When to Give Up on Relationships

Everyone knows the importance of believing in your ability to achieve goals and persisting despite adversity.  Let’s take that for granted. I want to talk about the flip side — about the times when it is best to give up. Sometimes, the wisest course is to drop a goal, walk away, and invest your energy elsewhere.

Specifically, let’s talk about the times when it might be best to give up on relationships – not any one relationship in particular, but relationships in general.  By “relationships,” I am referring to serious, committed, long-term sexual-romantic relationships (LTRs).  All that verbiage wouldn’t fit in the title.  I’m not talking about all the other types of relationships you might have — friendships, short-term relationships, casual encounters, etc. — just LTRs. 

And although “giving up” can have negative connotations, I don’t mean it that way. Under some conditions, giving up — dropping a goal and walking away — can be the smart choice.

To head off a potential misunderstanding, “giving up” doesn’t have to be permanent.  It can be temporary.  In fact, if you’re a young man, any decision to give up on relationships ought to be temporary, not permanent.   

To head off a second misunderstanding, I am not advocating that people give up on LTRs.  I am not advocating anything.  I am going to offer a simple framework for you to decide whether it might be time to give up and walk away.  But every situation is different. It is natural to want relationships, and they can be wonderful things.  If you want to continue to pursue an LTR, go for it. I sincerely wish you the best. I am not making any blanket prescriptions here, just walking you through a process to help you decide for yourself.  

Good Reasons to Give Up

To be sure, there are many bad reasons to give up on relationships — feeling temporarily down, being afraid of rejection, having low self-esteem, lacking specific interpersonal skills.  However, I want to focus on the good reasons — because, for some people, there are good, rational reasons for giving up on pursuing LTRs. 

Here are a few.   

• Perhaps attaining a good LTR is unrealistic or unattainable for you, at least for now.  Continuing to strive toward an unrealistic goal only generates frustration, sadness, failure, and, potentially, depression. 

• Perhaps along the way, you learn unsavory things about how romantic relationships work or about how the opposite sex functions within those relationships.  This knowledge may sap your enthusiasm for the project.  You no longer find romantic relationships nearly as appealing as they did when you were younger, more idealistic, and more naïve. 

• As we age, hormones cool.  The neurochemistry that once shouted in our ear becomes an occasional mumble.  What once seemed imperative now seems entirely optional.  As the goal of an LTR seems less alluring, it could be beneficial to put your energies elsewhere.   

• As you live a single life over time, you may discover that you really enjoy it.  After a while, you’re not so sure you want an LTR after all.  An LTR would require giving up many of the freedoms and joys of your single life.    

• You discover that LTRs actually require a lot more effort, time, risk, and sacrifice than you realized.  You aren’t sure they are worth the tradeoff anymore.     

• Your experience in dating or relationships sours you.  You may enter the dating arena with youthful hope, but you accumulate experiences of disappointment, rejection, frustration, and pain. 

In all these cases, consciously deciding to give up on pursuing the goal of an LTR – temporarily or permanently – can save people time and energy, spare them pointless suffering, and/or help them shift away from goals that no longer serve them and toward ones that are more rewarding.  Those are some potentially good reasons for giving up on LTRs.   

I’d like to offer you a simple framework for assessing this question for yourself.

 

When Is it Time to Give Up?

When might it be time to give up on LTRs, either temporarily or permanently?  I’ve given this some thought (probably too much).  I’ll give you a framework for doing a self-assessment.  It’s nothing terribly original, just a set of questions to ask yourself.  However, I think it cuts to the heart of the matter.  

Now, if you have already decided the issue for yourself, then what follows will probably seem like a lot of unnecessary analysis and overthinking.  Hey, that’s my specialty!  But for those of you who are still wondering about this question, or who want to take a fresh look at the question, maybe this will help.     

In my opinion, it boils down to three main questions.  

The Three Questions

When you respond to these questions, try to give either a positive or negative response — a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.  The questions themselves are simple and straightforward, but giving clear positive or negative responses can be more challenging. Sometimes the answer may be unclear or in the middle somewhere. However, I am trying to keep things simple, and clear positive or negative responses will make your answers easy to interpret.  If you are not able to give clear yeas or nays to the questions, that’s okay.  Things are not always so cut and dry. It makes the results ambiguous, but that’s life.

