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There's only one simple answer to that question: your heart knows.
Every other answer is complicated.
If you answered by detailing incidents of undeniable abuse or chronic addictions, plenty of people would agree that you are completely justified in ending that relationship. However, you could also go on a search for couples who had dealt with those problems rather than divorcing. You would find some very happy, mature, satisfied people who were grateful they hadn't ended things when they felt justified in doing so.
If you answered by pointing to dramatic differences in personality and temperament, you would find good evidence that such differences were almost certain to persist. And you would also find good reason to believe that those differences would almost certainly engender conflict, frequent and chronic. But if you went looking for couples who had learned to cherish differences and resolve conflict well, you would find people who were delighted by the varied experiences and intrigued by the alternate perspectives of other personality types.
If you answered by tearfully recounting betrayals and infidelity in your history, most cultures and nearly every religious tradition allows for the parting of partners whose vows have already been broken. Suppose, however, that you decided to check whether there were couples who had learned how to come back from betrayal. You would find couples who had learned how to trust again, how to feel safe again, how to protect their intimacy and set boundaries that worked for them. Such couples exist, although they don't necessarily advertise themselves, to no one's surprise.
Think of a reason for divorcing, and you can find couples who have conquered it. Every single justification for ending a relationship has an exception, somewhere, in the history of couples who have decided not to stop trying, not to give up, not to blame each other but to become allies instead.
On the other hand, think of a reason for staying together, and you can find evidence that reasons such as the following don't make much sense.
Staying together for the sake of the kids might very well lead to your children being exposed to styles of relating so toxic that love will be forever contaminated in their minds.
Staying together because it makes little financial sense to divorce may well lead to the final splitting being acrimonious and vicious, because the resentment reached tidal levels of overwhelm during the interim.
Staying together because your religious principles require it isn't always accompanied by the development of the compassion and character it takes to maintain a healthy relationship. If you stay together because of religious obligation but don't inject loving kindness into your relationship, you may be creating your own torment on earth.
Let me say this as plainly as decades of working with couples leads me to see it: Saying "No" just takes one, but saying "Yes" takes three big decisions.
No relationship can be rescued if one partner doesn't want it to be rescued. If one partner is unwilling to have an open heart to intimacy, if one partner is unwilling to manage abrasive, offensive, abusive immaturities, if one partner is unwilling to choose the self-disciplines that make fidelity possible, that relationship cannot be what most of us would call successful. You've got to both want it to work. You don't both have to want it exactly equally or in perfect synchrony, but you do both have to want it.
Every relationship can be rescued if you both decide three things.
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We are in this for good, at a heart level, where "we" counts as much as "me" and "you." Both of us are willing to rank the good of the relationship as just as important as what each wants. In practice, that means that I place what is good for you as high on the priority list as I do what is good for me. We are allies in expanding mutual happiness, not adversaries trying to win a battle for anything -- control, power, being right, who gets affection tonight or who gets to pay for it tomorrow.
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We cultivate hope. Choosing hope means you keep trying, you keep working, you keep experimenting, you keep playing with things. Choosing hope means you don't give up or give in. It means you tweak and tweak and tweak, always attempting to expand happiness together. It means you make thousand-mile journeys one step at a time, not knowing for sure if the ending destination will ever justify the monotonous means. It means you look for rare others who are models for success and ask them how they managed, rather than collecting the abundant evidence that failure is so common it must be normal. People won't allow themselves to want what they don't believe they can ever get. Cultivating hope means believing you can grow a successful relationship past any and all difficulties. It means believing you can get what you both want, so you motivate yourselves to that end by cultivating hope that it will happen.
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We find or figure out how to live what we know. There's not much mystery in cultivating a happy relationship once you decide to and can generate hope to do so. Most of us know the right answers, we just can't live them. We can't apply them when we are angry, frightened, distracted, or disappointed. We know what to do, we just aren't mature enough to do the right thing at the right time, when it is really hard to do it. We don't usually need to know more secrets to communication or how to make our partners feel satisfied in bed. What we need most is to do what we know is right when we feel most justified in doing something else.
The Relationship Rich workshop is practice in those three decisions. It is an experience-based training in how to feel the commitment of your heart, how to cultivate hope, and how to live what you know.
It isn't magic. It won't take someone who has decided not to let a relationship work, shake them by the scruff of the neck, and shout some sense into them. In our experience, nothing does that. That decision has to come from within.
However...
Sometimes partners decide to exit a relationship before they've given their heart to it. If you've never given your heart to another, then you shouldn't be asking if the relationship can be rescued. You should be asking, "How will I ever experience real love if I keep my heart to myself?"
Sometimes partners decide to exit a relationship because they are hopeless. They haven't learned to cultivate hope because they've been collecting grievances, accumulating despair, confirming prejudices instilled by their family heritage or a history of dysfunctioning relationships. You can't rescue a relationship you have decided is hopeless, but when you cultivate hope, every relationship has potential.
Sometimes partners are hopeless that happiness is possible because they haven't learned how to work towards it. The work that really acts to build happiness in relationships is not getting more answers right on a multiple choice test. It's getting the right loving, collaborative, happiness-building answers out of your mouth when what you are most inclined to do is explode with rage or implode with fury. It's communicating when silence feels safer, sharing when you feel like hoarding, giving when you feel you deserve to take, engaging when that feels risky, forgiving when you have been betrayed. That's work that takes heart and guts, not right answers.
Any relationship can be rescued, as long as both partners give it heart, hope, and the right kind of hard work. No relationship can be rescued without them.
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