Making A Clean Break
Posted by fxckfeelings on June 14, 2009
Nobody enjoys the break-up process, but there are ways, as either the dumped or the dumpee, to make that process even worse. Between a woman who thinks she’s permaturely ending things to a man who can’t let go, these two cases show how breaking-up is not just hard to do, but easy to fuck up royally.
–Dr. Lastname
I just broke up with my boyfriend, and even though I thought I was doing the right thing in the long run, I think I’m now making a habit of ending relationships before they get too serious. This time I ended things because, after a year together, I had to face the fact that I wasn’t as excited about him as I should be, and certainly not as excited about him as he was about me (and never was—this wasn’t an issue of the spark being gone, but never really being there in the first place). I left the guy before him because he and his mother were very close—maybe too close, in that his mother seemed to boss him around—and that mother lived hundreds of miles away, which meant he’d want to move hundred miles away eventually, and I really didn’t (let alone raise a family there so close to his crazy mother). I’m not that old, but I’m definitely in the marriage window, and while I think I’m just being realistic when I make these decisions, I worry that I’m just panicking in the face of actually settling down. I hate how much I’ve hurt my exes by what I’ve done, my goal is, I don’t want to do it again.
It’s understandable to feel bad when you’ve made someone else feel bad, but feelings aren’t that important when you’re looking at the bottom line. Before you start criticizing yourself for the painful outcome of these two relationships, considering the obstacles that make it difficult to find a good partner.
Ultimately, your goal isn’t to avoid painful breakups; it’s to deal with prospective partners honestly while you try to find a good match, knowing that it’s entirely possible to begin a relationship with someone you like and respect and then discover problems that would doom a long-term future.
That’s what you can’t control here: the unsolvability of two of those problems and the need to break the relationship sooner rather than later, regardless of the pain you might cause.
We both know couples who broke up because one of them is over-responsive to another priority in their lives, like a mother or job or college basketball. So when you’re considering settling down with someone, you need to ask yourself how this guy is likely to respond if the demands of our family conflict with his other loyalties.
Consider whether or not he’ll respond to your demands by getting his priorities straight without being too subservient, using what you know about your time together as well as information about his previous relationships to help make your determination. Which seems to be exactly what you did.
Even though it was painful to end things with your Freudian issues ex-boyfriend, you did so without frivolous motivation. I agree with you that this criterion—how well he handles the boundaries of the relationship—is critical and can be a deal-breaker, and, in my experience, it’s often hard to figure it out before you know someone well. So don’t fault yourself for back out or the pain it caused since you prevented more pain later. And dodged a hell of a mother-in-law.
We also know couples whose marriage failed because one of them tried too hard to make things work with someone s/he thought s/he should care about and didn’t. I think you were right to give it a try, because sometimes your feelings for someone grow with time. Then again, sometimes they don’t, and you need to move on. Painful, again, but what you did seemed necessary, principled, and well-intended.
In some ways, you are panicking in the face of settling down, but only because you’ve done a fair assessment of what your future would be like and don’t want to settle down with someone who isn’t right for you, which is a completely appropriate (if painful) response. You’re doing the right thing, even if you haven’t yet found the right guy.
STATEMENT:
To protect yourself from the guilt and remorse you don’t deserve, write a statement setting out your principles and procedures for doing a search under these tough conditions. “I think it’s important to try to find a good partner and dangerous to choose a bad one. So I need to search for qualities that I believe are necessary for a relationship to last and not be overly influenced by attractiveness (though that’s not unimportant). I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or break my own heart, but it’s my job to move on quickly if I think someone won’t pan out, because that will do the most good in the long run. This is a worthwhile task and I will not be deterred by pain.”
I like to stay friends with my exes, or at least friendly, but this one woman I dated a few years ago won’t speak to me, and I don’t understand why. We were friends before we dated, were together for a year, and when she told me she didn’t want to be with me anymore, I admit, I was upset, but then she agreed to try to maintain a friendship, at least for a while. When I told her that I wasn’t happy with her level of effort, she told me she thought we should spend some time apart then, and I haven’t heard from her since. I’ve written her a handful of emails since then, like when I heard she’d gotten promoted at work, or when my wife and I first got engaged, but she won’t talk to me. I’m happily married now, so it’s not that I’m not over her…I guess I just miss her as a friend and can’t think of a reason she’d consider me an enemy. I would be really upset if she thought I’d hurt her in some way, and I’ve only ever been friendly, so I don’t understand how that could happen. My goal is to figure out what I’ve done to my ex to make her shun me, and what I can do to make it right.
When your goal is to keep a friendship, you’re assuming that it’s within your power to do so, and that’s a dangerous assumption. When it isn’t within your power (as it usually isn’t), but you still put on the full court press, you’ll always make the relationship worse. You’ll press so hard that the other person will likely feel smothered to death.
So regardless of whether your commitment was cemented with blood, a legal contract, or an oath on your honor as a gentleman, there are obstacles to continuing friendship or love that are truly insurmountable. A break-up is one of them.
It may be a subtle matter of human chemistry or the way brains and/or personalities are put together, but it often happens that people who are initially drawn together as friends or lovers can’t stay that way. When she stopped being your girlfriend, she was announcing that something wasn’t working for her. So she agreed to try a half-assed fix.
It makes sense; after investing a year in the relationship, she probably wanted it to pay off, but was forced to admit that something got in the way. Whatever that something was, there’s always a good chance it will not permit friendship, even if you both wish one another well and have no lingering resentments. Chemistry is tricky, not just in bringing two people together, but in keeping them apart.
The sad truth is that when one party in a broken relationship makes the plea to maintain friendship as the romantic relationship ends, it’s an offer best refused; it exists to cushion the blow of rejection, either to make someone feel less guilty or less devastated, but all it tends to do is draw out the break-up process. One day, you might be friends, but at that point, you’re just exes.
Yes, it’s worth trying harder to improve or keep a relationship if you think it’s really possible. But if you try harder once or twice and it’s not working, accept the overwhelming probability that you’ve arrived at a limit to what you and she control and that, sad though it may be, and impossible to understand, the time for leaving her alone has arrived. I’m sure your wife feels the same way.
STATEMENT:
Compose a statement that reminds you of your need for a boundary, a limit to how far you’ll let your wishes go. “I hoped my ex-girlfriend and I could maintain a friendship and thought she agreed to make an effort. I hoped that her negative feelings, whatever they were, were limited to our being a couple and that our previous friendship could reassert itself. I was wrong, but I’m glad I tried. There’s a good chance that she tried also before feeling that it was wrong for her. I have a right to feel disappointed, but expressing my negative feelings or trying to reach out to her gets me and her to focus on our negative feelings instead of on the good things we brought one another. My goal is not to keep the friendship going, but to make the best of what we had.”
