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    Friday, January 26, 2018

    WHY IT’S SO HARD TO BREAK UP WITH SOMEONE (EVEN WHEN YOU NEED TO)




    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 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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