What does it mean to “outgrow” your relationship?
One way to think of it is the same way you might outgrow a piece of clothing.
First you may notice that a button is missing or it just doesn’t hang the way it used to. You may choose not to wear the item as often. It just doesn’t have the same appeal it once did.
So it hangs in your closet or sits in a drawer. You kind of forget about it, you’ve lost interest.
Then one day, when you’re switching out your clothes for the season, there it is.
And now it’s decision time.
Do you keep it? Or are you done with it?
Relationships can be like that.
Sometimes we notice problems that we aren’t ready to address, so we ignore them.
We put them on the shelf and wait for a “better time.”
A friend of mine heard me say that I was coaching women who had outgrown their relationships. She hadn’t heard that phrase before. She said it sat with her as a little thought seed and the little seed grew into a big beanstalk in her mind.
She recognized that she was in a relationship she wasn’t invested in anymore. She was just maintaining the status quo, going along peacefully in a life that really wasn’t miserable, but not fulfilling either. She has been growing and finishing up a challenging six-month program that changed her thinking and ultimately what she wanted for herself.
That’s another way to “outgrow” a relationship.
In “Cutting Loose” a book by Ashton Applewhite about Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well, the author writes about how women are motivated toward growth and self development. The women subjects in her book talk about how they continued to grow and change and eventually outgrew the roles they had in their marriages. She writes, “Women marry because wives are supposed to have cornered the market on womanly happiness. In fact, wives constitute the most depressed segment of the population (and women who describe themselves as happily married suffer nearly four times as much severe depression as happily married men.)”
So whatever your idea is of “outgrowing” your relationship, if that phrase seems to resonate with you, just like my friend, there is probably something under the surface wanting to be addressed.
If ignored, these unaddressed problems can eventually be like beach balls. When we continue to push them under the water, they keep popping up to the surface, unwilling to stay underwater.
If any of this resonates with you, schedule a complimentary relationship coaching mini-session where we can review your situation and decide whether coaching is the right answer for you.
