Our brains are prone to a host of psychological
effects and fallacies that convince us that we shouldn’t finally pull the trigger and end that toxic relationship, even though it’s
making us miserable.
Maybe
you’ve had a friend who knows he needed to dump their toxic girlfriend.
Maybe you got tired of slamming your head into the brick wall of their
obstinacy as you watched their drama and misery unfold in real time on
Facebook, stunned that
they didn’t realize how miserable they are.
Maybe you were the one who needed to break up
with your partner. God knows I was. I stayed in an emotionally
abusive relationship – knowing damn good and well that I needed
to break up with my girlfriend – for years longer than I should have.
The
good news is that once you recognize these stalling tactics for what they are,
you can learn to overcome them. Here are some of the ways you make it so much
harder to break up with someone… even when you know you need to.
Breaking Up With Them
Makes You A “Bad” Person
Break
ups hurt, no matter which side of the equation you’re on. On the one hand, it
totally sucks to get dumped… but it also sucks
to be the dumper.
On the whole, people hate having to break up with someone;
we’re naturally loathe to hurt somebody we care (or cared) for, even when it’s
necessary. Sure, every once in a while you’ll run into a thundering assbeast
who casts people aside like used Kleenex, but most of us aren’t cartoon
villains who feast on tears of despair.
However necessary the break up may be, years of
experience and pop culture have taught us that the person doing the dumping is
the bad guy. They’re the ones who aren’t invested enough, who break promises,
who don’t care enough to make it work or aren’t strong enough to make it
through the rough patches. It’s tantamount to admitting that you’re simply not good enough and
that stings our egos enough that we’ll frequently put up with any amount
of bullshit, drama and abuse to prove it. But as the man said: that’s just
pride fucking with you. Pride doesn’t help in times like this, it only hurts.
The
thing is, just sticking around doesn’t mean you’re a better person. In
fact, it can often make things worse all
around – for them and for you. Some people try to avoid
the break up because they don’t want to hurt their partner. It’s a a lovely
idea – after all, who doesn’t want a painless breakup? But
then the hobnailed boot of reality swings in and stomps all over those idyll
daydreams; when the break up does come – and it always does – it
becomes pretty obvious that someone’s been sticking around despite desperately
wanting to leave. There’s nothing that can ensure a swift, decisive kick to
your soul’s nuts like finding out your snugglebunny has been dying inside for
the last two months, four months, year, what-have you.
Other
times, people try to avoid breaking up with their partners because they worry
about what it says about them. One of the most common examples of this are
people who realize they are no longer attracted to their partners. As
unromantic as it is to say this – and I’ll get in trouble with the Dating
Advice Giver’s Union for saying it – sometimes shit happens and we realize
we’re no longer into our partners as much as we once were. People and
relationships grow and change over time and that spark may vanish. Sometimes you can get it back. Other times those changes
mean that we’re no longer compatible, sexually or romantically. It may be
something as significant as a lifestyle change or it may be something shallow
as weight gain or age or other physical changes – but it’s still a valid issue. Staying
in a relationship in order to avoid admitting that you’re not attracted to
somebody doesn’t make you a better person, it just prolongs your misery and
increases your partner’s when
they realize that you’ve been waiting for the end of time to hurry up and
arrive.
Similarly,
trying to push past deal-breakers or changes in the relationship don’t make you
stronger, they make you masochistic. The fact that you were willing
to overlook an issue – they smoke, they drink, you have different values, etc.
– in the beginning doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to break up with them over
it later. You’re not locked in to a relationship because you over- or
underestimated how important an issue was to you, nor does it mean that you’ve
broken your word and now you’re banned from dating forever more. It just means
that you made a mistake. The fact that you promised to love someone until
you died isn’t the same as the Unbreakable Vow, no matter how much your ex
harps on it afterwards. Unless you straight-up deceived to them, realizing
that you couldn’t keep a promise you made isn’t the same as lying. All it means
is that you were wrong.
You’ve Put So Much Time In
Already
Another
shockingly common reason why people are averse to breaking up, even when they
know it’s what they need to do? Because they’ve been dating for so long now
that they can’t just give up now. A good friend of mine took over a year
to finally decide divorce her deadbeat husband because it would mean that those
ten years of marriage (not even counting how long they’d been dating
beforehand) would have been wasted. Other people are loath to initiate the
break up because they feel like it would be tantamount to giving up. It doesn’t
matter that they’re abjectly miserable; they’d rather suffer than deal with the
social approbrium of being a “quitter”.
can sound absurd… but you’ve felt it too, even if you didn’t realize it at the time.
This hesitation is the result of a psychological quirk known as the “sunk cost
fallacy”. People pay more attention to – and give more emotional
importance – to what they might lose rather than
what they might gain when they have to make a choice… even when what is lost is
something as ephemeral as time. That sense of
loss and an inability to recover something spurs our behavior far more than any
potential gains. If you’ve ever felt like ten pounds of ass in a five pound
sack but went to a movie, a concert, a trip anyway because you’ve already bought the tickets, then you’ve experienced the
sunk-cost fallacy; the sense of loss of the price of the ticket was too much to
bear. It’s the same thing that keeps you playing games that you can’t
stand but can’t bring yourself to quit… you’ve sunk all this time (and
occasionally money) that giving up just feels wrong.
That’s the same feeling that keeps you from
breaking up with somebody because it would mean you would have wasted all that
time you spent dating them. Breaking up with your partner you might be
happier… but it also means giving up the time and emotions you’ve already
invested in the relationship. That’s going to sting and there’s no getting
around it.
But
just as you wouldn’t throw money into a company that’s flaming out, you
shouldn’t throw more of your time and emotion into a dying relationship. Losing
your investment hurts and there’s no getting it back. But by getting out now you
can stop yourself from losing even more.
But Then You’ll Be Alone…
The
last reason for avoiding a necessary break up is, in many ways, the hardest to
overcome. For a lot of people, the prospect of being single is scarier than
being with the wrong person. It’s a self-limiting belief based out of a scarcity mentality – the idea that there
are only so many women in the world who could possibly be into you. Under this
self-imposed belief, every rejection and every break up brings you one step
closer to dying alone, unloved and forgotten.
Like many other self-limiting beliefs, this one is
hard to overcome; part of what makes it so insidious is that it’s
self-reinforcing. Your self-esteem is already taking a beating from the
relationship. You feel like a loser for not being able to bring yourself to
leave. This only serves to confirm your loser status that would prevent you
from ever finding anyone else. Nobody else could possibly love you, so you
should take what you can get. And yet you’re miserable, which makes you feel
like a loser for not being to leave…
This,
more than anything else, kept me in relationships I should have run
screaming from, back in the bad old days. I didn’t think I could do any
better, so I stuck around and took it. I was willing to make any number of
excuses as to why it wasn’t that bad, that this was just how
relationships were, that things would get better when X happened. But X would
come and go and things wouldn’t improve and I would be left feeling lower than
a snake’s ass in a drainage ditch.

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