Why Breaking Up Is Awesome

Scenario one: You’ve just been on a disappointing third-date. Truth is you’ve been ‘um-ing’ and ‘ah-ing’ about this guy for quite a while. On paper he seemed awesome, but while sitting accross the table, you knew that he was not going to give you the kind of relationship you’re  looking for.

The final nail in the coffin was when you were joking and flirting with him after dinner, but somehow he completely misinterpreted your playfulness and called you ‘a bit crazy’. The thing is he’s a really nice guy and still interested in seeing you, which is really why you’ve stuck it in so long – you don’t want to hurt his feelings.

Scenario two: You’ve  been dating this woman for three years now. Things are great when they are good, but the dark side of this love story is a ticking time bomb. Often it feels like you’re having to walk on eggshells. You’ve loved her as best you could but nothing is ever good enough by her standards. All and all this relationship is starting to take a toll on your own self-worth. And when the subject of children inevitably comes up you get uneasy – romantic dreams aside, you do NOT feel safe to bring a child into this world (with this person).

Ultimately you have two options lest you want to continue living in this limbo. 1) you both seek proessional help in working on the relationship together or 2) you break up and move on to a more satisfying relationship.

The thing is, ‘breaking up’ is entirely necessary to do, if you want to develop wisdom and maturity in relationships.

Often we seem to forget just how normal and necessary breaking up is – particularly for younger people. In fact, I would argue that the primary life task between one’s late teens and late 20s is working out how to be in a relationship … by having multiple relationships.

This means working out all sorts of things, for example, what you’ll put up with from partners and how you will bring yourself to a relationship. Marry this to the fact that the lowest divorce rate occurs with people who marry in their late 20s and early 30s, it means that all – every single one – of our earlier relationships must come to an end!

In other words, if dating is done right, we should be having more break-ups than matches.

I remember when I was explaining this to my 19-year-old daughter (yep the very same co-author of mine and now dating coach) she asked, ‘Okay, but what if I meet the love of my life in my early 20s?’

I told her, ‘If they are the love of your life then when you go your separate ways, you will reconnect down the track. To give the relationship its best chance you want to come to it with the benefit of experience found in other relationships.’

Something worth remembering when considering a break up (whether you are breaking hearts or cradling your own broken heart) is that a failed relationship simply says you’re not a match for each other. It says NOTHING ABOUT HOW GOOD A PERSON YOU ARE!

If you take one thing away from this article this is it. Pretty much every person I see struggle with a relationship break up is doing so because they take it too personally. They see it as a statement of how bad a person they are – ‘I’m not good enough.’

Research shows that ‘I’m not good enough’ is the most common human negative belief by far – and nothing turns it up to full volume more than a breakup, or indeed, any kind of social rejection. You can tell when this is at play as we tend to beat ourselves up with variations on thoughts like, ‘What is wrong with me?’ or ‘Why am I such a loser?’ or ‘Why aren’t I good enough for him/her?’ This thinking does nothing but hurt us, undermine us even further!

Which brings me to my final point. We will be haunted by painful issues until we learn what they have to teach us … no, the learning is something much more sophisticated than ‘don’t do that again.’ It could be anything from just learning how to manage emotional pain, knowing it will pass, to learning specifics like, ‘How could I have treated my partner better?’

One of my key life realisations was: Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. Wisdom and maturity are built on experience. So, to gain wisdom and maturity, we need to not get what we want!

The reality is that we learn very little when things go well for us. Our most important learnings, the kind that builds wisdom, occurs amidst the pain of things not going our way. While they don’t feel like it, these times of pain are when our better soul is being forged.

There are myriad lessons to be learned around a breakup – make the most of the opportunity!

Related Articles: The Single Biggest Mistake People MakeAfter Breaking Up by Jiveny Blair-West