here’s a complaint I often hear from men in relationships, and it sounds something like:

‘I come home from work, take out the trash, help in the kitchen, fix the car, help with the kids. I’m doing all these things and she still complains I’m not doing enough. I tell her I love her all the time and she's still unhappy’.

In the words of Robert Glover, author of the transformational book, No More Mr. Nice Guy, I am a recovering nice guy.

Being a nice guy is a strategy. It's a strategy that nice guys have developed in childhood. And it's a very effective strategy in many ways. It's helped me be successful in many areas of my life in many ways. And it’s also caused a shit-ton of problems.

What image comes to mind when you think of ‘the perfect relationship’?

Mine involves a tropical beach house, tanned and fit bodies (one of them is mine, one is my partner’s) and I’m dressed in white linen trousers and shirt.

And in this vision I’m calm, successful (this is a top-notch beach house I’ll have you know). The vibe is both easy and, frankly, sterile. Basically I’m in a stock photo from a travel brochure.

Whenever two people come together there’s always an opportunity for confusion. Two different realities co-exist, so confusion is inevitable.

If you find yourself confused or doubting something about your partner or your relationship, seeking the support and wise counsel of friends can be helpful. Talking through possibilities, exploring our feelings, hearing other perspectives can be vital.

Relationships take some awareness and take some skill to get right. The truth is that many of us were not brought up with models of great relationships. We weren't taught, consciously or unconsciously, helpful pragmatic tools and skills about how to be in a relationship successfully. So we bumble our way along trying to figure it out as we go.

There are a few reasons why relationships can be so difficult. Here are two of them.

In Part Un I wrote about shifting attention to oneself when considering the challenges in your relationship.

My own relationship was asking me to share my work-in-progress thoughts. Y’know instead of waiting for that day when I’ve thought everything through and figured it all out and can present what I want, or what’s bothering me, in a perfect package. Or get to a point of such discomfort I can no longer keep quiet.

“Why is my relationship like this?”

“Why isn’t my relationship better?”

“Why is she/he/they like THAT?”

“If only they would _____ (fill in the blank)”

I get it. I’ve spent time in past relationships hoping it would change, or my partner would change, or I would somehow wake up one day feeling different and not be bothered by THAT thing anymore. Or if this One Little Thing would just change already to make everything different.

A common relationship fantasy is that we should want to spend all of our time together with people we like and love. Furthermore, even if we’ve spent hours/days/weeks apart, we should be able to just slip right back into our harmonious togetherness.

This is probably untrue for many of us.