Who Actually Ends a Relationship?

There is a particular kind of pain that some of us have to endure at the end of a relationship stemming from the confusing way in which we both had to call time on the union – and resolutely didn’t want to. Not only are we bereft of the relationship we cherished, we have to carry the guilt of being the ones who ‘ended it’ while having no ostensible wish to have done so. We wind up worrying we did the ‘wrong thing’ and caused someone else avoidable suffering while not perceiving the underlying truth: ‘we’ didn’t end anything.

It is important to be able to soften our pain by untangling the logic and stating a fundamental principle. The one who ends a relationship is not necessarily the one who calls for a serious chat and says it’s over. This is merely the one who declares a relationship finished – a very different thing. The one who actually ends the relationship is the one who ceases to love. And unfortunately, the one who ceases to love often does so in very unobtrusive and hard-to-pin-down ways which they don’t discuss and which the other party has to constantly doubt whether they are imagining or not. For example, by being there and yet not quite being there. By being cold but denying they are so. By being repeatedly grouchy but dissimulating their lack of engagement by counter charges of unreasonableness or neediness. By privileging their friends and then saying that the partner is possessive.

The result is that one partner can be sternly calling for an end while deep down longing for the other to simply be more responsive and engaged; the ending is just the last move to be free of pain once every other attempt to get love back on the road appears to have failed. It definitely isn’t the first or the hundredth choice. And the other party may ostensibly be calling for a relationship to continue – while secretly (and we may need to say unconsciously) manoeuvring for the partner to have no other recourse but to end it.

The level of unconsciousness in all this can be debated. If we are being squeamish and generous, we could say that the rejecting partner doesn’t know anything about their desire to be free of the relationship at all. But we might not be giving human nature its full due if we didn’t imagine that at times, they know only too well. It’s just so very much easier to let another person do the painful work for one.

Whatever is at play, the avoidant partner evidently cannot cleanly admit to their level of ambivalence. When asked ‘do you want this to continue?’ their answer is always ‘yes’. But when the relationship is given a chance to flourish, they do nothing to help it do so. They may on a Monday be saying the relationship should have another chance and by Wednesday be once more subtly pulling away by not answering calls or replying in a gruff and distracted way.

This is why the break up may need to happen a few times. Just so that the one who ends it can get a full sense that it isn’t they who are actually ending it each time. This unfortunate being can end up regretting ‘what they did’ while forgetting a stranger truth: they didn’t do anything. They may go back and try to correct ‘their decision’ (and the ex may even let them) before the complicated reality sets in: it wasn’t their decision in the first place and, as one or two or three more goes at love will show them, they aren’t going to be able to change the eventual outcome whatever they try.

So for some of us, there seems no alternative but to have to end relationships with an extra burden of grief. We will be publicly identified as the one who broke up. We will have to carry the blame and the shame. Others may judge us. And the one who has supposedly been left will in some quarters be able to get a lot of sympathy for their ‘abandonment.’

And yet the story isn’t true. Deep down, we would have loved for the relationship to continue. We might have have done a lot to help it do so. But we couldn’t accept a dead or half-hearted connection – without genuine love, or effort or intimacy. We ended it because what was on offer didn’t feel to us like a relationship any more – even if it is always going to lie in the partner’s prerogative to claim otherwise.

We may just have to accept a complicated truth: we had to call time on the relationship – but we didn’t end it. We were holding the axe when it fell, but we never picked it up. We walked away not because we were not in love, but because we were.