Levinger's Barrier Model and My Personal Experience

Today I’m going to discuss breaking up on individual changes and relate it back to my previous relationship. This relates to Levinger’s Barrier Model. On the model, it says: if attraction is high, barriers are high, and alternatives are low, then the couple stays together. If attraction is low, barriers are low, and alternatives are high, then the couple will break up. Let me explain this a little bit more. Attraction are the reasons to stay in a relationship. For example, in my previous relationship the reasons where: I loved his family, and we had fun together. Alternatives are the reasons to leave. In my previous relationship, these would be: he never had time for me, we were sort of mean to each other, and all we did was fight. The barriers are the things that make it hard to leave the relationship. For example, we were together for 5 years, that’s a lot of time we were ‘wasting’ if we were to just break up. During the last year of our relationship, the model changed. The attraction lowered. Now, it changed to me only loving his family because our time together wasn’t all that fun anymore. The alternatives increased to: never having time together, less caring, less trying, mean comments back and forth, and the fighting increased. The barriers became less important. The only thing keeping us together was basically the time and effort we put into the relationship. When we both came to reality, the more we are unhappy together, the more time we are wasting. So in short, the attraction was low, the barriers were low, and the alternatives were high. The Leninger’s Barrier Model was accurate when it came to my previous relationship, as the result was we broke up.