Here are the questions.

1. How appealing is the prospect of an LTR in general? 

That is, how attractive do you find the idea of being in an LTR in general?  We are talking here about the notion of an LTR in the abstract, not any specific LTR.  How important is it to you, to be in a serious, committed, long-term romantic relationship, in general?  How central is an LTR to your happiness and fulfillment in life?  How badly do you want it?

 

2. What good options for an LTR are realistically available to you?  

Now we whittle down the general notion in Question #1 to the specific options that are realistically available to you, given who you are (age, location, looks, socioeconomic status, etc.).  After all, every woman can’t have “Chad,” and every man can’t have a kind, sweet supermodel. 

Note the qualifier “good.”  Most people can get into an LTR if they lower their standards enough, but presumably we want a good (or at least a good-enough) LTR, not just any old LTR. 

“Realistically available” is tricky to assess.  I suggest looking at it from three angles – your side, her side, and the middle (the matter of “fit”). 

Your side 

Given your age and location, how many of the women in your dating pool are attractive to you as potential LTR partners?  I’m not talking just about physical attraction.  I’m talking about the standards you have for a woman to be your LTR partner.  What sort of women are realistically available as good potential options?  And how attracted are you to those specific women as LTR partners?  How motivated are you to pursue an LTR with that specific subset of women?      

Her side 

Now flip the perspective.  Look at yourself through the eyes of an average woman.  How attractive are you as an LTR partner to the average woman in your age range and location?  How many women would want to be in an LTR with you?  Set aside your no doubt wonderful internal qualities and consider how you come across to the average woman who doesn’t know you well. 

Answering this question well requires self-awareness, humility, and an accurate understanding of what most women want in a serious LTR partner.  I can’t do justice to the topic here, but in general, most women focus on qualities such as looks, ability to provide, social status, social confidence, ability to protect, interest in children and family, and an active/entertaining lifestyle (among other things).  Assess yourself on those criteria.  How many women in your age range and location would select you as an LTR partner (not just a sexual partner, and not just a temporary source of validation, but as a long-term partner)?  

If you are a woman reading this, you would flip the genders and ask the same question: how many men would want you – not as a sex partner, but as a long-term relationship partner?  Again, this requires humility and accurate awareness of what most men want in an LTR partner.  

Fit 

Mutual attraction isn’t enough.  In order to have a good LTR, there needs to be a good-enough “fit” with respect to certain dimensions – for instance, core values, fundamental beliefs (e.g., religion/spirituality), lifestyle preferences, intelligence/education, and personality style.  I’m not saying you need to be clones – vive la difference and all that – but if there isn’t enough overlap on core dimensions, an LTR will not get off the ground or stay in the air for long. 

When you look at the women in your dating pool, how many of them are a good-enough fit along these dimensions?  This requires some knowledge of the women in your dating pool, with respect to those core dimensions. 

Notice that each of these perspectives (your side, her side, and “fit”) entails a winnowing down, a narrowing of options.  After each question, fewer options remain.  Question 3 asks, after all the winnowing, what remains?  What sort of good, realistically available options are still left on the table?    

Now ask yourself an important follow-up question:  And how appealing do you find those options? How motivated are you to pursue an LTR – not in general, but with those specific women?  How badly do you want that?  

3. Given your previous answers (especially #2), how motivated are you to make the effort, take the risks, and make the sacrifices necessary to find, build, and maintain that LTR?   

Just because we want something doesn’t mean we pursue it.  We want a lot of things, but we decide they aren’t worth the effort, risk, or sacrifice, and so we forget about it.  Question 3 is basically, “Are the benefits of an LTR worth the cost?” 

The benefits of an LTR are obvious, because they are touted by the culture and media – companionship, sex, physical affection, some degree of security, and hopefully love.  Let’s set aside the issue of how often that actually happens.  Instead, let’s count the costs. They don’t get nearly as much airtime. 

