The Best and Worst Ways to Be Left in Love

Being left by someone who once loved us – and whom we still adore – has to count among the most soul-destroying of all emotional eventualities. It is – if we can put it crudely – completely awful, and anyone to whom it has happened deserves our immediate and unbounded sympathy. However, this basic fact should never obscure an important nuance: that there are two quite different versions of horrible. There is very bad. And then there is very, very bad indeed.

Let’s look first at the merely very bad. In this version, someone who once loved us comes to us cleanly and promptly and says something like the following: ‘I respect and admire you so much. I am so grateful to you in a million ways. It’s just that something in me has changed. I need to start the next chapter of my life elsewhere. I can and will explain more in due course, but for now, I know this is devastating, and you have every right to feel betrayed by me. Please don’t think that this negates what came before. I simply need something different going forward.’

This – let’s make no bones about it – is very sad. But it’s eminently survivable. It will cost you weeks, maybe months, but it won’t take years, and you will make a full recovery.

Now let’s look at the catastrophe. This starts in complete silence, with our partner doing some of the following: no longer answering messages on time, no longer pulling their weight around the house, flirting with other people, refusing sex, being ill-tempered and short, being grumpy and elsewhere and staying out late with friends who don’t like or know us. But when we complain, the tables are turned. They accuse us of being ‘too intense’ or ‘controlling’ or ‘exacting’ or ‘engulfing’ or ‘not being interested in having fun anymore …’ They wait for us to get desperate and lose our emotional footing – and then they stand back and ask with innocence: ‘Why can’t you be more relaxed? Why can’t we have a bit more space in this relationship?’

Eventually we have to pull this person aside and say: ‘I can’t take it anymore. I think I have to leave; I’m not at peace here.’ And if we’re really unlucky, they’ll burst into tears and say ‘No, how awful – what little faith you have in me.’ We then have to watch them cry for a relationship they no longer wanted and feel like we are a bad person for ending a misery they did everything not to mitigate.

For a while, our irritation with them obscures from our minds the poignant truth of our hearts: that we adore them still, that we want so much to be with them. And yet the guilt of the ending rests entirely on us. We wind up feeling that we’ve been the mean-spirited and impatient instigators of a withdrawal of which we’re the pained victims.

Eventually, our partner will go off into the night – tearfully but, as we fail to note, without any actual protest – leaving us entirely haunted: what did we do wrong? Could we have tried harder? Were we impatient?

We’ll keep imagining – because they’ve done nothing to persuade us otherwise – that they still love us (as we cherish them); it’s only that the relationship has mysteriously become ‘impossible’, maybe because of something very wrong with us (we may self-diagnose a fear of intimacy or an anxious attachment style). We’ll beg them to return, and if we’re really unlucky, they’ll say yes – only to rehearse their surreptitious disengagement a second, a third, or even a fourth time. So committed are they to seeming ‘nice’, they turn into monsters – and drive us to the edge of insanity.

If healing is ever possible, it depends on our ability to trace the lies back to their camouflaged sources. Recovery depends on us eventually being able to think a simple-sounding truth: however tricky things might be, however many issues there are, no relationship ever collapses unless – and until – one person quietly wants it to. If that person isn’t us, then it must be the other person. If it’s not me, it’s them.

We can allow ourselves to think at last: This relationship I revered ended only and solely because I had a partner who very privately wanted to get out – but didn’t have the decency or mental equipment to admit as much.

The tragedy is that we can be two or three years down the line from a breakup at this point. The waste of time is shocking. The damage to our nerves and our sense of reality is enormous, and the knock-on effect on other attempts to fall in love is equally grave.

This, therefore, is a message to all exiting partners: never leave without properly admitting that this is what you are doing – and pay the full price for your intent. Stop loving if you need to; but in the name of mercy, do your partner the honour of telling them unambiguously what has changed in your heart. Stop trying to seem nice – and, finally, in the only real sense, be nice.