Young men are trained to be warriors.
From the time we’re born, we’re told to never give up, never surrender, and to fight for what we love at all costs. All costs – even if it means sacrificing everything we believe in.
We’re taught to sacrifice our well-being for our partners, family members, and our friends.
If you don’t think deeply on the topic, it’s really easy to trick yourself into thinking that your purpose on this earth as a man is to take punishment, be miserable, and bend to the desires of the people closest to you. A lot of men live this way.
But this is actually the opposite of how a man is meant to live his life. Men can be protectors, providers, and leaders, but there’s more to being a man than just taking out the trash and making sure the people around you are happy with you.
There’s more to being a man than taking care of a romantic partner.
There’s more to being a man than being a man in a relationship. To learn and become everything you can become as a man, sometimes you have to walk away.
Why Men Stay In Bad Relationships
Determining whether or not to stay in a relationship starts with understanding a few fundamental psychological principles.
Let’s start with what makes most men stay in relationships that they hate: the scarcity mindset.
With the scarcity mindset, a man might constantly feel that the world around him is caving in. This man is not living, he’s trying to get through the day – he’s surviving.
We all have bad days, and we all limp to the finish line sometime, but your entire life should not be like this.
Most of your life should be spent reaching for new heights, overcoming obstacles, and feeling content as you enjoy the fruits of your labor. If that bothers you, that’s probably because your potential is out of reach at the moment.
In time, you must learn to be content with an abundance mindset.
How to Fight Scarcity and Adopt Abundance
The man who lives in a world created by his anxieties about scarcity will settle for a job he hates, a partner who he doesn’t love, and a life that is nothing like the one he dreams of.
No one wants a life that is “meh”, but many of us end up stuck in them. I used to be stuck in one of these lives – a life of pain, misery, and loneliness. A life of “quiet desperation”, if you’re asking Henry David Thoreau.
Scarcity is the root of this quiet desperation. Scarcity creates weakness, and weakness creates weak choices. Weak choices create weak men, and this creates an endless cycle of misery and depression.
That’s why to fight scarcity, a mental shift must occur. You must learn to live with an abundant mind. An abundant mind will create abundant life.
This New Mindset Might Change Your Life
As you begin to fight your way out of the anxiety that comes with scarcity, you are rewarded with the realization of the abundance of reality.
However, the abundance mindset does not mean what most people think it means.
Abundance is not an excuse to treat people badly, make careless decisions, or live recklessly, but it is an “excuse” to forgive yourself for mistakes and bad decisions.
You can forgive yourself because there are plenty more decisions coming on the horizon. Until the day that you die, you always will have another opportunity to make a decision that can change the course of your life.
This is the core ethos of the abundance mindset.
The abundance mindset gives you choice. It gives you power. It gives you the ability to look at a situation and see it for what it is – not for “how it can hurt you”.
The abundance mindset gives you the ability to take a step away from your reality and into the real reality. Walking away from a relationship can be the catalyst for this growth.
The Undeniable Power of a Breakup
A breakup can depress you, break you down, and force you to reevaluate the direction of your life.
A good breakup will mess you up pretty well.
However, that’s okay. We’ve all been there.
Honestly, I’d rather try to survive 5 minutes in the ring with a heavyweight boxer than try to once again deal with some of the breakups I’ve gone through over the years.
Maybe that’s dramatic, but it’s how I feel. Breakups can force you to change everything.
But it’s not enough to just have a bad breakup. Everyone has breakups, but not everyone comes out on the other side of them stronger.
This is because breakups expose limits, and as men, we often struggle to deal with our limits.
Learning to deal with this experience through an abundance mindset will send your mental and spiritual growth to an all-time high.
The end of a relationship exposes your flaws and limitations and it exposes the flaws and limitations of your partner – but limits don’t have to be bad things.
The end of a romantic relationship exposes where you are in your life, and that can be an incredibly uncomfortable feeling.
No one likes to find out that they aren’t doing as well in life as they thought. But when you’re confronted with a hard fact of reality like that, there’s only one question to ask yourself: What are you going to do about it?
The ending of a relationship doesn’t need to just be the death of your former self and a sign that your life is imperfect.
The death of a relationship can also be the birth of something new. It can be the birth of something strong.
This strength is built through walking away.
Walking Away Gives You Strength
The image of a broken man is hard to look at. He’s usually chasing, begging, and contorting himself to fit the desires of the person who he longs to be with.
He’s strung out, emotionally exhausted, depressed, anxious, and caught in a vicious cycle that will never end – unless he finds his way out. But that’s easier said than done.
Even after we walk away from someone that we believe we love, we still run the risk of projecting our insecurities and bad feelings onto new people. This is why people say that they have “the same relationship twice”.
Walking away from a woman does not just mean stopping seeing her. It means to free yourself from the coping mechanisms and codependencies that you used to have when you were with her.
This is far more difficult, but it is also the only way to create lasting change in your relationships. But how do you know when to walk away?
Let’s talk about it.
A Few Signs Your Relationship Is Dying
Are you fighting more than talking? Not good.
Is sex a chore? Not good.
Is everything an argument? Not good.
The truth is that most of the signs that your relationship is dying are pretty obvious, but we hide them. We’re blinded by love.
But is it really “love” that blinds us? Are you “blinded by love”, or are you blinded by comfort, security, and a fear of change?
What holds men back from walking away in relationships is not always “love” – if we were in love, our relationship would probably not be making us feel as horrible as we feel.