I won’t try to enumerate them all, but here is a brief overview:

• Finding, building, and maintaining an LTR takes a lot of work.  It requires a good deal of time, energy, attention, and money.  Because time, energy, attention, and money are all limited resources, when you spend a large portion of them on LTRs, those resources are unavailable for anything else that matters to you. As a result, other interests and values will necessarily suffer, at least to some degree, when you pursue LTRs.          

• Pursuing LTRs entails a variety of risks.  To name a few: rejection, infidelity, accidental pregnancy, STDs, relationship failures, feeling like you’ve wasted your time and energy, dealing with stress and conflict, vindictive ex-girlfriends, false accusations, and trauma.  While some of these outcomes are annoyances, others can be devastating, life-altering, and cause permanent harm.       

• Every LTR also requires a range of sacrifices.  For example, pursuing and maintaining LTRs require significant sacrifices in terms of freedom, autonomy, peace and quiet, simplicity (lack of complications, stressors), and the flexibility to pursue other interests, activities, or relationships.   These are not one-time sacrifices but go on for years or decades.      

Question 3 asks, How motivated do you feel to do the work, take the risks, and make the sacrifices necessary to find, build, and maintain an LTR over many years?  In weighing your answer, think about your answer to Question 1 but especially your answer to Question 2.  How motivated do you feel to do the work, take the risks, and make the sacrifices necessary to obtain that specific LTR?  Does it seem worth the tradeoff to you?   

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Interpreting Results

If you were able to give clear positive or negative responses to the questions, then interpreting your results is straightforward. 

• If you gave a negative response to any one of the three questions, then it might be time to throw in the towel.  I trust that you see the logic in this.  If you don’t find LTRs very appealing, or if you don’t have good, realistically available options, or if you don’t feel motivated to pay the costs, then pursuing an LTR does not make much sense.  It would probably be better to forget about pursuing LTRs and put your energies elsewhere, either temporarily or permanently.   

• If you gave positive responses to all three questions, then it is not time to give up on LTRs.  Keep on pursuing them.  I wish you well. 

• If you gave negative responses to more than one question, then the case for giving up becomes even more clear.  You only need one negative answer to suggest that it’s time to walk away, but two or three makes the case very strong.     

If you were not able to give positive or negative responses to the questions – if your answers were in the middle somewhere – then results are equally ambiguous.  That’s fine.  Not everything in life allows for simple yes/no answers.  Maybe you at least got a sense of which direction you are leaning.  Keep gathering information and pondering the question.  No need to rush it.      

My Answers

I will share my own answers, as a way of illustrating the process.  Maybe this will help you to think through your own responses. 

1. How attractive is the prospect of an LTR in general? 

I would have answered this question differently when I was younger.  When I was in my 20s and 30s, being in a good LTR felt very important to me.  Now, at 62, I really don’t give a crap.  I haven’t pursued an LTR for about 15 years. 

I’ve talked about this elsewhere, so I won’t belabor it, but here are a few of the main reasons that, over time, I found LTRs less and less appealing:  

1. I grew out of my naïve, romantic idealization of relationships.  As I learned how the sausage was made, I lost a lot of my appetite.
2. I grew to love the single life.  My repeated experience in LTRs was that I liked them at first, then invariably had to get out, because I felt confined and stagnant.  Over time, I learned that I am better suited to living single.   
3. I grew out of my naivete about women.  This took a while.  I was a slow learner.  I always knew men could be kind of shit (ha), but it took me many years to realize that women can be kind of shit, too – just in their own special way.       
4. I discovered how much of my drive towards an LTR was based on my own psychological limitations and lack of development, combined with bad social programming.  Once I did the inner work to ameliorate these issues, I discovered that I didn’t really want an LTR all that much after all – which was ironic, since part of the reason I did the work was to be better LTR partner. 
5. As I got older, my interest in sex and romance dwindled to embers.  At this point, sex just isn’t that important to me, and the idea of feeling passionate and romantic towards a woman my age seems faintly ridiculous.  As you may have noticed, sex and romance are important features of a “sexual-romantic” relationship.  As I’ve lost interest in those, I’ve lost motivation for an LTR.
6. I learned that I could find most of what LTRs offer elsewhere – and often much more easily.  I’m speaking companionship, connection, physical affection, and love.  I can meet these needs in other ways.  As such, an LTR seems much less necessary than it used to feel.   

