Stop feeling guilty over failed relationships

Kim Kardashian has officially made peace with her choice to end her marriage to Kanye West after nearly seven years.

What you need to know:

Sometimes it is fine to reach the end of the road

Relationships end for several reasons. Sometimes the reasons are mutually and amicably agreed upon and sometimes they are disagreed on from points of heated contention.

Whatever the case, even when ‘all is good in the neighbourhood’, often one leaves a relationship filled with regret, shame and more often than not, guilt.

Depending on the nature of the break-up, these feelings and emotions could be self-inflicted, imposed by your ex-partner or societal pressure. But in any and every case they are extremely difficult to deal with and make the process of healing after a relationship that much harder.

As usual, to give you all context and a well-rounded and informative column, I tend to pick inspiration from topics, persons and platforms most relevant to our generation.

Recently, in my downtime, I managed to catch on of the episodes from ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’. They are in the midst of airing their 20th and final season and one of the topics being touched is the breakdown of the marriage between Kanye and Kim Kardashian West (please worry not if you have no idea who any of these people are).

A failure?

In a scene with her sisters, Kim breaks down and states how she feels like such a failure, how hard she has worked at her marriage and tried to keep it together but it still did not work.

It stirred up a series of thoughts and questions in my mind, the most predominant being, ‘Even when we have done our best in the most difficult and toxic situations why do we still feel like we have failed at something?’

Society has conditioned us to think that we must endure every difficulty encountered in relationships and that nothing is too hard to handle and as such the dissolution of any union is always internalised as a failure.

I mean even as you tie the knot, the person marrying two people instructs both of you that it is “until death do you part”.

A break up also symbolises the cessation of hope and completely eliminates the possibility of positive change in a relationship, even if you have established that the other person was not on the same page as you or you left because of reasons pertaining to abuse or mistreatment.

Taking care

There is still a voice that lingers and makes you feel as though you have disappointed yourself and everyone around you with the decision to end the relationship.

I think the time has come for us to stop internalising and feeling guilty for not seeing a relationship through, especially if ending it meant freeing yourself from a toxic situation, an unstable environment or even a situation that just lacks basic fundamentals like growth be it personal or as a unit.

Do all that is required to take care of you, free yourself and your mind from societal expectations and beliefs when it comes to your personal relationships.

Sometimes you just reach the end of the road with people and that is completely fine, and unless you have caused anyone harm emotionally or physically at the demise of your relationship, you have nothing to feel guilty about in this life or the next.