Is there hope for my relationship? My colleagues and I are often asked that question and variations of it. But some people make an appointment with us after they have already decided that there is no hope--that they just have to get out. Sometimes people aren't even completely aware they've decided this, but they come to counseling already convinced that nothing we can offer can possibly change their minds. It’s sad when that happens, because if people can find just a little hope, and work hard to get rid of the negatives in the relationship, the love can often come back as strong as ever.
It's important not to blame partners who have lost hope, because there are usually very legitimate reasons why people give up on their relationship. In many cases, for example, they have been hurting for a very long time, and persistent pain leads to discouragement. Long term physical or emotional pain has the psychological effect of causing you to think that it will never stop. Another reason people tend to lose hope for relationship improvement is that they've already tried everything they know to make it better and nothing has worked. They've tried interacting differently with their partner; they've tried reading books, asking friends or family members for advice, and they are still facing daily pain and loneliness in a relationship that once gave them the opposite. Of course they are discouraged. Who wouldn’t be?
But hope is an enduring ember. I admit that as a child I was fascinated with fire. The fact that a hot ember could ignite one thing but not another was a source of great curiosity. To my parent's understandable concern it also lead to many hours of playful experimentation as I dropped first this piece of bark and then that twig onto a glowing coal in the fireplace to see what would happen. Somehow through this play I learned that buried embers can stay hot for days after a fire burns out. To rekindle a fire, even long after it's burned out, all I had to do was to expose some glowing embers, toss on some dry tinder, and get some oxygen to the whole thing by blowing on or fanning it.
I have watched couples uncover the ember of love in their relationships. It is a very exciting moment of rediscovery and renewal--like the new growth of spring pushing courageously though the sun-warmed soil after the winter frosts have given way to warmer days. I have had the pleasure of seeing couples, first tentatively and then more enthusiastically, fan the smoldering tinder on the embers of a once crackling fire of love.
But a newly rekindled fire is a tender thing. It is very easy for still discouraged partners to stop feeding the growing flames and let it go out again, for impatient partners to dump too much firewood on too quickly and smother it, or for fearful partners to simply dump a bucket of water over the whole thing to avoid getting burned again. Yes, a lot of things can potentially go wrong when rekindling love. But should that stop couples from trying? I say no way. Love is too powerful and too important to let die. And having worked with hundreds of people, I have seen that ending a problem relationship does nothing to end problems. In addition to splitting up a family, it often prevents a person from learning to deal with the things that need to be dealt with for a relationship to work. In other words, obstacles to love not overcome in ones current relationship will, as certain as autumn follows summer, show up in the next.
Fear, discouragement, and pain are real, and must be faced. But unless a partner has personal problems her/she is unable or unwilling to change, problems that make him/her unfit for ANY relationship, there are powerful reasons to search for that enduring ember of love.
