Women Who Won't Tolerate Men's Garbage Do 7 Key Things When A Guy Lets Her Down
These behaviors undermine trust, but hope is not lost for these women.
Oleksandr Khmelevskyi | Shutterstock I have many clients who come to me feeling frustrated that they can’t trust their boyfriends and husbands to do what they say they are going to do. Their friends say, "leave him!" but, because they love these men, it's just not that simple.
Of course, men don’t always repeatedly break their promises with malicious intent. Often they flake out because they over-promise, worrying they'll disappoint their partner, so they make promises they doubt they can keep.
So, how do you deal with a man who keeps breaking his promises? Let me give you some suggestions.
1. They don’t make excuses for a man's behavior
Many of my clients make excuses for why their guy when he tells a lie. Perhaps their partner had to prioritize work and could not do what he said he would do. Perhaps he didn’t understand what he had promised. Perhaps you had asked too much of him. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
Whatever there reason for his behavior, don’t justify it away. No one, man or woman, should break their promises. If a girlfriend or wife repeatedly broke their promises would you justify it away or would consider letting them go as a friend because they continue to let you down?
If you continue to justify his behavior, even as he continues to break his promises over and over, it will just lead to you feeling badly about yourself. That's because you will believe, every time, that if he loved you he would keep his promises so he must not. All of this indicates a degree of codependence, which is often associated with higher sensitivity to negativity, ultimately becoming a self-defeating cycle.
2. They stop believing that man's promises
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Wishful thinking is something that can cause big time destruction in a relationship. In this case, the wishful thinking is that your partner will stop his behavior out of nowhere, will start keeping all of his promises and your problem will be solved.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work this way. If a man is in the habit of breaking promises over and over, and he gets away with it, he has no reason to change. He will continue to do what he does.
If you are going to continue to be in this relationship, it will be important for you to accept that he won’t ever keep his promises. Why? For two reasons.
The first is that you won’t feel let down. If you accept that the promises that he makes are empty, then you won’t feel let down when things don't happen.
The second is that, if you accept that this behavior will be ongoing, you won’t ask him to make you any promises. You will just do what you have to do to get things done, leaving him on the sidelines to do his own thing.
I am not advocating accepting that he will always break his promises. Ultimately, you will find this unsustainable and painful but it is an option should you choose to stay in the relationship. This is only a temporary solution.
3. They get to the heart of the issue by talking openly
It is important that you and your boyfriend have a dialogue about why he breaks his promises. Doing so will calling him out on his behavior and also, perhaps, lead him to reflect on why he breaks his promises over and over.
I know that my husband often breaks his promises but he does so because he doesn’t want to let me down. This context matters a lot to me.
For weeks he promised to cut up some fallen trees and for weeks he kept putting it off with excuses. Finally, I got mad and called him out on it. He said that he was concerned that the trees weren’t on our land and that is why he didn’t want to cut them up.
If he had only told me the truth when I first asked him to cut up the trees, I wouldn’t have had the expectation that he was going to do it, I wouldn’t have gotten mad and I wouldn’t have felt let down (a feeling that is not going away).
On the other hand, my ex-husband used to break his promises all the time. While sometimes he would keep his promises, more often than not he wouldn’t. More often than not he intended to keep his promises but was just incapable of doing it, for whatever reason. This repeated breaking of promises eroded our relationship to the point that he is now my ex-husband.
So, try to talk to your boyfriend or husband about why he does what he does. Perhaps this will help you both understand what is happening so that you can work together to make change.
4. They don’t let a man off the hook
Many of my clients don’t call their partners out on their broken promises. Perhaps at the beginning they did, but, as time goes on, they stop doing so.
They stop doing so because they feel like a nag when they do. They are so disappointed that they don’t want to have another fight. They don’t want to give their boyfriends a reason to leave. They blame themselves for what has happened.
