The Primary Emotion Behind Every Failed Relationship

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your relationships. Unfortunately, most people mismanage their relationships, and suffer immensely as a result.

As complex as the dynamic between any two individuals can be, there are a few universal principles that govern all relationships.

Adapt to these principles, and your relationships will grow stronger and more enriching over time.

Fail to adapt to these principles, and your relationships will eventually stagnate, degenerate and dissolve.

In this series, I articulate a few of the principles I’ve come to identify through my own experiences. The key questions I seek to explore are:

• Why do relationships fail?
• What behaviors and mindsets lead to positive relationship outcomes?
• What are the core emotional processes that underlie and determine relationship outcomes?

In this first essay, I will focus on the first question — why to relationships fail?

After observing and analyzing several failed relationships, I’ve become convinced of the following:

Resentment kills relationships.

Frustrating Behaviors and Frustrated Desires

When two people interact, they each bring their own set of behaviors and desires.

When your behavior matches your partner’s desire, and vice versa, the relationship flows.

But soon as your behavior runs counter to your partner’s desire, frustration occurs.

The most dangerous aspect of frustration is that it accumulates.

When your partner chewed loudly on your first date, you found it off-putting, but tolerable. Now two years later, the mere sound of his mouth inspires fantasies of murder.

When frustration is allowed to accumulate unprocessed, it eventually breeds Resentment.

This is where the relationship problems really start to take hold.

Resentment and the Desire for Vengeance

Resentment is the emotion we feel when we regard ourselves as being treated unfairly.

When people frustrate our desires, we can feel as if they’ve “cheated” us of the opportunity to have a positive experience.

Whether we’re justified in feeling this way or not is irrelevant; it will still engender a feeling of resentment.

The emotion of resentment is based on our deeply instinctual sense of reciprocity.

We remember the ways people do right and wrong by us, and we store those episodes in our memory banks as an emotional credits and debts.

If we allow our partners to continue to frustrate our desires, their debts accrue compound interest, and we grow ever more resentful.

Eventually the debt grows so large that it totally bankrupts the relationship of all its love, and the whole thing falls apart.

When resentment isn’t expressed in a healthy manner, it manifest itself as vengeance.

People seek revenge in various ways, and most people aren’t honest with themselves in the ways they do it.

Some are directly vengeful and abuse the people they resent physically or verbally.

Others seek more indirect means of revenge, like passive aggression, sabotage or infidelity.

It’s absolutely critical that you’re honest with yourself about all the ways you act vengefully in your relationships.

Many people are convinced they are pure of heart and would never harm a soul. These people typically carry out the most subtle and insidious acts of vengeance.

Personally, my default means of expressing resentment is to go cold. I’ll ignore the person I resent, and stop doing fun or nice things for them.

In the moment, I may make up a reason like “I’m just tired” or “I don’t feel like it.” — but now I know myself well enough to recognize those as lies.

In truth, my coldness is a way to repay the pain I experienced, since I know people feel pain when I do that.

So now, the algorithm for me is quite simple:

If I don’t feel unobstructed love and appreciation for you, that means resentment is hiding in me somewhere.

It’s not always immediately obvious why I feel resentment, but if I look hard enough, I’ll always find something.

The feeling of resentment is never something I consciously choose to feel. Nor is it something that always makes logical sense.

I can’t deny or wish away the presence of resentment anymore than I can deny or wish away the presence of fear.

As it is with fear, resentment is something you just have to accept and deal with head on.

And as it is with fear, most people avoid and repress direct confrontation with resentment.

The hope is that resentment will go away on its own if ignored for long enough.

But resentments are like taxes— the longer you avoid dealing with them…

There is only one force powerful enough to extinguish resentment — Truth.

In my next essay, I explain my process for discovering and expressing it:

How to Clear your Resentments and Redeem your Relationships.