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At some point in your life, you will leave a job, a friend will leave town, you will regretfully (or gleefully) decide you can't be with the one you once loved any more. Do it in a timely fashion (see the previous chapter), do it thoroughly and then immobilize the break long enough for it to heal completely.
A friend of mine, Dean Larue, has excellent advice for ending a relatively long term, committed relationship. Make sure this is really what you want to do (give it about six weeks, less for a shorter relationship, more for a longer one). Establish a period of time during which there will be no contact (a hiatus) except for emergencies, and define the emergencies ahead of time. The hiatus should last about six months.
This isn't the way most people end relationships, so if you do decide to follow Dean's excellent advice, expect to be explaining it to other people a lot. They may very well be wondering why you both can't just be friends. They'll probably have some alternate theory about how these things should work. Their advice might be better than Dean's. Here are some questions to ask people when they offer advice on how to break up:
A lot of people are running around with theories about how best to break up that have no connection to reality, at least, not in their direct experience. Don't get sucked into their wacky world. I can tell you from personal experience that terrible, terrible breakup advice often comes from people who will in their own near future rather spectacularly bungle a breakup of their own. Learn from their experience -- not by applying their foolish notions.
You may well have the admirable goal of wanting to be friends with your ex. Friendship is a relationship. When it is real, it is reciprocal. If your ex doesn't want to be your friend, you won't be friends. You can, and I encourage you, to continue to behave in a way that will make it possible for them to change their mind. That means being civil, patient and staying well clear of anything that might be considered stalking or otherwise arouse fear in them. Nobody owes anyone friendship, or love, and an attempt to create a relationship based on a sense of debt dooms that relationship from the beginning.
A lot of people are startled to discover that the attitude that enabled them to stay friends with all of their early relationships fails to work with relationships later in life. This may feel like going backwards. It isn't, necessarily. The earlier relationships may have been shorter in duration, non-exclusive or otherwise not as committed. Longer, exclusive, committed relationships have the potential to build up a lot more resentment before terminating. If you want to be friends with exs from longer, exclusive, committed relationships, you really need to have your act together during the course of the relationship: you need to communicate both positive and negative feelings, needs, desires; you need to negotiate effectively and fairly; you need to adhere to relationship-strengthening policies of sharing and allocating resources; you need to understand and take responsibility for the results of your own beliefs and actions. In practice, that comes down to a lot of speak up for yourself, listen to what the other person has to say, compliment and apologize freely, communicate your needs and complaints firmly but with compassion. A breakup that results from a failure in one of these areas can be nasty. Failures in multiple areas create a large doubt in your exs mind that you are worth being in any kind of relationship with. Your best bet is to keep your distance, learn to do better and move on. A successful new relationship is the best proof your ex could want that you are a better person now, worth taking a second chance on, at least as a friend.
Let's say you manage to stay friends with one or more of your exs, or, at any rate, you think you are friends with one or more of your exs. Back in Chapter 5, I stated a rule that you have to have at least two friends before you should even think about dating, and I supplied some criteria for determining whether these friends met my definition of friend for the purposes of the rule. Just for yucks, run your exs who you think are friends through the criteria I supplied. When you talk to other people who claim to be friends with their exs, run them through the criteria also. The goal here isn't to dig in semantically about what it means to be a friend. I'm trying to calibrate what "friend" means. Do you want to be that close a friend with an ex? With every ex? Or are you just looking to be sure you aren't badmouthing each other to mutual friends for the next decade or until one of you leaves town permanently? Do you want to keep up on each others trials and triumphs or would you be happy if they said hey how's it going as they passed on the street? These are all legitimate definitions of friend.
It's easy to grow accustomed to a lot of intimacy without realizing that's what one has with another person. We share the details of our day, our meals, our beds with a partner, and just because we decide we can't stand to live with them anymore doesn't mean we don't want to vent to them about our job or our family or that horrible article in the newspaper our favorite political candidate. If they don't want to do this any more, does that mean our partner was only (pretending to) listen and care so they could share the rent and have less stress sex on some sort of semi-irregular schedule?
Possibly, but not necessarily, and I would argue not even probably. Whatever the deal may have been between the two of you (and for all I know, the deal was vent for rent), I am prepared to bet that the end of the relationship means you no longer have someone to talk at over dinner or at the end of the day or the week or whatever. You probably miss it, and one of the easiest ways to get it back is to stay friends with this person so you can keep getting it. Basically, this is the same problem as continuing to have sex with an ex. Don't do it. Find someone else to talk to on the phone. Journal. Hire someone to listen to you. Establish a rotation with your other friends. If you don't have enough friends to do all the listening you need, address that as a problem (because believe me, that's a bad one).
Venting to friends after a breakup is normal and a good thing. If you don't, your friends probably won't trust you, because you're weird, you don't share, and you must have been a horrible asshole in the relationship or you wouldn't be keeping shut about the whole thing. Venting can take many forms. It doesn't even have to be verbal. It can be a little extra violence in a team sport. It can be several more beers with your friends. It can be a smirk on your face whenever you see a couple. I'm not asking you to verbalize everything. I'm asking you to represent your emotions in a way that's appropriate to your relationships with your friends. They should know approximately how you feel.
They will let you know if you vent too much. They will make this clear to you, possibly by becoming mysteriously unavailable to you after a while. They might be bad friends (unlikely). You should give some serious thought to how much venting you used to do to your partner, which has now been transformed into venting about your partner to everyone else. If you did a lot of venting to your partner, find out what you were venting about. Those were problems you were not addressing directly, but were managing by complaining about them to a sympathetic person. Now that you aren't distracted by the time demands of that close relationship, you have the time and energy to address those problems directly. If you don't, you'll soon no longer have the time demands of any of your relationships, which should give you lots of time to address those problems directly. This is a process which can continue until you have no friends at all. I recommend intervening earlier in the process. Earlier sections of this work probably have useful advice for you.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2002.
Created February 9, 2002 Updated February 14, 2002