its own.
While we don't give it much thought, our most strongly internalized myth about love is that “love is forever.” Our popular music and literature continually assert this, and even aside from this encouragement, we tend to see relationships as permanent, to assume that once they have begun, they will go on, immutably, forever.
And yet, with increasing frequency, relationships do end. One out of every two marriages ends, and uncounted numbers of short- and long-term unions not legalized by marriage also end. These stunning statistics certainly prove that love is not forever, yet when our relationships end, we judge ourselves harshly, according to the values implied by the myth of forever.
The truth is that since we first embroidered this myth on our hearts, our relationships have gone through innumerable transformations, while our thinking about them has not. As a result, an incredible number of people are suffering through the trauma of ending their relationships with guilt, rage, self-flagellation, and a profound loss of self-esteem as the only emotional hallmarks of parting.
We all seem to be experts at falling in love. We even have a number of commonly agreed upon rituals for courting. But we don't know much about what goes on inside of a relationship, and we know even less about how to end one. Survivors of ended relationships haven't left us much of a trail as to how they made it through this painful rite of passage. We know that there are some survivors, that hardly anyone dies or ends up in an insane asylum because of having ended a relationship. Indeed, among the “survivors,” we know many examples of transformed men and women, people who are happier after their breakups and divorces. But we don't know how they made it through the terrible experience.
That's one of the reasons endings are so difficult. We don't know how to do them. We don't know how to get through the endings of relationships. We've all seen people around us going through their endings (or we've even done it once or twice ourselves), and what we see are people in pain, bouncing off the walls emotionally and having to go through radical upheavals in their lives and circumstances. In general, our observations teach us that the endings of relationships are frightening indeed, and this makes us very afraid of going through an ending of our own. Sometimes we are even afraid to acknowledge that the dissolution of the relationship might actually be an improvement because we are so afraid of going through whatever we'll have to go through in order to accomplish it.
One of our greatest fears about ending a relationship is that in the process of parting we will have to experience feelings that will overwhelm us and from which we will never be able to recover. We all suspect that the ending of our relationship is going to take us into some deep emotional waters. We are already feeling vaguely out of control as we contemplate the possibility of the ending, and we sense that the ending itself will take us in over our heads emotionally and leave us feeling totally out of control. This fear is so immense—and so pervasive—that even if a soothsayer could tell us unequivocally that in twenty-five years we would still be as unhappy in our present relationship as we are now, we would probably still be afraid of ending it. Many of us would rather do anything—including continuing to live in a miserable, lifeless, spirit-defeating relationship—than go through all the feelings of ending a relationship.
Another great fear is that, once having ended our present relationship, we will never love or be loved again. While this feeling is very frightening, it has been my experience that, for the most part, this is not the case; in fact, an overwhelming majority of my clients who ended relationships went on to establish new and much more satisfying unions. These happier relationships resulted when people were willing to learn the lessons their previous relationships had to teach.
I have helped hundreds of people through the process of ending their relationships: people who precipitated the ending, people who resented the ending, and couples who mutually agreed upon the ending. My experience is that whether you leave or were left, if you are willing to go through the process of ending in a directed and thoughtful way, without avoiding any part of the emotional process, you can go on to establish a new and more satisfying relationship.
The purpose of this book is to hold out a hand to anyone who is already going through the ending of a relationship and who, as a result, is feeling all the difficult, scary, and unfamiliar feelings that accompany a parting. (If you are not sure your relationship is ending or should end, begin by reading the Diagnostic Coda, which starts on page 153.) By showing you that relationships do have legitimate reasons for ending, by guiding you through the normal emotional stages that occur, and by providing you with a first-aid kit for getting through the ending, this book will enable you to live through the end of your relationship with your self and your self-esteem intact.
2
Why Is Breaking Up So Hard to Do?
NEXT TO THE DEATH of a loved one, the ending of a relationship is the single most emotionally painful experience that any of us ever goes through. In spite of divorce statistics, and although every one of us has been touched by someone's experience of divorce or separation, when we find ourselves contemplating the end of our own relationships, we are totally unprepared. The terrible thing that happens to others is, like terminal illness or death, a thing that is never supposed to happen to us. Because love is our security blanket, we want it to last forever and to be our everything. That's why breaking up is so hard to do.
Existential Fears
When I say that love is our security blanket, what I mean is that we use our intimate relationships more than any other experience in our lives to solve some of the most basic questions of our existence. “Why don't I live forever?” “What is the meaning of life?” “What should I do while I'm here?” We very often want to see our relationships as providing the answers to these questions. To the question “Why don't I live forever?” the answer becomes, “If you love me, it doesn't matter.” To the question, “What is the meaning of life?” we answer, “Love.” And to the question, “What shall I do while I'm here?” we often answer, “Love my husband, love my wife, enjoy one another till death do us part.”
Among the many things that we're continually trying to work out in our lives is the problem that none of us lives forever, that our human existence is finite. Because we are all afraid of death, of the ultimate extinction of our personalities, we do whatever we can to give ourselves stability. We try to provide ourselves with the illusion that some things can always be counted upon, that some things will always continue. We try to defend ourselves against the gaping hole of death by taking love into our lives, by staying close to the persons about whom and to whom we can say, “I know you'll always be with me. I know you won't leave me here alone.” Because the thought of death is so intimidating, whatever gives us the illusion of stability and permanence is extremely important to us, and it is to our relationships that we have assigned the primary task of providing us with this sense of permanence.
It is both natural and easy to expect this feeling of permanence from our relationships, because as children most of us experience ourselves as being constantly in relationship to our parents. From the very beginning of our conscious experience, we could feel that they were there, and, so far as we knew, they had always been there. They were there when we opened our eyes, when we first opened our mouths for nourishment, and when, gradually, we generated our first thoughts. Because of this continuous experience of them, our sense is that they are forever, that they always have been, and that they always will be. It is this sense of relationships as continuous and, in a sense, eternal that grants us the necessary stability in our early lives.
For most of us, there was also something immensely luxurious and peaceful about this early experience. Even though as adults we know that our childhood experience of safety was an illusion, we want to create a counterpart experience in adulthood by creating
