When Is It Time To Walk Away From The Person You Envisioned Forever With?

Love is a mess, sometimes it’s perfect, but most of the time it’s a mess. You have contradicting thoughts and ideas in your head. You might not agree on everything or your S/O might not take things you’re actually concerned about seriously. Maybe you are almost to your breaking point and you just don’t know how long you can handle it anymore.

But you love them, so what do you do?

I feel like lately I’ve talked about this topic one to many times with people I’ve met in my life.

They absolutely love their S/O but their relationship is taking a toll on them, mentally and emotionally and sometimes even physically. I watch them exert so much of their energy into trying to patch the holes, into just wanting to give their S/O one more chance to turn things around. They don’t want to leave because their worried when they leave their S/O’s life will come crashing down and you never want to see someone you care about suffer.

But enough has to be enough, right?

You can’t keep trying to help someone who doesn’t want to help and you can’t make someone change when they don’t see anything wrong with their behavior, and that’s extrememly hard to accept.

You want to help people so badly, you want to ‘fix’ them, you think maybe it you just try a little harder, push a little more or love a little louder than it can make them realize how much they need you.

But unfortunately things don’t always go like we plan in our head, in fact things rarely ever go as we plan. Sometimes things just aren’t meant to work out and that can be extremely challenging to wrap your mind around.

I see people in my own life in dead end relationships, relationships that should have ended months, maybe even years ago because they’re not going to change and they’re not getting any better. I watch my friends try and try to make their S/O happy when in reality I don’t even think they notice. The only thing I see them notice is that times they messed up or forgot or didn’t do something they said they would. That’s what they notice and that isn’t healthy.

It’s hard to watch. It’s heartbreaking, really.

So when is it time to pack up and walk away?

Now.

I know it’s hard for you to think of your life without them, I know you’ve invested so much time and so many years into your relationship, but it’s at dead end now and there’s no more road ahead. It’s not healthy for either of you. You fight more than you’re happy. You’re not the same people you first were when you started dating, things change and one of you grows more than the other. You’ve become different people, you’ve become different people and you’re having a difficult time accepting that.

You want to get back to where you started, but sometimes that’s just not possible. Sometimes you can’t get that time back, even if you wish you could.

It’s hard to wrap your mind around the thought of someone no longer being in your life, but sometimes you have to do what’s best for you in the long run, not at this very moment.

You need to separate your head from your heart and listen to that voice in your head telling you something’s got to give because that something might be you.

You can’t keep clinging to someone who isn’t going to make you ultimately happy, they might have made you happy in the past but time and things change rather quickly. Your life is now, you can’t keep living this lie that things will get better. And maybe they will, but they most likely won’t.

You’re still young, you still have time ahead of you and a whole life to celebrate, don’t lock yourself into a relationship that isn’t bringing you full joy just because you’ve been dating someone for four years. That four years isn’t a waste of your time, it could be a great time, but it will also be another chapter in your book.

Don’t worry about what your friends will think, about what your family will say, think about you because you’re the only one in the relationship and they don’t have to date them, you do. It’s your life and you have to do what’s best for YOU.

And more importantly you never know, you might wind back up in each other’s arms after sometime apart maybe the best thing you could do for yourselves is give each other a real break, to feel pain, to miss each other and to grow on your own in order to see if you’re meant to be together.

Heartbreak is hard, love is complicated, but your happiness and your emotional needs should never be put on the back burner in order to attempt to make someone else happy. Sometimes you just need to drop everything and put yourself first, you’ll be better off in the long run.