[vapourmile]

I want to throw some ideas up for the sake of seeing how they get shot down, a couple of hypotheses for debate, if anybody wishes to make a remark:

1.The whole idea of an unsatisfactory relationship is bogus and based on the belief that satisfaction is found through relationships. What I mean is, when people are not satisfied they blame the relationship, a way of saying "I'm not satisfied, I'm with you, so it's your fault". This also suggests to me that there are people who believe the answer to satisfaction is the right relationship with the right person. It also implies to me that some believe their measure of satisfaction is based on what they're getting from somebody else. It also implies that some believe happiness depends on the support of somebody else. In other words, that happiness is somehow contingent to ones capacity to spend a lot of time with somebody (bodies) who is (are) doing the right thing according to some kind of internal map of what other people should be doing.

Maybe you should be reading Viktor Frankl's "Man's search for meaning" (with apologies for the gender typing there, it was composed before we had a social obligation to de-gender our communications).

2.One of the reasons people leave a relationship is somewhere based in the utterly absurd belief that, because the other person is responsible for how we feel, we can get the satisfaction we seek from being with somebody else. In fact, dissatisfaction is innate. In fact, your sense of happiness has got nothing to do with who you're going out with at all, and it is not even anything to do with going out with somebody at all. In fact, the belief that romance holds the keys to long-term happiness is mass delusion.

3. Each of us is ultimately and solely responsible for producing the happiness and misery we feel. If there is a nameable source of misery it is the sustained belief that ones satisfaction depends on a the vacillations of an outside agent of any kind. Or the control or accumulation of such thing. If there is a nameable solution to this mental illness it is the outright realisation that you alone are the source of your satisfaction, and, with this understood, get over your emotional constipation and start producing it. And if you can't do that, at least quit blaming the other. Exactly how much of your satisfaction do you think THEY are responsible for? Because I'd estimate it to be about 0%, most likely, less.