When it’s time to step away from a friendship, relationship or job | SamanthaSMorris
When world number one tennis player Ash Barty shocked the world by announcing she was retiring from tennis at 25, Dr James Collett couldn’t help but thrill.
“A lot of people are almost in denial, they don’t want to admit [that they’ve fallen out of love],” says Dr Rowan Burckhardt, director of The Sydney Couples Counselling Centre.“Once your partner and you have become detached” – the psychological term for having fallen out of love – “it’s almost like we are going back to zero, in the sense that we’re talking about the prospect of falling in love with a new person, even though we’ve got that history together,” he says.
“Couples that repeatedly fight, they might think, surely the relationship’s over, but it’s not so much that you’re fighting – that could be as much about being a bad habit, or a poor fighting style, or poor behaviour that can be unlearned. If the fights are more nasty, minimising, dismissive... that’s more the worry than the issue you’re raising [and fighting about]. Because what you need is a partner who takes you seriously. They don’t have to agree with you.”“That’s a red flag,” says Shaw.
“I tell all my students, ‘You’re not looking for the perfect job that you walk into, and suddenly, it’s like a cosmic alignment and you feel like you’re in the place you’re meant to be,’” he says, referring to the vision commonly seen in Instagram posts of people deep-sea diving, or teaching students in Africa, and the caption that they’re “living their best life”. “First off, that [cosmic alignment] probably exists for some people, and that’s just a happy accident,” says Collett.
We’d do well to heed some of their advice when weighing up whether a friend’s annoying habits – or infuriating and hurtful slights – are enough to warrant ditching them, or whether they’re worth keeping for the long haul, he says.