Breakups are hard, one of the hardest things that we have to go through. I have a friend who once said to me ‘even the death of my father was not as painful as some of the breakups I’ve been through’. Let that sink in for a moment.The demise of his own flesh and blood was somehow easier to comprehend and process than the departure of a former lover.
Let there be no doubt – breakups are wrenching and torturous experiences. And as someone who has been through not one but two breakups this year I feel qualified to speak on the matter. As Oscar Wilde nearly wrote: “To lose one girlfriend may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
So if you are watching this in the hope that it will somehow help you to easily extricate yourself from a subpar relationship that no longer suits then understand – there is no easy way out. The time will never be right. You will have regrets whatever you do. There is often no guarantee that the actions you take will lead to an increase in your personal happiness. And above all, you are on your own – no one can make the decision to break up for you because no one else intimately understands your motives and life in the way that you do.
All of that being said, there is another side to the conundrum since the fear of breaking up can also confound you, sentencing you to a prolonged sojourn in a relationship that is monotonous, mentally draining or even abusive. That unique fear attached to saying ‘I’m sorry but this is no longer working for me’ has trapped so many of us in doomed and damaging situations – for years. Years of precious life wasted because we were too scared to undergo a heartbreaking but very common and very human process.
So why is it that it can be so difficult to know when you should break up with someone, and why is it so hard to actually pull the trigger? Because – and I hope you will forgive me the cliche – things are never truly black and white. On top of which our old friend the sunk cost fallacy looms large.
It is, in my experience at least, unusual to find yourself in a relationship with someone who is wholly bad. After all, if they were so terrible then why would you have got together with them in the first place? In most cases she is merely human with some good and some bad. And often you will beamoan that fact. ‘If only she was a bitch! How much easier then would it be to end it!’.
Men in particular seem perpetually stuck at a fork in the road – one way leads to a tranquil land of security, snuggles, Netflix and shared meals and country walks; the other to a wilder terrain of promiscuity, new girls, travel and danger. Our tragedy is that we want both at the same time, but the two are not easily reconciled. And so we self-lacerate, commiserating with friends stuck in the same place, over drinks at the tavern by the fork in the road.
Often it’s not so much the other person that is the problem, more that your paths don’t align. Specifically, the problem is often what you both want in the future. Women naturally have a tendency towards the domestic. Most – although not all – want children, and children require stability and a comfortable, stable home. And so while a young woman might prefer exciting bad boy types for short flings, later she will either seek to convert one of these bad boys to the settled life, or else she’ll seek out a guy who better fits the provider role.
But many men, even those who eventually want families of their own, also crave freedom, sexual and otherwise. But this is simply not factored into our current system of monogamy and marriage, and the resulting tension – rarely spoken about in the mainstream and yet readily apparent to any thinking person – causes many problems.
The simple fact is that if your life goals are not aligned with those of the person you are with then you should break up with her. immediately. Your inner voice is saying ‘yes, but I may change my mind in time’. But ‘may’ is no good – if you are not on the same page now then you should spit up.
But what happens if you’ve fallen in love?
Love, you see, is the tricky fucker that causes all the problems. Because love is the opposite of rationality. It clouds everything, and, like heroin, creates a sense of comfortable inertia so beguiling that it is nearly impossible to resist.
(And yes, I’m using the term ‘love’ as a kind of catch-all umbrella term for ‘the feelz’ here. Whether or not ‘love’ actually exists at all is the subject for another video. But the feelz certainly do – they are a chemical manifestation of the Oxytocin that floods your brain when you become intimate with someone over an extended period of time).
And this is why, if you happen to be a committed bachelor, you should avoid dating girls for more than about three months, or if you do, you should make sure the ground rules are set in advance and that you don’t see them too regularly. Because once you fall under the narcotic sway of love then all bets are off and you are stuck watching videos like this one and reaching out to friends and dating coaches about what to do knowing full well that no one can get you out of this mess but yourself.
It has been said that it’s easier to get into a relationship than to get out of one and I can confirm that this is true. I can also confirm the Churchillian adage that ‘if you’re going through hell, keep going’. There is no other way. You will not avoid pain. You cannot.
And what do you fear most, whether you end it or she does? The excruciating knowledge that the one you crave is still out there but that all access to her is now denied forever.
When I split with my girlfriend earlier this year I learned a very important lesson – that to ensure pain without doing anything to assuage it is one of the greatest skills you can learn as a man. Some cuts are too deep to endure. Some losses are too profound. There is no ‘getting over it’. ‘You’ll get over it’ is an irrelevance, an insult when two who were in love have been irrevocably divided. You cannot ‘put it into perspective’. You cannot ‘look on the bright side’. These words – empty cliches all – simply make no sense when set against the enormity of a loss so big that it extinguishes all arguments, all objections.
The best that you can do, when you split up with someone and when it really gets you – and it happens to all of us – is to compartmentalise. The pain exists. You don’t accept it because you can’t. But you acknowledge it. You don’t try to diminish it or numb it. You acknowledge it. And then you get on with your life, one damn second at a time. There is nothing else to be done. There is no other, better way.
Mostly you try to forget, or at least, not to remember, by burying yourself stolidly and stubbornly in the tasks of the day. And sometimes, rarely, if you can bear it, you indulge yourself with the bittersweet act of remembrance.
******
“You once wrote ‘you meant everything to me’ on a note you sent me. Well, you meant everything to me too. I am an imperfect, broken human being whose life and ambitions are hard to understand, but you stood with me and you tried your best, and for that I honour you. I know now you think it all meant nothing, but I promise you from the bottom of my heart that is not true. We never properly talked about it all – I lacked the necessary courage for that – and I suppose now we never will, but I want you to know that I have never experienced a deeper and purer feeling of love than I did when I was with you. I know that now you think it was all a mirage, but it never was for me, I promise you of that. And although I suppose the end was always inevitable – and for months I couldn’t even bring myself to think or speak of it as ‘the end’ – the loss of you is a weight I carry around with me every day.
And that loss sealed my fate. I have now passed the fork in the road. Because if I were ever to have taken the path to the right I would only have travelled it with you. You were my travelling companion. You were the only one. And I have no desire to travel with anyone else.
And so now a new path has opened up to me, with new vistas ahead – a rich terrain which regretfully I can only explore without you. I suppose it was always inevitable. But that doesn’t reduce the pain one iota, I can assure you, however it may look on the outside.
I hate goodbyes, and so I won’t say one now, but I will say: be well, enjoy and endure what you must. We will meet again in dreams.”
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Strange to see a man so invested in his feels. In could tell in recent streams the break up had taken it’s toll. Best wishes brother .