My partner promised to change again

A repeated promise is evidence about the pattern, not about the future. The first time someone says they will change, you have no way of knowing. By the third or fourth time you have something better than their word: you have what happened after the last one. Decide on that.

Why it keeps happening

Promises tend to arrive at a particular point. Something happens that is bad enough for you to pull away, and the pulling away is what produces the promise. For a while things are better. Then pressure builds again, the behaviour returns, and the promise is made again, often with more feeling than before.

Both of you can be sincere inside this. Your partner may mean every word at the moment they say it. The problem is what the promise is for. If it exists to bring you back, it has done its job the moment you stay, and the behaviour it was about has lost the thing that was pressing on it. Promises made to end a crisis tend to last exactly as long as the crisis.

Notice, too, how the promise is phrased. "I'll never do that again" is a promise about a single act. "I know I've been hard to live with" is a promise about a mood. Neither names what the behaviour actually was or what it did to you. A promise that does not contain the specific thing is a promise about your reaction rather than their conduct.

What would make this one different

Ask what has changed since the last promise other than the promise itself. Have they gone to anyone outside the relationship? Have they said, unprompted and in detail, what they did and what it cost you? Have they stopped the behaviour in a moment where nobody was watching and nothing was at stake? Have they taken a consequence you set without turning it into an argument about your unfairness?

If the answer to all of these is no, you have the same promise with more emphasis. Emphasis is not change.

And there is a check for you here as well. If you have promised to change something, the same test applies. What have you done since, that someone else could see?

How to stop deciding on hope

Write it down. Date the promise, write what was promised in their words, and then keep a line each day for the next month: what happened, how you felt by bedtime. Keep it where they cannot find it. At the end of the month, read it as if it were about a friend. People who do this usually find that the written record and the feeling of the last few days tell different stories, and the written one is the more reliable of the two.

If the record shows real change, you will have something to trust that is not your own hope. If it shows the old shape returning, you will have something to act on that is not a fresh argument.

What this might mean for you

The member module The apology cycle explains why a round of promise and relapse can feel like progress each time and tends not to be, and what it does to your sense of your own judgement. Real change or performed change is free and sets out what to look for while you wait. For the record itself, The four-week log gives you a private place to keep it.

You are allowed to want it to be true this time and to check anyway. If the behaviour that keeps returning has frightened you, the question is a safety one first: National Domestic Abuse Helpline 0808 2000 247, Men's Advice Line 0808 801 0327, Galop 0800 999 5428.