The 7 Year Contract

We were having a discussion in the office this week and Chris mentioned his Mum had heard a radio interview with someone suggesting that relationships should have a 7 year contract that is renegotiated every 7 years according to whether it is working or not. It prompted me to comment that it didn’t surprise me that peoples ideas about ‘forever’ have changed given that the values we hold in respect to relationships have changed so much. In the 1950s or 1960s divorce has much more stigma attached to it and so often people stayed in a relationship that may not have been personally fulfilling because they worried about what other people would think. This is still the case to some degree today but more often people are likely to pursue their own personal happiness even if children are involved. People are more likely to consider the impact on children of a loveless relationship that perhaps means they are subjected to frequent arguments and tenseness in the home. People will leave a relationship in the pursuit of greater happiness with the hope that the children will be better off if their parents are better off. So what do you think about relationships being renegotiated? Have relationships just become commodities that will eventually date and be out of fashion requiring us to get a new model?

Online dating throws people into a sea of new rules around relationships that are often hard to navigate. How long do you communicate before meeting? Are you being unrealistic expecting that if someone is communicating with you they will forgo other communications in the meantime?

I think as a training company we could offer people lots of support around managing their own emotions and expectations in what can be often a quite confusing new game. It really is a new game – going online to find the love of your life or should I say the person you are going to contract to for the next 7 years.

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