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Relationships have beginnings and they have ends. The most rewarding, nurturing relationships between mature adults will someday end when one of them dies. But long before death (which recedes further from us over time, but is still everpresent), many relationships end. Workers are laid off. Friends part. Spouses divorce. I'm here to say that sometimes, that's a really, really good thing.
You probably have some idea of when a friend ceases to be a friend, when an employee should reasonably tell the boss to take this job and shove it, when to dump a significant other, possibly even when a parent is justified in kicking offspring out of the house. Your friends have ideas, too, as does your boss, your employees, your significant other, your parents and your kids, to the extent that these people exist. It can be enlightening to discuss these ideas with others, but be prepared to have your ear talked off about some controversial incident in the speaker's pastl. If you can't think of anything that might cause you to end various kinds of relationships, life can get arbitrarily ugly for you. I cannot emphasize this enough. There are extremely ambitious, driven people out there who latch on to the passive or uncertain. Rapacious corporations will exploit your labor, friends will borrow your stuff and never return it, romantic partners will cheat on you.
In general, when someone continues to treat you in a way you have already confronted them with as unacceptable, you should end the relationship with that person. Since it is unreasonable to expect ourselves and others to know ahead of time and successfully communicate, in detail, all unacceptable behavior, we will have to figure this out and tell others about it as we go along.
You may be tempted to unilaterally end or scale back a relationship rather than talk about something your friend or lover is doing that you cannot tolerate, on the theory that this kind of communication is more trouble than it is worth. If you make a habit of this, you will probably find that other people treat you in exactly the same way. It will likely limit your opportunities to develop intimate friendships that last over the years.
Telling someone they hurt you in a way that makes you question your relationship to them is traumatic -- it's a lot like twisting an ankle or spraining a thumb while exercising or playing a sport. You can stop exercising, but you'll die sooner and your quality of life will deteriorate. The more regularly you exercise or play a particular sport, the less likely you are to be injured. Injuries occur most often in novices, or in people exerting their maximum effort at something they do not do regularly.
When exercising, or playing a sport, you can get a personal trainer, a coach to help you figure out the best, safest, most efficient way to execute a particular move, whether running form or throwing a frisbee. You can use a therapist or counselor, or your friends, as relationship coaches. You can read books. The process of learning from and with friends will provide an opportunity to learn about boundaries in relationships in the abstract and in detail. As you exercise, or learn a new kind of motion, muscles develop and technique improves so that the joint is no longer threatened by the activity. Over time, if our relationships develop in knowledge and increase in intimacy, we will find that deal breakers are triggered far less often, if at all.
The future in store for those who do not do the work of communicating deal breakers is much more unpleasant. I hope you do not have relationships with people who hurt you intentionally. Likely it is something they do for another reason. Unless you provide a better reason not to do what they did, or a different environment, you can expect a repeat. The longer this goes on, the more it will affect you and eventually you will communicate or leave. If you communicate later, your friend (spouse, coworker, whatever) will find it very, very difficult not to immediately respond with (in a whiny or accusatory tone), "Why didn't you tell me before?"
Telling someone after the tenth time they called you by a nickname you hate that you hate that nickname is a humiliating experience for them. Maybe they thought you like being call sugar plum. They now vividly remember every single time they called you sugar plum, in front of your friends, at the office holiday party. All those happy memories are being rewritten and not in a good way. (If you're thinking this is basically the same reason women shouldn't fake orgasms, you're absolutely right.)
Telling someone late is better than not telling them at all, assuming you still want to stay. (If you are leaving anyway, don't tell them every single thing you hated about them.) Acknowledge that you had difficulty communicating the problem. If they are sure they cannot change in a way that is compatible with your needs, end the relationship or change the nature of your relationship so that is more tolerant of that incompatibility. You can explore the deal breaker (boundary, ground rule, etc.) jointly, but it is your responsibility to communicate honestly: if you say it's okay for them to do some version of it that isn't okay, or that you learn later isn't okay, you have to bring this up again. Leaving is less damaging to everyone than hoping it will take care of itself, or believing you should suck it up and deal since you screwed up the communication once already, or worrying about being a hypocrite if you admitted you were wrong about the nature of the deal breaker in the previous communication.
A RELATIONSHIP THAT ENDS WHEN A DEAL BREAKER IS ENFORCED ENDS AS A PERFECT RELATIONSHIP. You did it right. Later in life, as you change, and as others change, you may realize that that is no longer a deal breaker for you, or is not a deal breaker with everyone you are in a relationship with. YOU WERE STILL RIGHT TO LEAVE. While we (should) all experience continuity with our earlier selves and (ideally) with our future selves, that is an amorphous continuity found more in spirit than in principles, more in essence than in behavior.
You may be concerned that if you were to apply this advice, you would lose all of your friends, because either they choose to leave rather than change, or you choose to leave because of their unwillingness to change. Get an independent coach. Hire a therapist or otherwise get advice. Describe what is happening. Answer their questions. Listen to their advice. It will likely fall into one of several major categories, the first, and most reassuring, being that you are worrying over nothing, your friends will love you anyway, everyone involved is basically reasonable and it's just going to be an emotional rollercoaster for awhile as you open up a bit more and start telling the people around you how you feel about them.
You may, however, fall into one of the following, less pleasant, categories.
You may be really creepy yourself, incredibly demanding of your friends and just not worth the trouble. Your coach can help you learn the internal adjustments necessary to deal with the fact that people breathe, chew, occasionally fart, have poor grammar, weird accents and sometimes lack grace, physically or otherwise. Also, people are messy: their hair gets out of place, they may have a zit or irregular features, their clothes may not be perfectly clean and they might be sweaty. You may find it shocking, but some people even do unpleasant things like spit or pick their noses. Their homes show signs of human habitation, in much the same way that a den might show signs of animal habitation. If you can't cope with the basic realities of human life, and feel a need to control those realities, not just in yourself, but in those around you, you will have a lot of trouble keeping friends. Get help getting over it; don't fix the problem by trying to change everyone else.
You may have been hanging out with a really creepy crowd of people. Maybe you bonded over a substance which you are no longer abusing. Your therapist will help you relearn how to interact with people and bond over something other than a truly excellent mind-altering substance, or at least help you ratchet down through coffee or something similarly socially acceptable.
Last, and most important, once you have successfully communicated a deal breaker, your friend or whoever has made appropriate changes, and the relationship is continuing, you need to be able to recover to normal. This is part (but not all) of why it is so important that you communicate earlier rather than later. It is much harder to remember what is normal if you've been letting that bitch call you sugar plum in front of everyone for the last 6 months. If she does it once, you tell her, and she never does it again, you may not even remember that it happened 6 months later. Either way, you must recover to normal if the relationship is to survive. Relationships don't survive debts hanging over them, or people who constantly bring up a supposedly settled problem from the past. The marriage might continue, you might still call each other friend, the business might survive but it's just not the same if it's not the same. If you have trouble getting back to normal, try to figure out what normal is, and get help reaching that goal.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2002.
Created February 9, 2002 Updated February 11, 2002