For whatever reason, women often let their male partners off the hook when they are repeatedly breaking promises. Unfortunately, the only thing that this does is encourage their boyfriend to continue breaking promises as they know that there will be no consequences if they do.
5. They know that its not because of them (most likely)
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So many of my clients believe that when their partner breaks their promises it is because they don’t love them. That their actions reflect their true feelings. And while this might in fact be the case, more often than not its not.
One of my client’s husbands had promised to stop on the way home from work to look at some new windows for their house. He had to work later than he thought and he just forgot. My client took this to mean that he didn’t love her; that if he loved her he would have done what he promised.
And, in this case, it just wasn’t true. He did love her, he just forgot to do what he promised and committed to doing it the next day.
Another client had a partner who was consistently letting her down, promising to spend time with her and then making excuses why he couldn’t. While he didn’t break those promises because he didn’t love her, spending time with her was not a priority for him.
Because she let him get away with it, he made no effort to change. And, because she continued to let him break his promises to her, eventually he just walked away because he didn’t respect that she was such a doormat and fell in love with someone who challenged him.
So know that, most often, men don’t break their promises as a reflection of their feelings. They do it because they are being enabled to do so.
6. They get help
Many people who perpetually break promises have some kind of internal mechanism that leads them to do it. Perhaps they were always lied to as a child and its all they know. Perhaps they struggle with self esteem issues and believe that their actions aren’t important. Perhaps they tend to sabotage relationships and breaking promises has always succeeded in the past.
Whatever the reason, if your partner continues to break his promises and you want to stay in the relationship, if is essential that you have some kind of couples therapy, whether with a therapist or with a qualified life coach. While it may seem overwhelming to seek help, a study into the variety and effectiveness of various forms of couples therapy and or other support can truly help relationships succed.
Working together with a professional will help you understand why he breaks his promises and him understand the effect that it has on you. Once you have some clarity about what the broken promises do to your relationship, you can start developing tools for how to do things differently.
Perhaps when its time for him to make a promise the two of you work together to define whether or not he thinks he can succeed at it or would it perhaps be better for you to modify the promise to something that he can do. Perhaps you talk specifically about what the best way for him to keep his promise would look like. Perhaps he could be honest with you about his ability to carry off this particular promise.
Whatever the actions that you develop might be, doing things differently is the only way that you will be able to break the cycle.
7. They walk away when all hope is lost
This is an excellent option to choose if your guy lies to you over and over and over. Just walk away. I know that this idea feels like a kick in the teeth but the reality is is this is most likely the best option for you to be happy.
After all, in spite of everything, your boyfriend breaks his promises. Certainly, if this is your husband or you share kids, you will want to put in a lot of effort to be sure you've both done the most you can do, but, in the end one thing is true: You are in a relationship with someone you can’t trust or rely on. A relationship like this is one that will never survive. After all, a relationship dies without trust.
I know that the idea of walking away is scary. After all, the idea of starting to date again is abhorrent and the possibility that you will never love or be loved again seems like a reality. But don't worry, that is just negative thinking and it can be overcome. After a little break, you will can get back out there.
Sure, dating again isn't your first choice, but you will love and be loved again and you won’t have to deal with the daily pain of being let down, pain that is most likely getting worse every day. If you're not already married to him or have kids with him, you should know from the time you've spent together that these bigger responsibilities will only make the situation worse.
I know that its easy to rationalize away the fact that your boyfriend breaks his promises. After all, we are all only human and humans make mistakes. And this is true.
But, the reality is is that someone who lies to you over and over, which is what breaking a promise really is, is someone it is hard to be in a healthy relationship with. It is essential that you don’t look away from the reality of your relationship and take conscious steps to deal with it. Only by doing so will you get your happily ever after.
Mitzi Bockmann is an NYC-based Certified Life Coach and mental health advocate who works exclusively with women to help them be all they want to be. Mitzi's bylines have appeared in MSN, Prevention, and Psych Central.
