My Blog

I’ve never been married…never lived with anyone I’ve dated…nor have I really ever had a terribly healthy, functional relationship before Martyn….My point, you ask? Well, I certainly can’t add anything to a discussion of what can lead to marriage breakdown, but I can sure throw in my two cents about relationship breakdown.

I think a big part of determining whether or not your relationship will be successful comes from knowing what your deal-breakers are…and then assessing your relationship against them. Martyn’s last post spoke about problems and issues…and, if I may reiterate his point, issues are those problems that can't be fixed or that one partner is unwilling to work on.

So, where do deal-breakers come in, you ask? Well, deal-breakers are those “issues” you CAN'T live with.

Going into this relationship with Martyn, I was aware from the get-go that he was a single father of a 2 year-old daughter (who spends 90% of her time with him). True to his feelings about honesty, he had all of this information front and center in his profile (to be ignored by some ladies, it would seem). For me, this was never in and of itself an issue. First, I genuinely love children and second, the fact that his daughter is with him most of the time spoke to his personal character. Looking for a serious relationship myself, I also considered the long-term benefits of this arrangement, thinking that having his daughter most of the time would be better than “weekend fatherhood” in terms of building a “family unit” down the road.

Now you may be questioning my long-term assessment of this potential relationship BEFORE even answering his introductory email. But I would argue that this kind of thinking is not only a good idea, but really essential for any relationship, particularly one where children are involved. If you already see, from the 2 (or less) descriptive paragraphs and the “vital stats” on his/her profile page, any of your deal-breakers enumerated, then you are better off never initiating/accepting contact. No matter how cute, funny, intelligent, hot, or “insert quality here” he/she
appears to be, deal-breakers are just that…

So with a big checkmark on that front, I was happy to respond to Martyn’s email (well, a full week later…still stinging from “Stand-me-up” guy…and generally feeling jaded and cynical about the whole process). And still, I was not naïve enough to believe that deal-breakers would not come up down the road. Compatibility, common interests and chemistry aside (and in no way am I downplaying the importance of these factors to a successful relationship), it is important to be honest with yourself at the outset regarding your relationship “bottom line” – in other words, what you will or won’t be able to accept long-term.

In the end, my deal-breakers were two-fold: I wanted (and want) to get married AND have children. Now obviously I wasn’t going to go THERE during any initial dates – That is one sure-fire way to see that a budding romance goes absolutely NOWHERE. But (and here’s where we get back to compatibility et. al.) over time, all things remaining blissfully happy (we were compatible, had great chemistry, etc. etc.), I needed to know that there was at least an openness on Martyn’s part to these two things. It may sound simple, but I was dating someone in the process of getting
divorced, who already had a child (that he was raising as a single father). I, for one, would not have been surprised in the least were he to NEVER want to take that walk down the aisle again, much less have more kids that might end up in the same situation as the one he already had.

My point with all of this…as Martyn said, most problems can be worked on and negotiated (as long as the willingness is there and there are no “physiological” limitations), but you can’t work around deal-breakers – the better you know what yours are at the outset, the less likely you are to “run into” them once you are already well-invested in the relationship.