What Busts in Relationship Breakdown?

Relationship conflict is like a Jenga Tower.

As insult is added to injury, as hurts polarise us more and more into the corner of resentment, in being embittered, we continue to remove ‘pieces’ making the structure of the relationship less and less stable.

Sooner or later, it collapses. Divorce. Division. Derision. Desecration. Dereliction. Diminution. Dissolution. Dismay. And several other ‘D’ words, among many other words.

WHEN JENGA IS FUN

It takes one person to remove one piece from the tower, before the other person obliges.

It’s a fun game that builds to a crescendo. As more pieces are taken, players become emboldened.

There is an adrenalin rush when a risky piece is slid out of the pile. The pressure goes onto the opponent. They must prove they can make an equally thrilling move.

Spectators move in and give players their support. Everyone anticipates that the tower will fall at some point soon. But when?

And then… finally, it does.

It topples and the pieces lay strewn over the floor. So many relationships end like this.

THE ‘JENGA’ OF RELATIONSHIP

Relationships that endure conflict bear these features.

Sometimes we’re not even aware we’re taking out precious pieces of the relationship’s scaffold even as we do it. But as soon as we pull our first piece out from the relational Jenga Tower, the onus is on the other person who has been infracted.

“Payback is sweet,” isn’t that what they say? At its most insidious, we’re not even aware we’re acting out of hurt.

Giving back to people what they gave us becomes our human norm, and we may not identify it’s wrong and that the right thing to do is to act in peace. The more we’re hurt by someone, the less we trust them, and the more we expect them to betray us further.

The more pieces that are taken out against us, the more these actions are telling about how they feel about us; the more aggressively we pull our pieces out — force comes with confidence attained in conflict. And when force is observed in the other person it’s the perfect excuse to up the ante.

It begins to consume our heart and our thoughts. We walk around fuming about their last move or our next move. And, of course, we do involve others; spectators are bountiful when conflict turns ugly. And gossip is like fuel on an already raging inferno.

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All it takes to halt the collapse of the tower is peace.

What busts in relationship breakdowns? Peace. If it were a balloon, conflict would overinflate it beyond its design capacity.

But as peace in a relationship is a solid square tower, instability brings it to the brink of disaster.

We must reconcile that all our relationships are fraught with the Jenga Tower analogy.

Trust can be eroded slowly over time, as we allow small hurts to be denied and never addressed. Pieces are taken out of the relational tower and both parties ought to be able to see what’s going to happen next. Denial or a lack of care simply doesn’t cut it.

Someone, anyone, must make the decision to call a truce, to lay down the guns, to take a moment to look the other in the eye and say, “You mean more to me than to win [whatever it is you’re fighting over] … this is getting us nowhere.”

Peace is the maturity of one saying to another, “There’s bigger stakes here than what we’re fighting over.”

Peace is also, at times, recognising that some people cannot deal in peace. It brings much grief when we decide to kick the dust off our feet. All relationships have the right to the hope of reconciliation.

Acknowledgement to PeaceWise’s Heart of Peacemaking 102 course.

Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash