Eight Rules for Ending Relationships

We live – many of us – in highly policed societies where sanctions exist for the most minor infractions. We may have to pay close to a month’s salary for dropping a napkin in a park or driving at 22mph down a clear dual carriageway at 3am.

But there is one area in our regulated world where few laws exist. In relationships, unless there is violence or egregious abuse, there are no ‘rules’ to speak of. We can with impunity spend eight years with someone and then, just as all their other options have closed, politely tell them that we’ve fallen in love elsewhere and walk out by nightfall – and there is nothing the forlorn party can do (other than weep and lose their minds).

But even if no legal sanctions exist, this does not mean that notions of right and wrong cease to apply. There are a host of rules around ending relationships that all decent people understand – and here, framed for our consciences, are eight of the most important:

An Ethical Code for Ending Love

1. Hurt them unbearably if you need to; don’t in addition steal any more of their time than necessary. It’s particularly unkind to pretend not to have noticed that a partner might have only a limited window in which to marry, start a family or reconfigure a career. The first instant that you realise it’s not working is the instant to tell them it’s not working, not after the return from the holidays or towards the end of next year or, maybe, the year after that. Don’t – on top of it all – rob them of a future.

2. Adore them immeasurably – or get out. If you’re not fully proud of them, allow someone else to be. If you really suspect you could do ‘better’, go out and do so. Know that your Plan B could – right now – be someone else’s Plan A. Love deeply or not at all.

3. Perhaps one can’t stop developing unfaithful thoughts; there’s very little obligation to act on them. Don’t add the toll of betrayal to the miseries of abandonment.

4. Don’t force them to end the relationship when it’s you who want to get out. Don’t express your discomfort through ambivalence and a luke warm manner until they get so upset, they eventually have to exit for their own survival. Say you’re fed up when you are, don’t evasively hint as much, then tell them you love them when they ask. Don’t make them doubt their sanity by framing them as the one who wants to exit when they’re deeply in love. Don’t give them the guilt to carry for what you want, but are too cowardly, to do.

5. It hurts so much more when we don’t quite know why a partner is leaving; we keep thinking it might be a mistake – and that they will soon come to their senses. So give the ex a coherent explanation for why it simply can’t, and never will, work, one that will feel robust in the middle of the night – and spare them the pains of boundless rumination. If you’re old enough to be in a relationship, you are old enough to say in plain terms why you want to exit.

6. Stop trying too hard to be ‘nice’. Allow them – at least for a while – to dislike you. They need to develop the necessary resentment to save themselves. Don’t – on top of it all – insist on rescuing your self-image.

7. Get out of their way. They have proper friends, they don’t need an ambiguous figure to make them feel repeatedly unsure where they stand. Every ongoing sweet gesture is at risk of being misinterpreted as a sign of hope. Allow yourself – where necessary – to be forgotten. 

8. Don’t pretend that there are no rules. They exist no less clearly than the ones that are on the statute books – and the tribunal of ordinary decency knows it. Retain your humanity through one of the most painful moments that you will ever put anyone through. And pray that someone else will do the same for you if – and probably when – your turn comes around.