If you’re ever going to be honest with yourself about anything, then this is the time to start. Why do you want your ex back, why did you break up in the first place, and the hardest of all, were you to blame, even partly, for the relationship falling to pieces.

Of all of these, I think I’ll answer the last question for you; and the answer I would have to give you would be, yes, you were partly responsible for the breakup of your relationship.

Remember that it takes both people to make the relationship work, not two people. "Two people" implies that you can work independent of each other to make it work, when this is simply not true.

A relationship won’t survive the rigors of being in the world and weathering the years if both people involved don’t make a concentrated effort.

It doesn’t even matter if each of you is doing something in your own way to contribute to the relationship. Unless and until you both learn to row in the same direction, you might find yourselves at cross purposes.

So yes, you were also responsible for your breakup even if you weren’t the one to actually put it into so many words.

And this is where it becomes hard for you to be honest with yourself. Most of us would prefer to spend our lives with our head in the sand ignoring those things which distress us the most, and which will cause us pain, especially when we know that we are part of the problem.

This means that most of us would also prefer not to have to accept responsibility for our actions, because when all is said and done, it just hurts so much, and do we really want to face up to the fact that we might be partly responsible for our own pain?

The truth of the matter is, that by ignoring this responsibility that we have toward our selves, we are leaving ourselves open to more and more heartache.

And the reason for this lies in our un-acceptance of our own fallibility, or our own faults and wrongs.

You might not be the entire reason that your relationship went south, but you sure contributed, because if you didn’t, what does that say about how much attention you were paying to your relationship? What does that say about how much effort you were putting into your relationship?

Are you going to think to yourself, “Oh, he [she] left me because they weren’t the right person for me/ because they were having an affair/ because they were just not interested in making this relationship work.”

The unfortunate truth is that these are the lines that we so willingly feed ourselves time and again, when something goes wrong or when we fail in our relationships. It’s the easiest way out of a bad situation and we take it without even thinking what it will do to us.

For one thing, if we take the three most common examples of our fooling ourselves, “they left because they weren’t the right person for me” is not a reason, because if this was the case, then you wouldn’t be going through so much pain and suffering would you?

It doesn’t matter if the person was wrong for you in a social aspect, because when you got together with that person, you felt them to be the right one for you. Differences might have driven you apart, but the apathetic “…not the right person for me” absolves you of any responsibility in the relationship.

If your partner was having an affair, then you need to ask yourself why? Why did it happen, and why does it bother you so much? I realize that the last question probably scandalized many of you reading this, but it is the plain unvarnished truth.

If you did nothing to encourage or incite your partner to have an affair in the first place, if it is in that person’s nature to need more than one person at a time, why are you beating yourself up over it?

Was there anything that you could have done which would have changed things around?

And if you were partially responsible for your partner cheating on you (such as by not being able to give them the love and attention they need, not you), then why aren’t you taking you taking your share of the responsibility for it? Why are you putting all the blame on your partner for straying?

If you can take the responsibility in the over the first case, where you had no part in it, why won’t you take the responsibility in the second case?

And remember that although both parties are responsible for making the relationship work, each person can only be held responsible for themselves.

So although you might want shoulder some of the burden for your relationship not working, you cannot shoulder the blame for your partner wanting vastly different things than you do, such as needing more than one person to be involved with.

It’s a complicated problem this thing about being honest with yourself and taking on your fair share of responsibility.

If you take on too little and place all the blame for the relationship being in tatters at your partner’s door, then you are essentially absolving yourself of being in the relationship at all.

If on the other hand, you try to take all the world’s cares onto your shoulders and blame yourself for the things that your partner does, because it is in their nature then you are claiming to have more power than you really do, because no one can be responsible for the actions of another person.

And this very thin line of right and wrong, of taking responsibility where it is appropriate and discarding it where it isn’t, is where we all tend to mess up and go to extremes. It happens to all of us. We just don’t realize it.

And the reason why this happens, is mainly because we are too close to the situation to see what is right in front of our faces.

We can’t see that we are partly responsible for driving our love away when we start taking things for granted; and we can’t see that we are in no way responsible for our partner not wanting to be in an extended relationship right now.

This is simply his/ her genetic makeup, and is part of their needs at the moment. Things might change with time, but there’s nothing that you can do to change things. It’s as simple, and as difficult, as that.

You need to be honest with yourself from the get go itself about what exactly went wrong, and what part if any you had in the breakup.

If we take things a step further, and go with our earlier example, the salve to your wounds of the line, “(the relationship didn’t work).because they were just not interested in making it work” goes two ways.

In one instance, if this is really the case, if the other party wanted something completely different from this relationship than you did, what makes you take on the responsibility for their walking away from you?

On the other hand, if they wanted something different why are you trying to paint them as the bad person? Because they left you to pursue their own goals? Is this such a bad thing when you come to think of it?

Why are you still obsessing about it when you know that you cannot change facts?

This is your responsibility and your problem to change, your inability to take your own life under control even when things are not your fault.

And if you can’t be honest with anyone else about your relationship, then at least try to be honest with yourself.

In this way, by being honest with yourself right from the outset, you might even be able to figure out where things went wrong, and if you were partly responsible for things going to the dogs, then you can at least look to fix things so that next time the same thing won’t happen again.