You have already made a determination that they don’t understand you, that they will never understand you and that the relationship just won’t work out with them. So, all of a sudden, the incredible anger that were starting fights decrease.

You start walking away from them. You used to feel like she was busting your balls or like he was riding you and not understanding you. Now the minute you get into a fight, you just walk away from it.

The fact that you are on opposite sides of the bed, which used to bother you and keep you up at night, turns into the natural way things are and you are able to sleep with no problem. You go to your side of the bed, they go to theirs, and you both just go to sleep.

You are not up for four hours every night thinking, wondering, feeling and missing them. You just want to go to sleep.

When it hits this point, i.e., when it hits the breakup point, then you need to face the business of breaking up. You know breaking up sucks, but there is only one good way to do it.

When you think you might have hit that breakup point, you must tell the person that you’re disconnecting from them. You need to be honest and raw.

If you don’t think the relationship is going to work or you know you’ve already disconnected based on how things have been going, then you might want to consider walking away for a week. Spend a week without that person.

Go visit some friends or family. Really think about what life would be like without that person. How would you feel without them being there?

When you’re in the thick of things, they never seem to be able to work out. So take a break. Take a walk. Take a week long walk.

Take that week to ask yourself some questions. What does your life look like without them? Do you like and enjoy the way it feels?

Then, after you’ve taken this time, go back and either take a stand for the relationship or break up. Whichever decision you make, you need to be honest with yourself.

Life is too short! There are a lot of wonderful, amazing people out there whom you can meet.

When you take this time to think, be sure to think about what it was like when you first met this person. How did you feel about them before things got so frustrating? Did you feel like they were your soulmate and the two of you were meant to be? You’ve got to dial back into that.

A friend of mine said to me one time, “Pretend you just got amnesia and all of a sudden someone told you the person with whom you are living (or in a relationship) is the person you are going to marry. You would have none of the bad feelings and none of the fights. What would you do in that situation?” What you would do in that situation is try to get to know that person again without all the anger, fights, frustration and history getting in the way.

So maybe take a week to yourself and then a week with that person. Get to know them again and remember the reasons why you fell in love. If you guys can do that, then you might be able to save your relationship.

A lot of you have been in multiple relationships. I would say all of you have probably been in at least one relationship. No matter in how many relationships you’ve been, however, all relationships have what I call a breaking point.

You may have been in a four year relationship, but you might have hit that breakup point at year two. It’s like the television shows that “jump the shark” according to that website, meaning a good show stops being good but remains on the air for one or more seasons after that.

Every relationship has a breakup point. The breakup point is the point in the relationship where the fighting escalates to a place where you no longer feel like you’re understood by your partner. All of a sudden the sex stops, the communication stops, and you are living like roommates.

You get into that dynamic when you’re at the point in a relationship where you are trying to understand each other, but then you get so frustrated because you feel like you just don’t understand each other anymore. When that happens, you end up just kind of coexisting in that new dynamic.

It is this dynamic which leads to a lot of the parts of your relationship deteriorating. The sex decreases. The communication decreases. Maybe you stop kissing each other goodbye or stop texting each other during the day.

However it manifests itself, when you get to this place you are at the breakup point. It is the breakup point because the longer you stay in that dynamic after the sex, communication and tender moments stop, the harder it is to regain the original dynamic in that relationship and, eventually, it can’t be regained. That’s why I call this the breakup point.

I know I’ve been there in relationships. I know couples who haven’t had sex in years, and they can’t even imagine getting back to having sex with each other because they’ve hit the breakup point.

In the beginning of a relationship (which I call “the honeymoon stage”), you are learning about each other and making efforts to create romantic moods and nice evenings. When you’re in that stage, you are really working at building your relationship.

Then, at some point, you start to bump heads with each other and the dynamics change. You take away all of the nice things that you were doing the first year and a half or two years (or for however long it was), and then you move into a new dynamic moving forward. That is the breakup point.

The longer you stay in that dynamic and the further away you get from the dynamic you had during the honeymoon stage, the more likely it is that you’ll ever get it back (and, after a point, you won’t). You’ll never go back to the original dynamic, resentment builds and you get in your head too much.

You are no longer about feelings, and you start really punishing each other. “Well he hasn’t done this for me, so I’m not going to do this for him” are the kind of thoughts that take root.

