January is regarded as ‘National Breakup Month’, and February 13 has become known as ‘National Breakup Day’. According to researchers who conducted a survey, 59% of people said that if they were looking to end their relationship, they would hypothetically do so before Valentine’s Day to save money. Raises eyebrows, doesn’t it?
The beginning of the year is often said to experience a spike in couple splits, with various people saying that January is the time most divorce filings and couple separations occur. So this season we are likely to witness fairy-tale couples, including some celebrity partners splitting. No one enters into a love relationship with the aim of ending it one day. We all hope that the fairy tale will last until ‘death do us part’. The end of a relationship, whether due to a traumatic experience, infidelity, betrayal or heartbreak, is difficult to deal with. The reality is that relationships are complex, and partners sometimes grow apart over time.
Life, career and business coach Penny Holburn says generally, most relationships fail because people don’t know themselves or their partner well enough and lack relationship skills. ‘When it comes to our careers, we understand that we need to get educated and get experience. The same applies to relationships. You need knowledge and skills to make them work.’
When a romantic relationship ends, we tend to build defence walls around our hearts and become scared to love again. ‘Whether we know it or not, most of us are afraid of really being in love. While our fears may manifest themselves in different ways or show themselves at different stages of a relationship, we all harbour defences that we believe on some level will protect us from getting hurt. But while these defences may offer us a false illusion of safety or security, they keep us from attaining the closeness we most
desire,’ says well-known author on relationships, sex and love, Dr Lisa Firestone Holburn. ‘It is painful when a relationship ends, especially if you did not want it to end. But you can grieve it, learn from it, grow, and move on to a new one,’ says Dr Holburn. She adds that fear is always difficult to overcome and advises people who have ended romantic relationships to do some thinking and work on themselves before jumping into the next one. ‘Use the fear to get you to work on yourself. Understand who you are in a relationship, who you are attracted to and why, and understand what the typical frustrations and conflicts are that you experience in a relationship, and why. When we don’t learn and change from our failed relationships we tend to go straight back into the same type of relationship again, and later give up on love,’ says Dr Holburn. And that’s where philophobia kicks in.
In extreme cases, philophobia can make people feel isolated and unloved. ‘A new relationship is uncharted territory, and most of us have natural fears of the unknown. Letting ourselves fall in love means taking a real risk. We are placing a great amount of trust in another person, allowing them to affect us, which makes us feel exposed and vulnerable,’ she adds.
