surround feelings of jealousy. So let’s talk about it and understand what happens to us and our partner when we feel it.

I was thinking about jealousy the other day and how it can be so difficult in relationships. What brought on this thought was me thinking about telling my husband that I was going to meet a male friend, a colleague, for coffee. I was thinking about how he doesn’t even blink when I tell him these things.

He knows about my friend and I guess he doesn’t feel threatened in any way. I don’t know this to be true but it is what I think he thinks. Maybe I will ask him. But on the same subject I do know he was telling me about a dinner he was going to with some of his male friends. I asked who was going and he read the list and I heard a woman’s name.

Tag Archives: cheating

How Looking at Others Hurts Our Relationship

When a Partner Cheats

What to Do About Broken Trust in a Relationship

How We Learn to Trust Again After Infidelity

Why Do People Cheat? And Can We Survive It?

Understanding Anger and Pain in Relationships

Overcoming Temptation in Relationships

Forgiving Your Husband or Wife is Hard When You’re Hurt

How Jealousy in a Relationship Divides Us

Jealousy in Relationships and Why We Feel Hurt