Stuck in a relationship with your partner?

There’s a particular kind of tired that comes from having the same relationship problem, over and over, with no real end in sight. You talk about it. Things get a little better for a week, maybe two. Then somehow you’re right back where you started, like the conversation never happened at all.

Maybe it’s the same argument on repeat. The same promise that gets broken again. The same distance that creeps back in no matter how close you got last month. The same feeling that you’re asking for something your partner either can’t give you, or won’t.

At some point, the question quietly changes. It stops being “how do we fix this?” and starts becoming something closer to “am I just stuck?”

More than twenty years into doing this work, here’s what I’ve come to believe: feeling stuck doesn’t automatically mean a relationship is doomed. It usually just means something about the pattern you’re both caught in has to actually change. And sometimes the harder part isn’t identifying the pattern — it’s accepting that you can’t sit around waiting for your partner to change first before you decide what you’re going to do differently yourself.

5 Ways to Stop Being Stuck in a Relationship

1. Identify the Pattern, Not Just the Latest Argument

Couples usually come into my office talking about whatever the most recent fight was about. But I’m almost always more interested in what’s happening underneath it — the thing that keeps showing up no matter what the argument is technically “about.”

Maybe you criticize, and your partner withdraws. They withdraw, so you pursue harder. You pursue harder, and they shut down even more than before. Or maybe your partner keeps crossing the same boundary, you get angry, they apologize, things settle for a bit — and then it happens again anyway.

The subject of the fight tends to change. The shape of it usually doesn’t. So instead of only asking “what are we fighting about this time,” it’s worth asking a different question: “what keeps happening between us, underneath all of this?” That’s usually where the more useful answer actually starts.

2. Look at Your Part Without Taking All the Blame

This distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Owning your part in a relationship is not the same thing as owning everything that happens in it. If your partner lies, cheats, gets verbally aggressive, or keeps violating a boundary you’ve set, those are their choices — full stop, not yours.

But it’s still worth asking yourself what you’re doing in response to the pattern. Maybe you keep avoiding the hard conversation instead of having it. Maybe you say yes when you actually mean no. Maybe you threaten to leave every time there’s a fight but never actually deal with whatever’s underneath it. Maybe you’ve gotten so allergic to conflict that you’ve stopped saying what you actually need at all.

The point was never to conclude “this is all my fault.” It’s to find where you still have some agency in this. You can’t control your partner’s behavior — you never could. But you can change your own part in the pattern, and that’s not nothing.

3. Stop Waiting for Your Partner to Change First

This is where a lot of couples get stuck in a relationship for years, honestly. “I’ll be affectionate once they’re nicer to me.” “I’ll open up once they stop getting defensive.” “I’ll trust them once they prove I can.” “I’ll change once they change.”

Those expectations often make total sense on their own. The problem is that now both people are just standing there, waiting for the other one to go first.

Changing your side of the pattern doesn’t mean tolerating bad behavior, or quietly doing all the relationship’s emotional labor by yourself. It might mean communicating differently. Setting an actual boundary. Refusing to keep having the same circular argument on repeat. Or just saying, plainly, “this isn’t working for me anymore, and something has to change.” Sometimes changing your behavior means moving toward your partner in a new way. Sometimes it means stepping out of a dynamic that’s been quietly hurting you for a while.

4. Decide What You’re No Longer Willing to Accept

People mix up boundaries and demands a lot, but they’re not the same thing. A demand says “you need to stop doing this.” A boundary says “if this keeps happening, here’s what I’m going to do about it.” The difference matters because one depends on controlling someone else, and the other depends entirely on your own choices — which is the only thing you actually control anyway.

If you’ve explained, more than once, that something is hurting you, and nothing’s changed, the next step probably isn’t finding a cleverer way to say it. It’s deciding what you’re actually willing to keep living with.

Worth sitting with honestly: what would actually need to change for this relationship to feel healthy? Have I said that clearly, out loud, more than once? Is my partner actually willing to work on it? Am I seeing real change, or just repeated promises that never quite land? And how long, realistically, am I willing to stay inside the same pattern?

You don’t have to answer all of that today. But not answering it doesn’t make the questions go away either.

5. Get Help Before You’ve Completely Given Up

Here’s something I wish more couples understood going in: you don’t have to wait until the relationship is falling apart to walk into therapy. If anything, therapy gets a lot harder once both people have spent years quietly building resentment and one of them is already checked out emotionally.

Couples therapy can slow the whole dynamic down enough that you can actually see what’s happening in it — what sets the cycle off, what each of you does next, what’s underneath the anger that never quite gets said out loud, and what real change would actually look like in practice, not just in theory.

And sometimes therapy reveals something just as important, even if it’s harder to hear: that one person is genuinely willing to work on the relationship, and the other isn’t. That’s information too, and it matters just as much as anything else that comes out of the process.

When You Stop Being Stuck in a Relationship, It Doesn’t Always Mean Staying Together

I think this is important to say clearly.

The goal of relationship work isn’t always to save the relationship.

Sometimes getting unstuck means rebuilding.

Sometimes it means changing the way you communicate.

Sometimes it means setting boundaries that should have existed years ago.

