When to Get Out of a Relationship

We are often reminded that – in our self-indulgent times – people tend to get out of relationships far too soon. Unprepared for the difficulties that come with living closely around anyone, aware of endless apparent alternatives, they grow impatient at the first signs of trouble and casually throw away what might have been highly functional and fulfilling unions. Love is not an emotion, these skittish people need to be reminded, it’s a skill; and one that – like violin playing or lace-making – requires a great deal of dedication and forbearance.

And yet, when some of us look back at our lives, we may notice a rather different – though equally grave – problem: that we have been too good at patience and tolerance, that we have forgotten to notice our suffering and give it due weight, that we have extended inordinate understanding to behaviours that didn’t deserve our time and forgiveness – and that we have as a result wasted years, and possibly decades, of our very brief lives.

If we survey certain failed relationships with dispassion from the other side of heartbreak, the elements that undid us tend to have been there in nearly broad daylight from fairly early on. We tried to tell them (on that first weekend away) that their lack of overt affection left us frightened and uncertain of ourselves – and they grew offended, initially quietly, and then over the coming months with greater force, and so we learnt to keep quiet. Or when we mentioned that they needed to make more room for us in their lives alongside their friends, they kept going to parties without us anyway and accused us of being ‘possessive’ and ‘too needy’. Or when we asked if they might explore in therapy why they were so blocked in their career or over-concerned with their appearance, they grew sulky and said that we weren’t being ‘supportive’ and were too ‘strict’ in our requirements. 

None of these tensions sounded fatal at the time. We took them in our stride. We put them down to the wear and tear of being with another human. It’s only now, from the stillness and defeat of our single state, that we can more firmly draw the connections between the final scenes and the early impasses.

To prevent ourselves from wasting yet more of our time in fruitless couplings, we should learn to ask ourselves a simple sounding but imperative question about any person we are attempting to build a future with: ‘When I complain to them, do they listen?’

In other words, when we bring them an issue that matters very much to us – that they should more clearly signpost their moods, that they should be more reliable in answering our messages, that they need to make us feel more valued alongside their friends – do they stop what they are doing, respond without defensiveness, ideally paraphrase what we’ve tried to tell them so that we know they’ve understood and then give us genuine signs that they are absorbing and acting on what we have said. Do they reply: ‘I hear that this matters to you. What I think you’re saying is that you’re feeling sidelined by my work …’ Or: ‘You’re telling me that my bad moods get in the way of you being able to express your needs …’ And then, in time, does something actually alter? Are there signs of progress? Are we overcoming challenges rather than just repeating them?

There are two important caveats to this golden question (‘When I complain to them, do they listen?’): firstly, we mean complaining about things of real significance, not whether they leave the bathroom in a mess or forget items on the shopping list. We mean major impasses around communication, sexuality, intimacy or kindness.

Secondly, it matters immensely how we complain. It’s their responsibility to listen; it’s ours to speak with dignity, maturity and clarity. It doesn’t count if we do so late at night with raised voices, if we lace our complaints with insults, or if we belittle, nag or frighten. We also need to give them a great many chances. Not one or two or three. Let’s set the bar at an uncommonly high-sounding number: at least fifteen. Fifteen times we need to give them an opportunity to hear what we are telling them and change.

But if all this is in place and the frustrations nevertheless go on, we aren’t – by staying around – being mature or imaginative, therapeutic or fair-minded. We are delaying the inevitable. We will eventually be ruined anyway – ruined by our disloyalty to our insights. We will be undone by an over-developed sympathy for frustration. By doing nothing in the face of the golden question, we’re not changing what is going to happen; we’re merely speeding it up. We’re not in a functioning situation to begin with and may as well recognise the sombre truth right now. We aren’t helping our cause by hallucinating that we have found a solution when we haven’t. A relationship where one person doesn’t listen to another may survive for a while, even for a very long while; but it can never be safe, and it will never be a home. It’s bad enough that a relationship should be unviable. It becomes truly tragic when we continually deny that it might be so until it is too late to still try to make a life with someone who knows how to love like a grown-up.