scrambled, and your world turned upside down.
No matter how many people have already ended a relationship—and millions have—no matter whether you've done it before yourself, the end of a romantic relationship is still one of the absolutely most devastating emotional experiences you will ever go through. It's like a death, except that with a death you at least know for sure that the story is over: there's no going back. With the end of a relationship, however, there are thousands of agonizing opportunities for second-guessing, wondering whether you've done the right thing, asking yourself if you shouldn't try harder, if there isn't some way to rewrite the story so it can have a happy ending.
In the last several decades, divorce, the legal, court-sanctioned breakup of a marriage, has really come out of the closet. Fully fifty percent of first-time marriages end in divorce, and many statistics speculate that the percentage is even higher for second-time marital unions. In spite of the fact that divorce is now a familiar thread in the fabric of our society, there's still a tremendous amount of shame and confusion when a marriage comes apart. And the multitude of “invisible breakups”—pulling the plug on a living-together relationship or a romance that's barely out of the starting gate—can be equally, if not even more, traumatic. That's because when you're still just exploring the possibilities of a relationship, or if you've been in it for a while and are wondering whether or not to take it to the next level—to start living together, for example, or to turn your living-together relationship into a marriage—the heartbreak can be almost doubled. Not only are you losing the relationship you have, you're also losing the relationship that now you never will have—the one you thought might evolve out of this one.
It's sad but true that overall we're a lot more scared of relationships than we used to be. What seemed in the past like a sure till-death-do-us-part scenario is now beset by circumstances we never used to have to consider: a fragile new economic landscape, a jungle of employment uncertainty, cyber distractions of every ilk, and a just plain terrible shortage of time.
In this social landscape, it's harder than ever to pursue romantic relationships and to nurture them. It's harder to keep a relationship together, and even more difficult—in the midst of all the things we're juggling—to confer an intention of permanence on a budding relationship. We used to feel optimistic about solidifying our relationships, and pretty darn sure about taking the step of marriage. So we were therefore all the more shocked when our marriages crumbled to an end. But now, as if all that weren't enough, added to the new fragility of marriage is the current explosion of alternative relationship forms, making us vulnerable to a whole new array of unexpected endings.
Whether you slipped into a romantic engagement that isn't quite working any longer and are wondering whether it's time to end it, or you were happily grounded in a marriage you were sure would last a lifetime, this book is for you. It's a hand to hold through every agonizing step of the process of letting go. It will tell you how to discover whether or not your relationship has run its course, and what you're likely to encounter as you go through each of the stages of parting. Even more important, it will help you understand why you got into this particular relationship in the first place, as well as what, in the larger frame of your life, was actually accomplished through your being in it. Finally, it will give you practical advice about how to regather yourself for the upcoming chapters of your life—even though right now it may be almost impossible for you to imagine that there will be some.
Time does a lot to heal our broken hearts, but really understanding what transpired in each of our relationships is what allows us to finally let go and move on.
No one I've ever worked with who has ended a relationship has come back to me later saying they wished they could resurrect the relationship they struggled so hard to let go of. That's because life keeps taking us to new places. It wants us to continue to grow and so it keeps sending us new people and experiences to enlarge our experience of life and of ourselves. So take heart. Although there may be plenty of tears in the process, you're not headed down a dead-end street. In fact, when you've taken yourself through the process of parting, you may just find yourself standing at the doorway to a whole new life. It is my deepest hope that you will.
1
A Hand to Hold
ENDING A RELATIONSHIP is so painful and makes us feel so awful—bad, hopeless, inadequate, desperate, lost, lonely, and worthless—that most of us are afraid we won't live through it. We feel bad about what our families will think, we're afraid of what the neighbors will think, we feel terrible for our children, we worry about leaving our houses, and we're anxious about our financial futures. But worst of all, we feel badly about ourselves. Not only are we losing context, history, and the familiar choreographies of our lives, but we are also losing a sense of who we really are and we get shaken to the core about our own self-worth.
At precisely the moment when we most need some perspective, some sense that there are reasons besides our own failures to account for what is happening, we are most inclined to take the blame entirely upon ourselves. It is exactly because it is such a natural inclination to define the ending of a relationship as a personal failure—and, consequently, to go through what is often a devastating crisis in self-esteem—that it is terribly important to see that there are always some other factors operating when a relationship ends.
Rather than viewing the end of a relationship as a statement of personal failure, I believe there are always good, legitimate, and understandable reasons why relationships end. These reasons have to do with the chemistry and process of relationships themselves.
In our individual lives, relationships are one of the most important vehicles by which we create our identities and through which we define ourselves. Since this is the case, it may be that we will create a number of relationships to achieve that self-definition, and, consequently, we may end one or several relationships in a single lifetime.
A relationship is a process and not a destination. It is not necessarily the final emotional resting place of the persons who enter into it, but a vital and growing entity that has a life—and a lifetime—of 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