How do you know when a relationship has gone sour?

It is not uncommon for slight acquaintances to get married, but a couple really have to know each other to get divorced. — Anonymous

I recently twitted to a friend: “While I believe that as much as one is called to marriage, one may also be called to end it.” She responded with a question: “How do you know when you’ve given it your all?”

Now, this exchange may seem quite flippant considering the gravity of the subject, but it only seems so because of the nature of the social networking apparatus of Twitter requires that exchanges be succinct and short (140 characters per tweet).

But it got me thinking. Indeed, how does one know that you’ve given a relationship that has gone sour your best shot? Is it measured by the years one has “sacrificed” to make it work? Is it justified by what one has given up and not gotten in return? Or does it have something to do with the severity and validity of the reasons for separating?

Many couples I know have separated, and sadly, the numbers keep growing. Some called it quits after just two or three years while others ended after two or more decades. I can’t really draw a profile of which couples get lucky and stay together and which ones end up separating. They all seem so beautiful and promising in the beginning until the years unravel their character flaws and differences.

What I have noticed though is that some separate with a lot of acrimony and bitterness while others seem to handle the dissolution of their union in a gentler, less destructive fashion.

A classmate once told me that he and his ex-wife get along so well that they recently went on a double date. They each brought their current partners and had dinner together. They had a great time and plan to do it again. My classmate and his ex are two easygoing people who married late and have one kid. When it was clear that they weren’t getting along, they decided early on that instead of being miserable together, they might as well separate and save what was left of the goodwill they still had toward each other. He says that their decision to separate was one of the best and smartest moves they ever made in their lives.

Another friend had the opposite experience. After being married close to 20 years, he and his wife parted bitterly and with much hostility. His wife had fallen for another guy and, without warning, told him that she was not in love with him anymore and that she was leaving him for her new boyfriend.

This was quite a shock to my friend and to their kids. For one, save for the usual fights and the “distant one day/close the next” cycle that they were constantly going through, things seemed to be more or less stable in their marriage, at least on the surface. The whole separation was like an explosion that my friend and his children still seem to be reeling from more than a decade after.

Through the years, he and his ex have tried to be more civil about the configuration of their separate realities, but more often than not, the peace is broken and blaming and accusations start to fly, making a mess of things all over again.

I also have friends who have been separated for years now and have managed to pick themselves up from the wreckage. Some have remarried and have a renewed belief in the promise of forever despite having failed the first time. I notice that the peace they have and their renewed belief in love come from the fact they have learned to forgive and not look back. 

Who did they forgive? Their spouses for the real and imagined hurts done to them. But many of them said that there was no release or closure until they could forgive themselves as well. They learned that by forgiving others and themselves, they could start their lives anew and move forward with new partners, forever leaving the past behind. And even when they had to revisit aspects of their former marriages for whatever purpose — legal, social or whatever else — they were surprised that they could do so with grace and very little anxiety.

Every marriage, no matter how seemingly solid, has its dysfunctions and problems. Sometimes your Significant Other feels like your Significant Bother. And I suspect that every partner in a marital union that has lasted 20 or more years has imagined or daydreamed what being separated from his/her partner would be like, especially when things are not going well.

I like St. John of the Cross’s description of spiritual journeys as consisting of “great faith, great doubt, great effort.” Coincidentally, Psychology Today once described the cycle of relationships in three stages: the promise, the disappointment or betrayal, and the courtship.

To my friend on Twitter who asked me how one knows when to give up, I answered that if you find yourself in “great doubt” or disappointment and betrayal, try and move things forward with “great effort” or courtship to get the cycle moving again.

But in situations and circumstances when people have lost the will to move the cycle forward, I added in another tweet that only she could decide whether to heed the call to continue the cycle or to call it quits. But in reality, it’s not even as simple as that.

A close friend of mine who after filing for legal separation in court pulled a big surprise by announcing, on the day the judge was going to issue the final verdict, that she and her estranged husband had decided to get back together. That was more than 10 years ago. And they have no regrets. Sometimes, you may think that it’s the end of the line, but perhaps waiting and giving it another great effort may be what is needed to turn things around.

In marriage, the thrill will evaporate, and the romance will wither as time goes by. But I have learned that these sensual states, while fleeting, can and do come back in cycles and waves. Even so, sooner or later, adrenaline, hormones and the sheen and attraction of youth and newness will fade, and other qualities must take over to bring the cycle to play in higher and nobler ways — qualities such as maturity, perseverance, loyalty, fidelity, constancy and humor, to name a few.

Not every old married couple would be so lucky to possess all those qualities at the moments they are needed to tide them over during bad times and sustain the relationship. But we do learn the value of showing up even when the feelings are not there. Recovering alcoholics learn to “fake it to make it” to get them through temptation. In a marriage, this would be the same as exerting “great effort,” which somehow leads to a new state of “great faith” and promise. 

So what am I saying? That after the glow has faded, marriage is, in reality, a spiritual journey requiring great faith and great effort to keep the great doubts at bay. I guess the same can be said of all life’s relationships, commitments and projects. It only ends when we stop the cycle.