Ken Rudolph: (next time remember that all relationships need frequent watering with empathy and compromise.)
Jess: Amen to that. And work, plain old inconvenient, difficult and often upsetting *work*.
Ellen Evans: And sometimes, even with the *best* intentions on all parts, they just don't work.
Naturally, some problems truly are insuperable, defeating any amount of effort to remedy them, just as you say.
It's doubtless simplistic to expect that a significant fraction of such pitfalls could be avoided by making a real effort at full self-disclosure before becoming involved with each other, yet I believe that the more potential partners can reveal and learn about each other, the more likely they will be to establish a lasting friendship.
One reservation about the "despite best intentions all around" aspect is that it can pretty easily serve as an excuse for avoiding the discomforts that accompany the work. Good intentions have limits too. Sometimes more work offers too little prospect of success to merit the energy investment.
I think most of us have one or another kind of personal limit, especially important if people are going to live together in relative harmony. I'm hardly a tidiness freak, but wholesale messiness is beyond my adaptability limit, for instance.
Yet another class of difficulty is being well established without serious problems, *then* something changes in a way that dooms the relationship. The longest of my major affairs (10.5 years) ended because my bf became an alcoholic of the abusive type. After four years of that I'd finally had enough and put him out.
Finally, a relationship that ends is not necessarily a failure.
It could very well have been highly successful while it existed
but simply ran its course, given the circumstances.
