Should I stay or Should I go?

Should I stay or should I go?

I regularly receive emails from people unsure whether or not to end their relationship or to try and stay together.

I don't think leaving a relationship without properly trying to address the problems you face is ever wise. If you don't try to work through the problems in your current relationship this time around, when you move on to a new relationship you are very likely to come face to face with the same problems again.

Turning to face your problems takes courage but working together can be very connecting and cathartic. A loving relationship takes work, it is a myth that if you find the right person everything is easy. All relationships, however well suited the couple, require consistent effort and quality time. 

Relationship counselling will teach you how to reconnect, how to communicate so that you both feel heard, and how to work through to mutually agreeable solutions so that you are no longer going round and around in circles with the same destructive arguments. 

There is an art to loving well. So many people think that love should carry you through, forgetting that love is a verb. Being told that you are loved means little if you don't feel loved. 

Relationship counselling forces couples to prioritise each other, to finally turn towards each other rather than away. If you feel that you have fallen out of love, know that you absolutely can fall back into love. 

Just look at what consitutes the honeymoon stage of a relationship - a lot of quality time together, affection, kindness, long loving talks, emotional and sexual intimacy, thinking about one another when apart, prioritising each other, romantic weekends away, regular loving texts. 

What constitutes a relationship in distress, - loss of emotional and sexual intimacy, not prioritising each other, spending little quality time together, thinking about work and children rather than each other, regularly turning away from each other, looking for the negatives rather than the positives, regular criticism and a general lack of care. 

Anything worthwhile takes time and effort. Our Relationships can teach us our greatest life lessons. Leaving without fully exploring the alternative is to pass up a huge opportunity for emotional and spiritual growth.