The Good Faith Problem
I recognize when an effort to resolve is genuine and when it is not. I am not responsible for the lack of good faith I did not bring into the room.
Have you tried to negotiate with someone who was not actually negotiating? There is a particular grief in it. You sit at the table prepared, thoughtful, willing to compromise on the things that can be compromised. You arrive with realistic positions and an open posture. And across from you is someone who has not arrived in the same way.
You may have spent years trying to make a relationship work with someone who would not, in the same sense, try. You learned — painfully, slowly — that effort cannot create a partnership when only one person is investing it. The same truth applies in this season. You cannot, by force of your own willingness, create the willingness of another.
This is not your failure. The failure of mutuality belongs to whoever withheld their half of it. You may have been told, again and again, that if you only tried harder, were only kinder, were only more flexible, the relationship would work. That was a lie inside the original relationship, and it is a lie now. Trying harder does not make a one-sided table into a shared one.
What is yours to do is to keep showing up with your own integrity — to make the honest offer, to stay calm in the face of provocation, to not lower yourself to the maneuvering happening across from you. That is enough. That is, in fact, all that has ever been asked of you.
If the process collapses, it collapses on the side that did not bring good faith. You will have done your part. The grief of having to do this work at all is real, but the grief of having done it imperfectly is not yours to carry.