What if there really is ONE major cause of relationship problems, one issue that if you address, would change everything? The good news and the bad news is – there is!

The good news is that it makes it easier to understand why you might be having problems in your relationship.

The bad news is that to resolve the issue takes a deep personal commitment to heal.

Even though the actions of caring and the actions of caretaking might look exactly the same, the intention is totally different, so the energy of the actions is also completely different.

Sandy is a caretaker. She is constantly doing things for others – sometimes because they ask her to and other times because she believes that is what they want and expect. The problem is that Sandy often abandons herself to give to others, and then expects others to give back to her and fill the emptiness within her caused by her self-abandonment. She ignores her own feelings and uses giving to others as an addiction to avoid responsibility for herself. She uses her caretaking as a form of control to try to get others to like and value her, rather than learning to like and value herself.

Over and over, I discover that there is often ONE major reason he or she doesn’t want to have sex.

Take Lawrence as an example. Lawrence learned as an adolescent to use sex addictively. He would find his father’s porn magazines that his father thought were hidden away and use them to satisfy himself. As he grew older, he learned to use the Internet for the same purpose – turning to his sexual addiction to fill the inner emptiness that came from his self-abandonment. Because Lawrence had never learned to take responsibility for his own feelings, he had learned to use not only sex, but wine and anger as well to fill his emptiness and take away his aloneness.

How far can you afford to bend your values to preserve your relationship? How far can you go in giving yourself up to avoid losing your partner? How much of yourself can you afford to sacrifice to not lose someone you love? How do we find the balance between maintaining our integrity and bending our values?

Most relationships require us to bend to a certain extent, but how much can we bend without a sense of loss of self?

There is an inherent paradox in these questions: A truly loving relationship is a relationship where each person accepts and even values the differences between them. If you have to excessively bend your values to preserve the relationship, what are you preserving? You are not preserving a loving relationship since love does not demand that you excessively bend your values.

Rather than look at relationship in terms of bending values to accommodate another person, let’s look at it in terms of each person learning and growing as a result of their differences in values.

For example, Patricia is a highly responsible person with a strong work ethic, while Sam tends to let things go a lot, which results in an imbalance regarding financial responsibility in the relationship. Patricia is not happy about this. Does she just accept these differences to preserve the relationship? No! That is not what a good relationship is really about. Since a good relationship is about each person learning and growing from their differences, rather than one or both people giving themselves up, Sam and Patricia need to engage in open explorations about their differences. They each have beliefs that can be explored, and in this process, new learning occurs that leads to intrinsic change rather than superficial compromise.