Why is Breaking Up Hard to Do? Wrestling With the Break-Up Monster.

Breaking up is hard to do. Only sociopaths and terminal masochists fail to find some kind of emotional turmoil when they want out. Detaching from another person is one of those life downsides we can only suffer through.

Sometimes it's a relief. When the inner voice whispers that the best option is termination, the pain of the act is tempered with guilty triumph. Afterwards, that is. Once the words are out there, the air is cleaner. One regains peripheral vision. Still and all, pinches of regret and dashes of sadness will adhere. We're meant to be with people, after all, and de-gluing feels like a step back.

Part of the reason break-ups are uncomfortable is that most of us aren't good at it. Facing someone with a parting can generate a vortex of emotion for which we're ill practiced and poorly prepared. Airline pilots spend time in simulators dealing with the kinds of horrid failures and tricky scenarios that are hardly ever seen in real life. But if the worst does occur, they have the confidence to deal.

Leaving a relationship isn't like that. We never know how the other person will react. We might even not know how we'll react. It takes time to build trust and confidence with another person; tearing all that hard work down can be utterly dispiriting. And yet it must be done. To avoid personal Titanic sinkings, we have to protect ourselves from bad relationships, slow down the ship, and head to warmer waters. Sometimes drifting for a while is the right course. Better that than having Hollywood remake your life as a tragedy.

So how can we get better at break-ups? One way might be to do it more often. I'm more and more amazed at how people cling to relationships that any outside observer can see don't work. We - humans - seem to think that the other person will magically stop the damaging/annoying/frustrating whatever that leads us to dissatisfaction. We hang in there on a hope and a whisper...a strategy that never works.

Western legal justice begins with the premise that a person is innocent until proven guilty. When we're talking about criminality and jail time I guess that makes sense. But should the same premise pertain when the worst that can happen is that we are without a regular Friday night date?




Bottoms Up, Heartbreakers.