When breaking up is best for you
by Mira and Charles on September 20th, 2010How breakups come in different flavors
Let’s talk about breaking up. Not you and me! I hope we’ll be together forever! But I’m talking about the breakups we’ve all thought about with the love interest in our lives. And most of us hate and fear those breakups. Even if we’re in a bad relationship, we’re still reluctant to break up. The pain! The agony! The loneliness! The freedom!! But what if we need to look at breakups in a whole new way?
Yes, it’s good that we’re reluctant to break up. That means that we hang in there to work through our little difficulties. But it’s not good that we’re too reluctant to break up. Breakups are nature’s way of weeding out bad relationships and helping us to move on to ones that work. Maybe we shouldn’t call them breakups at all. How about…relationship transformation?
Because that’s what really happens. The myth is that we go from being together to being utterly separate. From lovers to strangers. From “I love you” to “I don’t know you.”
The truth is that relationships usually don’t end. Not completely. They transform. You can think of it like this. When you end a relationship you chop off the bad bits and hang on to the good bits. That’s what really happens. We see it in our work all the time.
I’ve got a million examples.
The couple who couldn’t stop fighting and couldn’t stop f—king. They both fought and had passionate sex through and after their divorce. Lots of couples are like this.
Of course, there are many, many cases of couples who stop being lovers but become best friends.
There are couples who are neither friends or lovers but who do quite well as co-parents.
There are couples who end their romantic relationship but hang on to a professional relationship as business partners or creative collaborators.
There are couples who go from not being able to stand each other when they are close to getting along quite nicely when they have casual contact.
It’s good to understand this. It means you can avoid a couple of big mistakes.
You can avoid the mistake of avoiding a needed “relationship transformation” because you’re afraid that it would mean the end of everything.
And you can avoid thinking that, when you do break up, you have to avoid each other for fear of falling back into the old nightmare. Yes, that sometimes happens. But what’s more likely is that by letting go of what’s bad you’ll be able to hang on to what’s good.
And what about the fear that if you hold on to the good things with an ex you won’t be able to start a new relationship?
Well, that might happen if you’re still sleeping together. The new person in your life will have a lot of trouble understanding that. But in fact holding on to the good things in an old relationship actually helps you move on more quickly. Your heart will heal faster.
Next time: the pathways breakups take. It’s not a straight line!
In the meantime, do check out Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay for the absolutely best advice on whether to break up or not in the first place. Then there’s Is He Mr. Right? for the same kind of help for people in new relationships. And if you’re going through an affair, of course you’ll want to look at When Good People Have Affairs. Finally, here’s an idea: why not fix the bad bits so you can stay together? For help with that, the best book is Our Love Is Too Good to Feel So Bad.
