It seems profoundly unfair, but it is reality: Good relationships get all the breaks and bad ones seem to attract every single problem that passes within a hundred mile radius. The very relationships that need help the most accumulate problem after problem while good relationships keep on humming along.
Think about one very good relationship and one highly problematic relationship in your life. Now, think about a recent challenge or a problem that you faced in each relationship. The difference in how each relationship handled the problem is probably night and day.
Your good relationship likely dealt with the problem quite reasonably—perhaps not perfectly, but the issue was addressed and a solution or truce of some kind was worked out. Good relationships can cope with the challenges and struggles that are endemic to life.
Your troublesome relationship, on the other hand, probably has a terrible habit of making almost everything difficult. Bad relationships seem overcome by even minor things, are prone to turning molehills into mountains, and are as frustrating as they are exhausting. Bad relationships simply have a hard time coping.
Why?
It is tempting to attribute at least some of the differences between problematic relationships and smooth ones to luck. Except that it’s not really luck, of course. What looks like luck in a relationship is really what we’ve baked into the cake slowly, over weeks and months of good, sensible interactions and respectful communication.
While there are a host of interrelated reasons why good relationships handle problems better than bad relationships, at the heart of the difference are attributions.
An attribution is a scientific word for how we explain something. For example, let’s say that you follow a sports team and they lose a game. You will make an attribution for why they lost (since we humans like have explanations for virtually everything). So you might say: “They lost the game because they are a bunch of no-talent prima fools.” Or you might say: “They lost the game because the referees made lousy calls.”
These are very different attributions. In the first case, you are making an internal attribution by pinning the loss squarely on the team (they are no-talent fools) and in the second case, you are making an external attribution by citing a situational factor (the error-prone referees).
When we make internal attributions for negative events, we hold people accountable for their errors—we don’t cut them any slack. And when we make external attributions for negative outcomes, we give people a break.
Now, return to your good and bad relationship examples. As you might expect, we tend to extend more external attributions to the people we like when something goes wrong while we come down pretty hard by rendering internal attributions on people we have trouble with. This sets up the unfortunate situation wherein our best relationships can shed issues and problems far easier than our problematic ones—we cut our good relationships plenty of breaks while holding the bad ones to full account for any issues, problems, or trouble.
So, if you find yourself with a relationship that has fallen and can’t get up, consider cutting the relationship a little bit of slack. This is not to say that you don’t have a relational problem—you most certainly do have a serious problem on your hands when you find yourself dismissing good outcomes as luck or change due to external factors while simultaneously having zero tolerance for negative outcomes. You have much work to do in this case but start with cutting this relationship a little slack.
In some ways, a good relationship resembles a weeble-wobble in that it can usually right itself quickly. But the inability to stay down for long makes the underlying resilience of a good relationship seem easy when, in fact, such strength accumulated through one quality interaction after another, over a period of time measured in weeks and months and years. And steadily, one interaction at a time, each person in the relationship starts giving the other person the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong and full credit when things go right.
And in this glorious interpersonal state, good relationships just keep on getting better, avoiding and shedding problems in a way that looks effortless. But behind any relationship that looks easy and effortless is a long, steady accumulation of quality interactions, respectful communication, and goodwill that makes the relationship so good, so meaningful, and so resilient. It’s hard to keep a good relationship down.