And sometimes it means recognizing that the relationship cannot become healthy without changes your partner isn’t willing to make.

You can invite someone to change with you.

You cannot do their part for them.

If there is abuse, intimidation, coercive control, or fear for your safety, the priority is not improving your communication as a couple. Individual support and safety planning may be more appropriate.

How Do You Know Whether a Relationship Can Unstuck?

I pay attention to something much more important than whether couples fight.

What happens after the problem is identified?

Can both people take responsibility?

Is there curiosity?

Can someone apologize without immediately adding “but you…”?

Are boundaries respected?

Do promises eventually become behavior?

Is there still empathy underneath the frustration?

A relationship doesn’t need two perfect people.

It needs two people capable of looking at themselves.

If only one person is consistently doing that, eventually the question changes from:

“How can I fix our relationship?”

to:

“What do I need to do if this relationship doesn’t change?”

That’s painful.

But it can also be clarifying.

Feeling stuck has a way of convincing you there are only two options left: stay and keep being miserable, or leave right now, today. Almost always, there’s real work sitting between those two — work most people skip because the two extremes feel simpler than sitting in the messy middle.

Start by just getting honest about the pattern itself. Not who started it. Not who’s worse. Not who owes who the first apology or the first change. Just — what’s actually happening between the two of you, underneath the argument you keep having, and which parts of that are genuinely within your control?

More than twenty years into this work, and I still find it striking how much a relationship can shift once people stop repeating the same reflex and try approaching the problem from an angle they haven’t tried yet. I’ve also watched people arrive at something quieter but just as important — real clarity that they’ve done what they can, and that something has to be different now, one way or another.

Getting unstuck was never about already knowing how the story ends. It’s about refusing to keep waiting indefinitely for something to change on its own, because — and this is the part that’s hard to sit with — usually it just doesn’t.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do I feel stuck in a relationship?

It tends to show up when the same conflicts, the same unmet needs, the same broken promises, keep circling back around without anything actually shifting. You can love your partner completely and still feel genuinely unsure whether this can get better — those two things aren’t in conflict, even though it might feel that way.

Can an unhappy relationship actually become healthy again?

Sometimes, yes, genuinely. It’s a lot more likely when both people can name the unhealthy pattern out loud, own their own part in it, communicate honestly instead of around each other, and actually follow through — not just promise to, again.

How do I know if I’m part of the unhealthy pattern too?

Look at what you tend to do, almost automatically, when the problem shows back up. Withdraw? Criticize? Chase too hard? Avoid the conversation entirely? Quietly drop a boundary you set last month? Get defensive before the other person’s even finished a sentence? None of that makes you responsible for your partner’s choices — but it’s worth knowing your own reflexes too.

How do I actually know whether to stay or go?

Nobody has a clean test that spits out the answer for you — I wish it were that simple. What’s worth looking at honestly is whether there’s real respect there, actual safety, genuine accountability on both sides, a real willingness to change rather than just talk about it, and some actual evidence of that change, not just another round of promises. Therapy can give you room to sit with all of that without anyone pushing you toward a particular ending.

Can couples therapy actually help once things feel this stuck in a relationship?

Yes, more often than people expect. It can help you see the pattern you’re caught in more clearly, improve how the two of you actually talk to each other, work through resentment that’s been quietly piling up, build boundaries that hold, and get honest about what each of you actually needs. It does usually take both people showing up for it, though — one person alone can carry a lot, but not the whole thing.

You Don’t Have to Stay Stuck in the Same Pattern

Maybe you still love each other — a lot of the couples I see do. Maybe you’re just tired in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone outside the relationship. Maybe you don’t even know yet whether you want to repair this or walk away from it — you just know, somewhere underneath everything else, that you can’t keep doing what you’ve been doing.

Honestly, that’s reason enough to start looking at what’s actually going on.

As a Marriage and Family Therapist with more than twenty years in this chair, I help couples find the pattern that’s keeping them stuck, talk to each other more honestly, build boundaries that actually mean something, and figure out what real change would actually require — not the version of change that sounds good for a week and fades.

Therapy doesn’t have to start with already knowing whether you want to stay or go. A lot of the time, it starts smaller than that — with a question closer to, what actually needs to change for me to stop feeling this way?

Take the First Step

📞 Call: (818) 851-1293

📧 Email: marina@marinaedelman.com

Book an appointment today.

Marina Edelman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and the founder of TrueMe® Counseling, a couples and relationship therapy practice serving clients in Westlake Village, Thousand Oaks, and throughout California.

Marina specializes in couples therapy, affair recovery, and relationship repair, drawing on a carefully integrated set of evidence-based approaches:

• Gottman Method — Research-based tools for reducing conflict and building friendship and intimacy
• Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) — Healing attachment injuries and rebuilding emotional safety
• Attachment-Based Therapy — Understanding how early relational patterns shape adult love
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) — Identifying and shifting the thought patterns that fuel disconnection
• AEDP — Processing deep emotional wounds with compassion and precision

Her counseling is best suited for couples and individuals seeking structured, research-backed support for relationship repair, affair recovery, anxiety, communication challenges, and premarital or marriage counseling — in person or via telehealth across California.