How to Leave Someone You Love
As a therapist in Detroit who specializes in supporting people through relationship and intimacy concerns, there are two distinct parts of leaving a long-term relationship that commonly cause distress.
First, there is the process of deciding to leave. I often hear themes of self-doubt, guilt, anger, and disappointment from individuals navigating this choice. Secondly, there are all of the feelings about the end of the relationship. Regardless of who decides to end things, both people can experience absolute devastation.
It’s a myth that the person who makes the choice to leave doesn’t care. It’s a myth that the person who ends the relationship doesn’t also experience grief, internal conflict, and pain over the choice.
How to Know When to Leave a Relationship
If you’ve ever contemplating ending a relationship with someone you deeply care for, you know that it can be pure agony. You might feel terrified of living with the regret of walking away too soon while simultaneously feeling completely burned out from the conflicts within the relationship. Your friends might be hinting that they’re tired of hearing about the same fights and the same feelings over and over again. Family members might be expressing concern for your sense of well being.
This is a great time to explore what fantasies and dreams you’re holding onto and make choices from there. For example, have you developed a fantasy that it’s important to stay until your partner sees things your way enough to prevent them from speaking poorly of you to your mutual friends? Are you hoping that something will shift and your physical chemistry will improve?
There is nothing good or bad about any of these beliefs. It’s important to understand them to be able to assess if they’re realistic. We can gain great insight into which choices are best for ourselves the more we understand how our internal world is organized.
It’s normal to want one definitive sign that it’s time to leave or that it’s okay to leave. Sometimes this looks like sharing specific details about the relationship to friends hoping they’ll encourage you to leave. However, the question of how to know when to leave a long term relationship is rarely answered in one definitive moment.
Instead of looking for a sign or for permission, it might be helpful to reflect on what the relationship means to you, what’s motivating you to stay, and what meaning you’re assigning to yourself based on whether you stay or go
Is there a story you’re believing about what kind of person you would be if you left? If you stayed?
How do you leave someone you love?
You can expect that no matter how you end, you will have moments of missing the person. You can expect that you will have moments of anger or disappointment that things didn’t work out. You can also expect that you will perceive things differently.
However — you do not have to stay in the relationship until every word has been said. You do not have to stay in the relationship until the other person is absolved of these difficult feelings.
There’s a lot we can borrow from the world of therapy and therapeutic endings. When it comes time for a therapy relationship to end (client and therapist), there is ideally time to process that ending as a way of honoring the relationship and the time spent together. Therapeutic relationships are real relationships. They are professional, boundaried, and service-oriented, but they are still human and authentic.
In the last few months of a long treatment or last few sessions of a shorter treatment, there is time and space to talk about the conflicting feelings that come with the end of such a significant and special relationship.
It probably isn’t realistic to expect two people who are romantically involved to be able to end their relationship as smoothly as the end of a therapeutic relationship might be. But that doesn’t mean we can’t borrow the core concept that endings deserve dignity and that just because you have complicated feelings about an ending doesn’t mean that you are making the wrong choice.
Emotionally Processing the End of a Relationship
It’s common to feel like you can’t move forward until your ex understands your point of view. It’s common to continue to worry about what mutual friends think of the ending and who was in the “right.”
What would it be like for you to listen to your partner’s experience of the ending without working to convince them to see it differently? What would it be like to let go of the desire to get them to see things from your point of view? This is a way of redefining what closure means.
Sometimes, “closure” can be a coded way of saying “I finally got them to understand my perspective, so now I can walk away.” Instead, can you allow them to maintain their perspective, honor what the relationship was, and still move forward?
I completely recognize that this is much simpler said than done. This is a wonderful time to seek out a therapist to help you process everything that was left unresolved and all that it stirred up for you psychologically and emotionally. Everything you can’t process everything with your partner or ex-partner can be processed in therapy. You can check out Therapy Den or Inclusive Therapists to find someone licensed in your area. If you’re in Pennsylvania or Michigan, click here for more information on how to work with me.
You deserve support, safety, and care as you leave your relationship.
Safety Planning
If you do not have equal power in your relationship, fear for your safety, or worry about the potential for erratic behavior when you break up, it is important that you do not skip safety planning. Talk to a therapist, attorney, trusted friend, or family members about your plan and include them in which pieces they can help with. A safety plan can be as simple as having someone go with you to collect your belongings or as complex as needing to think through how to untangle shared finances and living situations.
Please do not hesitate to call 800-799-7233, text “start” to 88788, or visit thehotline.org for more resources and live support on how to safely leave an abusive relationship.