What do you do when your partner keeps telling you they love you and want the relationship to work… but you’re the only one actually doing anything to make it better?

You’re the one bringing up what isn’t working. You suggest therapy. You initiate the hard conversations. You try to repair after a fight. You read the books, listen to the podcasts, work on yourself and keep giving them another chance.

And they say they hear you. They may even agree with you.

But then nothing really changes.

That’s the situation Sarah brings to me in this episode, and it raises a question I hear all the time in my practice: How long are you supposed to keep trying when someone says they want the relationship, but their actions tell a different story?

Because love does matter. But love alone doesn’t make a relationship work. At some point, your partner has to be willing to help create the relationship they say they want.

We talk about how to tell the difference between someone who genuinely wants to grow but is struggling, and someone who has gotten comfortable letting you carry the emotional weight of the relationship.

And then there’s the harder question: If you already know this isn’t enough for you, what are you actually afraid will happen if you leave?

For a lot of people, that’s where things get really interesting. We stay because we’ve invested years. Because we’re afraid of starting over. Because we hear a clock ticking. Because some part of us believes an unsatisfying relationship is still safer than the possibility of having no relationship at all.

In this episode, I talk about:

• Why “I love you” has to be backed up by behavior

• How to know whether your partner is actually willing to work on the relationship

• Why you can’t do enough emotional work for two people

• The role fear plays in keeping us in relationships long after we know something has to change

• Why a clear boundary or ultimatum isn’t necessarily manipulation

• What to say when you need your partner to understand that things cannot continue as they are

• How to decide when you’ve tried enough

If you’ve been carrying your relationship and wondering how much longer you’re supposed to keep trying, I want you to hear this:

You don’t have to decide today whether you’re leaving forever.

But you do have to stop confusing someone’s intention to change with actual change.

At some point, you have to pay attention to what they’re doing, not just what they keep promising you they’re going to do.

If you’d like to ask a question or get some advice languageoflovepod@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at languageoflovepod.com to have your own question answered in a future session. And if you want to go even deeper, check out Codependent No More by Melody Beattie, because you deserve a love that shows up, not one that just talks a big game.

And if grief or loss is part of your story, come find me on my other podcast, Crying Out Loud. I talk with leading experts, healers and people who have lived through profound loss about what grief does to our brains, bodies, relationships and sense of self, and what actually helps us find our way through it. You can find Crying Out Loud wherever you’re listening to The Language of Love.

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