“There is more wisdom in your body than your deepest philosophy.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
If your relationship makes you feel like crap, this is something you need to do something about. You need to break past the limiting beliefs that you have adopted through a lifetime of being told to be tough for tough’s sake.
You need to break free. Your problem is probably not being broken, your problem is being out of touch with your core purpose. Your problem is being disconnected from your vision.
This disconnection leads to spiritual suicide. True strength is not merely enduring pain. True strength is transcending pain and striving to live well anyway.
Why Leave?
You don’t need to walk away to protect your ego. You don’t need to walk away to protect yourself. You don’t need to walk for any reason other than the fact that you are unhappy and that you deserve to live a happy life with people you want to be around.
If you are with a woman and you feel you don’t want to be with her, it’s simple – walk away. Simple, not easy.
It’s tough to venture out into the unpredictable world of being single. It’s easy to take the false security that she gives you for granted. Being single can be just as scary as being in a relationship, but it’s actually more important.
Life is a single-player experience. You are born alone. You die alone. Everyone you meet along the way throughout your life will not be in the coffin with you when you go.
Relationships are meant to enhance your experience on earth, not to define it. Your girlfriend or wife might be a nice person, but she’s not the meaning of your life.
The meaning of life is far more complicated than just your love for one person.
The Meaning of Life – In a Nutshell
According to the philosopher, concentration camp survivor, and psychologist Viktor Frankl, (also the author of Man’s Search for Meaning and founder of logotherapy – a psychological technique used to help people find meaning in their lives), there are 3 ways that you can find meaning in your life.
- Work – your job can give your life meaning if you are deeply connected to it. That job could be anything, but the important thing is that it’s something that gives you purpose. Helping people, making art, and problem-solving are just a few ways that people can find meaning in their lives through work.
- Love – this doesn’t mean what you think it means. It’s not just about lust, dinner dates, and going on cool trips with someone. Love is a deep connection that transcends humanity. Love is the acceptance of someone despite all their flaws. Love is beautiful enough to give your life meaning, but it doesn’t have to be your only option. If you aren’t in love, love cannot give your life meaning.
- Suffering – Sometimes meaning doesn’t mean “feeling good”. Meaning is sometimes suffering in the name of a higher purpose. For Viktor Frankl, it was surviving the concentration camp and never allowing his humanity to be taken away. For you, it could be overcoming your breakup, your loneliness, and your depression. Accepting your suffering for the sake of transcendence eases the pain of suffering. Read that again.
How Meaning Effects Relationships
When you live a life that is devoid of meaning and lacks a central purpose, it’s easy to find yourself on a slippery slope of codependency, depression, and “quiet desperation”, which we talked about earlier.
When you have no vision, it’s impossible to have strong relationships. Relationships are meant to enhance your vision. If there is no vision for how you want your life to go, the relationships you have will dictate the vision, and that is a gateway drug to misery.
First, establish a vision. This is why you must walk away from bad relationships. This is why you must walk away from people who drain you. You must spend time alone, and then spend time contemplating where you want to go and who you want to be.
Then, you can find relationships that coincide with your vision. Meaning first, girlfriend second. This is the recipe for more happiness, better relationships, and a stronger, more powerful life.
To build a better life, you need a strong, overarching philosophy.
If you do not have one for yourself, you need to find one before you torture yourself and someone else with yet another toxic relationship. If you aren’t ready to build your vision, you also aren’t ready for a relationship.
Why You Should Embrace Loneliness – At Least For a While
You should not walk away from a woman just because I told you to.
You should walk away from a woman because you’ve become a man who realizes what he wants, and you’ve made the decision that that woman or relationship is not it. You walk away not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.
You walk away because it’s the right thing to do. Men stay in bad relationships when they are scared. They stay in relationships when they are stuck.
They stay in relationships when some outside force has invaded their psyche and disconnected them from what they truly want – from their vision.
That’s exactly why you should walk away. You should walk away from relationships in order to reconnect with your vision. You should walk away to reconnect with what you truly want in your life.
Doing this will give you the power to build the life that you truly desire because it will free you from the limiting factors that social contracts can create in your lives. You know when you need to walk away.
All there’s left to do is to stop lying to yourself.
Conclusion
Not every man needs to walk away from his lover. However, many men need to re-establish their vision for lives and decide if what they’re doing is in line with their vision for the life they want.
You need a meaningful life first, and then you need to find a life partner. It is not the other way around. All other approaches to happiness are fleeting.
No lover will make you happy, just as no job will make you happy, just as no success will make you happy. Your happiness starts from within you. Happiness isn’t something you attain, it’s a state of being.
But for some of us, the only way we can learn this is by walking away from the people who are holding us back. It’s simple, but it is not easy. That’s why I’m here to help.
Are you ready to walk away from exhausting relationships, depressing breakups, and a life that makes you feel half-alive? Are you looking for people who want the same things you do?
Lucky for you, that’s exactly what I offer with my exclusive coaching program. See, this program isn’t only going to help you break free from nice guy behaviors, build quality romantic relationships, and become a stronger Grounded Man.
It’s also going to provide you with support from both myself and my elite community of men.
You’ll be tapped into your own “band of brothers” and you’ll also have access to the best training course for men that exist today, as well as weekly calls with my team of inspiring and determined coaches.
There are no boys, no complainers or dabblers, this program is for serious men only.
