The year is 2009. My sister has just gotten engaged. She's at a party and a woman with long gray braids is asking her about the engagement and shares an unsolicited piece of advice.

She says "you're gonna have to work through all your shit with him. If you don't, you'll just wind up working it through in the next relationship, anyway." Might as well stick it out.

I'd already suffered enough in my relationship, with "my shit" - to use the braided woman's terms - that I'd considered leaving, but that recognition had kept me in it. I knew I could kick him to the curb, but it wouldn't free me of my stuff.

15 years later, that wisdom still shines brightly for her and for me. As a relationship coach who has helped women and men through all manner of emotional and erotic challenges and with a variety of outcomes, I can say with confidence that your same issues will arise with another person.

I'm not saying there aren't relationships that ought to end. Or that you'll regret it if yours does. Most likely, if you leave the relationship you're in now because of the pain in that relationship, you will be glad you did. Your mind will retain all the reasons you left and those will remain good reasons.

Still, there may be a day when you realize “Oh gosh, I changed relationships. My new relationship looked completely different. Yet here I am. Back face to face with myself in this relationship as well.”

There's no escape. Wherever I go, there I am. We do have to work through our issues with ourselves, now in our current relationship, or in the next one or the one after that.

That's not to say that every relationship should last. Instead, it means if you are going to leave, the best investment you can make for yourself is to understand what you contributed to the dynamic that wound up not working for you.

Then, when you're looking for your next partner, and when you're in your next relationship, you don't have to repeat the same lessons. You get to play with new ones.

Relationship is a path of spiritual evolution

Or ongoing learning, or growth, if you prefer that language. It is a personal transformation machine. Every one of us is working out our unfinished business from earlier in life in the relationship we're in today.

And we will continue to seek opportunities to step into those same rivers in hopes of doing things differently this time for as long as we're here until we actually do enact a new pattern in an emotionally similar situation.

What I want you to know is possible: your patterns can be the jewels of your life.

You don't have to just suffer through those patterns. You can actually love yourself through them. They can become vehicles for deeper intimacy with parts of yourself that adapted to the environments of your childhood and prior relationships but that you don't have to keep repeating.

You can transform the relationship you have with those parts. By so doing, you will give yourself new options, new dynamics, new freedom, new ease, new joy. I know this because I've done it myself. And because hundreds of clients have done the same.

Rather than feeling burdened by the complexities and pains of your relationship dynamics, you can come to experience them as awe-inspiring blessings. You can know, as I do, that the tenacity of these issues is not something that happens to you... Not something you're beleaguered by. These issues are so tenacious, so relentless precisely because they are devoted to your resolution, your healing, your awakening through them.

If this isn't too nosy a question, I'm wondering...

Thanks for letting me share my story. If you missed my last few stories, here's where you can read them:

1. ​"From fighting all night to resolving conflicts with ease"​
2. ​"The sure-fire way to feel like your spouse's parent"​

And I'll be back soon... The next few stories are related to the e.rotic, so if you want some inspiration in that arena, keep your eyes peeled for my name in your inbox.

Talk to you soon! xoxo

Love love,

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Michele Lisenbury Christensen, MA Host of the Sex.Love.Power Podcast Love & Sex Coach for women, men, and couples ​ ​lisenbury.com​

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PS: On Monday, July 22, I'm honored to be a panelist at a free event hosted by the Relational Life Foundation: Embodied Liberation: Exploring Pleasure as a Guide to Relational Health & Social Justice. I mean, embodied pleasure, liberation, relationality and social justice, all in one conversation? Yes, please! More details​