When your relationship gets that way, you hit the critical point or you hit the breakup point. The critical is point is where one of two things will happen.

You are going to get back to the way things were by immediately forgiving, forgetting, loving and becoming aware of it, or you are going to continue the relationship with the bad dynamic in place and wait for the time years down the road when you realize you were at the breakup point years before that.

So if you are going through this right now, you need to look at your partner and think to yourself “Do I want to get back to the way we were, or do I want to realize two years down the road that we were at the breakup point now and did nothing about it?”

When you are in this place do you stay in ego, finger-point and defense mode? Look back at your last two relationships, and think about how they ended. What all of you are going to discover when you do that, is that you hit the breakup point in each of those relationships long before they actually ended.

Now, let me be clear about one thing. I am not telling you to quit a relationship simply because things get frustrating.

There comes a point, however, where the endless battle can’t be won. That is the point where neither one of you are willing to understand, fully compromise and do the things necessary to move forward.

That is when you stop caring. That is when you sleep on separate sides of the bed. That is when you reach the breakup point.

We don’t cover breakups enough here in the blog. In another blog, I am going to talk about the art of breaking up with someone.

It takes understanding each other’s communication style and the way you each express yourself. It takes understanding each other’s needs and desires. It takes really being able to listen to someone without judgment, ego and commentary. It takes being able to work on yourself on a daily basis.

Falling in love is easy. Staying in love is hard. It takes dedication and work by both partners.

I had an interesting lunch with a friend of mine the other day. He told me that his parents have been together for fifty years, and that there were times in their relationship — maybe years — in which they really didn’t like each other. He said that the one thing they always did that kept them together, though, was to stand up for each other.

No one is asking you to change. You are just being asked to grow.

Growing is what life is all about. The person who probably frustrates you and drives you crazy the most is the person with whom you have do the most growing.

So if you’re in love, drop the ego and think to yourself “How does my partner communicate? How can I understand them better? How can we find the peace again in the relationship?”

Relationships are always going to be a challenge, but if you’ve got a great one then you had better figure out how to keep it. Keeping the great ones are a battle, but think about the battle you went through to find it and this person with whom you fell in love.

They always say that everything is great as long as you are in control. It’s when you stop being in control, though, that all the work needs to be done.

So it’s kind of like the car is lying, sort of like how someone is lying when they say “Give me a second.” I think the same person invented the phrase “give me a second” and the “Refill Fuel Now” message.

You can tell it’s Saturday since these are about the only thoughts on my brain. Good thing I have a blog written, otherwise the “refill fuel now!” message would have been the topic of today’s blog.

So onto a less “gassy” topic. . .

Do you really respect your partner? Think about all the people in your life. Think about your best friends. You respect your friends, otherwise you wouldn’t be friends with them.

Do you really respect the person you’re dating though? Do you really respect their wishes and the things they like to do? Do you make sure there is enough balance between the things you like to do and the things they like to do?

Say one of you is a late night person and the other is an early morning person. Do you compromise about that? Do you respect each other’s wants and desires? It is really important that you do. A lot of people tend to tune out or ignore their partner’s wishes.

Say your partner wants to go out for dinner to a Chinese restaurant. You had Chinese food for lunch, but you know how much your partner is craving it. So what do you do? You just kind of don’t answer them. You go into silent mode and hope they don’t ask you again.

Here’s how you should handle it. Don’t ignore them. When you ignore someone, they will immediately start to think that the answer is no and that you’re not on the same page with them. You don’t want to do this.

It’s just human nature that if someone asks us to do something we’re not really in the mood to do, we will tend to go on mute mode (and will just ignore the request). Pretty soon what happens when you do this, though, is that your partner will start to think you’re not interested in doing that thing with them (when maybe you just aren’t interested in doing it that night).

So if your partner wants to go to a Jazz club one night and you aren’t in the mood that day to do that, answer them by saying something like “No, I’m really not in the mood to go listen to jazz tonight and get drunk. Let’s do it tomorrow night.”

So, don’t ignore somebody when they have a wish. Don’t ignore somebody when they want something. Just tell them you’re not in the mood for it that night, otherwise you are going to cause your partner to form all sorts of erroneous opinions about you. If that happens, you will all of a sudden start to see your relationship go in directions you never wanted it to go.