Why You Need to Stop Chasing Your Spouse?
Hey, Cody Butler here, a relationship coach, and founder of Better Marriage. Today, I want to talk to you about why it’s not a good idea to chase your spouse. Make sure you stay to the end because I’ve got an awesome free class for you on how to end the fighting in your relationship, how to restore communication, and how to bring back intimacy and sex in your marriage. In that class, you’ll understand why all these things happen and how to fix them almost immediately. I’ll tell you how to get it for free at the end of this video.
The First Reason
If your spouse has asked for space or is distant from you, the first reason why it’s a bad idea to chase them is that it empowers them. It gives them authority, and if you’re not educated around relationships, you might be looking to take control. You might want to feel like you’re in control and have some significance within the relationship. The quickest and easiest way to get that control is to continue to run as the other person chases. But, a relationship isn’t about one person running and the other person chasing. It’s about two people coming together through mutual agreement and mutual interest. By playing into that and chasing, you’re not creating an environment for a happy and healthy relationship to take place. So, whatever consequences you think may happen if you don’t chase, they’re better than chasing that person because you’re not going to have a happy and healthy relationship if you continue to chase.
The second reason
Not to chase is that the more you chase, the more they run. People like to be pursued, and if they realize that running away is a tool they can use to get attention and significance, they’re going to use it more and more. It allows the person who’s running to behave badly and engage in behavior they ordinarily wouldn’t get away with in a healthy, normal situation because they know they have control. The more you chase, the more control the person running away has, and the more they’ll like it and enjoy it. If they have a sincere desire to restore the relationship, they’re not going to want to run away; they’re going to want to come closer to you, put you in a place of equality, and have healthy, productive dialogue to restore the relationship and bring it back to a place of health.
The third reason
To stop chasing is if they’re running away because they need space from the relationship. They’re moving away because they need space from the situation, where they feel claustrophobic, threatened, and unsafe. Maybe every time you communicate, you have a fight, or you just can’t talk to each other. It’s just problem on top of problem, constant aggravation, and grief within the relationship. They’re looking for some space from that. You chasing them is just bringing them the problems they’re running away from, which is not the solution. The solution is to fix the problems they’re running away from, and then you won’t need to chase them.
The fourth reason
When you have a partner that’s pulling away or looking for space, you have to understand that they’re looking for space from a behavior or a situation, not from you. It’s not you they’re moving away from, but a behavior or a situation that’s causing the problem. If every time you talk, you fight, and can’t have a conversation without conflict, that’s what they’re moving away from. Maybe they’re just tired of fighting, and they can’t have another fight. They’re moving away from the difficulty and hopelessness.
They are moving away from the belief that they can’t have a productive conversation with you. They’re not moving away from you. If you could demonstrate that you can have a productive conversation, you can have a productive relationship. There is hope. This negativity can stop. They would instantly come back into that situation as soon as they realize that the negativity and what they are moving away from is gone. They’re going to come back because it’s not you that’s repelling them, it’s the situation, it’s the behavior.
So unless you change, unless the situation has changed, you’re simply taking to them what it is that they’re running away from, and they’re just going to run harder, they’re just going to run faster, and you’re just going to reinforce in their mind that this is not what they want. They want out of this relationship, and they want distance from you. So the real secret here is to work on the environment, to work on the situation that the relationship lives in. It’s not about chasing them to get them to come back; that’s never ever going to work. What works is identifying the environment and asking yourself the question, what environment would have to be present for my partner to want to come back into it? What environment would have to be present for my partner to be excited about coming back? What in the environment would not have to be there? And then really put all of your focus and effort on creating that environment, getting the good things to show up, and getting the negative things to be eliminated.
If you can do that, then your partner will inevitably want to come back into the situation because they don’t want to end the relationship. That’s really hard, that’s really expensive, that’s really painful. If the relationship can be reconciled, that is a better option. It’s a cheaper option, it’s an easier option, it’s a more desirable option.
So, creating that environment where the relationship can flourish, which comes down to you. Right, you have the ability to do that. You have the ability to work on yourself without asking anything of them. You have the ability to change the environment that the relationship shows up and without asking anything of them. You have the ability to change all of this stuff without asking anything of them, which really is point number four, which is work on yourself harder than you work on the relationship. Change yourself before you attempt to change your partner. Your partner doesn’t need changing, and you have really no authority or no right to make them change. The only place we have the right and the authority and the ability to really take action is on ourselves.
And hopefully, you can see here that by changing how we operate, by increasing our communication skills, if our partner has left because we fight all the time, then we have the ability to improve our communication skills, even if they don’t work on this. If we have fights all the time, we have the ability to work on our conflict resolution skills, even if they’re not working on theirs. We have the ability to work on our self-emotional self-regulation, even if our partner is not working on theirs. And if we improve all of those things, if we improve our communication skills, if we improve our conflict resolution skills, and if we improve our emotional regulation or emotional self-regulation skills, the relationship will improve dramatically without that person, without your partner needing to take any action whatsoever.
This is why one person can dramatically influence a relationship and make changes within a marriage. That’s what we work on in our Marriage Recovery Program with our clients. We focus on creating the right environment for a beautiful relationship and marriage to show up. We also help our clients understand what needs to happen within themselves, not their partners, to create that environment.
As individuals, we have the ability to reduce conflict, increase communication, and improve intimacy within a relationship. Our partners are drawn to our behavior, so changing our behavior can change their behavior towards us. We have the power to influence people’s reactions and behavior towards us, so all we need to do is understand what behaviors trigger the outcomes we want and engage in those behaviors.
If your partner is not interested in participating in a program like the Marriage Recovery Program, you can still make changes by changing your own behavior. If you change your behavior dramatically towards your partner, their behavior towards you will change dramatically too. It cannot fail.
If you want a copy of our free class on how to end fighting, improve communication, and restore intimacy, check out the links in the description and our pinned comment below. We also have other free resources that can help transform your relationship. There is no obligation whatsoever.
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That’s it for me. God bless you, and I’ll talk to you very soon.
