Why Ultimatums Rarely Work in Relationships
A classic dynamic in romantic relationships is The Ultimatum. One person wants the other to behave in a certain way, and threatens to leave if they don’t. Some examples include threatening to leave if your partner doesn’t stop drinking, hanging out with unsavory friends, or cheating. The threat even seems to work for a while, but then something happens, and your partner falls back into the unwanted behavior. Or, the behavior never stopped, and you catch your partner sneaking around. Now you have to follow through with the ultimatum, but you probably won’t. That lack of follow-through eats away at your already low sense of self-worth.
The reason that most ultimatums don’t work is that you aren’t ready to follow through on your threat to leave. You hope that the threat itself will be enough to make your partner behave in the desired manner. The follow-through is so difficult because you don’t have a strong sense of self-worth to begin with- that is why you are with someone who hurts you so much. Instead of saying, “This behavior hurts me right here and now,” your ultimatum says, “Sometime in the future, this behavior will be punished.” This is is a set-up, designed to further erode your low sense of self-worth.
As the ultimatum giver, you are already trapped in the belief that you can’t do any better than this, and that life alone would be so much worse than life with this person who hurts you. Saying “If you don’t stop drinking, I am out of here,” you are really saying, “Please change your behavior so that I don’t have to think about leaving you, because I can’t actually live without you.” Your partner hears the underlying message, and knows that there is no real threat here.
If you are someone who has been giving ultimatums to your partner, only to find that they don’t work, it is time for you to put the focus on yourself rather than your partner’s bad behavior. It is very likely that you have no idea how to give yourself this sort of attention, and also very likely that you don’t believe that you deserve to be with someone who loves and respects you, someone who doesn’t need fixing. When you learn how to give yourself the attention you need, your sense of worth will grow. When you feel worthy of love, you naturally stop putting up with unloving behavior. When you stop tolerating poor treatment in the present, you don’t need an ultimatum to tell you what to do in the future.
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That is so beautifully written, and what is nicer about it is it hits the spot…I used to think that it would be better to be in a relationship than not be in it because life would be lonely. But it is lonelier when you’re in a relationship that is absent in any form of affection. I do deserve better. Thank you for sharing.