So, my answer to Question 1 (“How attractive is the prospect of an LTR in general?”) is “eh, not very.”  If you were to rank motivation on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being “couldn’t care less” and 10 being “intense craving,” my score would be about a 0.5, maybe 1 on a bad day.  Although whispers of the old wish still surface occasionally, they are mild and fade quickly.  My usual state 99% of the time is being contentedly single, with no real interest in an LTR.  It has been that way for about 15 years.  I don’t expect it to change. 

  

2. What good options for an LTR are realistically available to you? 

My side:  I don’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings, but the vast majority of the single, available women in my area and age range (down to about 45) are just not attractive to me.  I’m not referring just to physical attractiveness, but to other aspects as well.  To put it simply, the dating pool at my age is pretty damn sad.  To be clear, I am not saying that these women are unappealing as people or as friends.  I am just saying I feel no romantic “pull” towards them, no motivation to pursue an LTR with them. 

Her side:  Frankly, I am not what most women want.  I’m average-looking, 5’ 7,” average weight but not athletic.  I’m introverted and analytical.  I’m mostly a homebody, with little interest in travel.  I am not particularly interested in kids and family.  From the outside, I look as if I’m average socioeconomic status at best – I drive a 9-year old Corolla, dress for comfort not looks, and live in a modest two-bedroom house in a working class neighborhood.  I also have no interest in playing the traditional male roles of provider, protector, chivalrous gentleman, and so on.  Women can sense that. 

So, I am not what most women want in an LTR partner.  Granted, I could change a lot of that, but I can’t be bothered. 

Fit:   I’m an odd duck, hard to match.  I won’t go into detail, but because of my unfortunate habit of thinking and questioning things, I’ve developed ways of seeing the world that are different than most of the people around me.      

Just for fun, I once did probability estimates of the likelihood of finding a woman who was a good fit for an LTR in my area and age range.  The results showed a 1 in 50,000 (0.002%) chance that even one such woman exists in my area.  I laughed.  It matched my experience in dating.  There really just isn’t a woman out there who is a good fit for me – not in my area, anyhow.  Maybe she’s hiding under a rock in Bolivia or something.

When I take those three perspectives into account, my answer to Question #2 – What good options are realistically available to you? – is, “There are none.”  Even if I wanted an LTR, there aren’t any good options out there. 

3. Given your previous responses (especially #2), how motivated are you to make the effort, take the risks, and make the sacrifices necessary to find, build, and maintain an LTR? 

Well, given my answer to #2, I’m not at all motivated.  If there are no good, realistically available options, why would I want to pursue them?  Pursue what?  There’s nothing to pursue.    

Just for the sake of discussion, though, let’s pretend my answer to #2 was positive.  Let’s say there were a bevy of women in my area who would be a good-enough fit.  In that case, my answer would be, “Eh, not very motivated.”  Why?  Because LTRs are not motivating to me in general (see Question #1), and because any prospects left over after the winnowing involved in Question #2 would be only mildly inspiring at best. 

More to the point, though, the costs associated with an LTR are just too high for me.  I have a lot of other values and interests in my life besides romantic relationships.  I don’t want to invest all the time and energy, take the risks, and make the sacrifices necessary.  Even if there were some good prospects out there, it just isn’t worth the tradeoff for me. 

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Back to You

I gave negative responses to all three questions, so you can guess what my decision was.  That’s me, though.  I’m older than most of you; I’ve “been there, done that” with a lot of this stuff; and my personality and perspective are not exactly mainstream. Please don’t take my answers as any sort of guide; I’m just illustrating the process.

Answer the questions for yourself and make your own call.  If you don’t have a clear answer, that’s fine. Keep the question open. It’s an important issue, and there is no need to rush towards closure. It took me decades. And remember, the decision to give up can be temporary — used to regroup, heal, work on yourself, or whatever. You can always come back later in life and reassess.

Good luck whatever you decide. 

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