Why breaking up with someone was harder than all the times I’ve been dumped

“It can feel as if we’re abandoning our partner when we leave a relationship, but you need to remember that the other person has the necessary connections and services outside of you to support their own healing.”

You could say I’ve become a bit of an expert when it comes to being broken up with. Okay, maybe not an expert, but I’ve definitely experienced my fair share of wine-soaked cries over a tub of ice cream.

You would think after being on the receiving end of my fair share of breakups that when the time came for the tables to turn I’d be thrilled to finally be the one in control of the narrative. Very quickly I realised how naive I was.

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A few years ago I was seeing a guy. It was a situation I went into adamant it was just going to be casual sex. Soon enough, I found myself lingering around his house multiple times a week, and then before I knew it I was knee-deep in feelings anxiously wondering if he felt the same way. As it turns out, he did (well, sort of).

After we’d declared our unconditional love for each other, I opened a text message from him one day saying that the pressures of being labelled ‘boyfriend‘ and ‘girlfriend’ were too much and that he’d like to hit ctrl-z on the “I love you”. Here’s the kicker – he still wanted to continue seeing me.

At this moment I knew I had two choices. I could a) continue seeing him in the hopes he would develop the same feelings for me that I had for him, or b) realise I deserve better and say we need to call it quits. I put myself first for the first time in my love life and chose the latter.

Unbeknownst to me was the significant lack of closure and heightened emotional distress that would still occur despite being the one in control of the decision-making. To understand what I was going through I sat down with relationship therapist Scout Smith-O’Leary to unpack my thoughts during this process.

Putting yourself and your needs first feels strange

It’s sad but it’s true. We enter relationships based on the idea that we must put someone else’s needs above our own. So much so, that when the time comes to put ourselves first it can feel extremely foreign and somewhat selfish. Scout tells me this stems from our two primary emotional needs of attachment and authenticity, and that when those two begin to conflict, you can find yourself struggling to process the guilt that’s attached to prioritising one over the other.

“We’re conditioned through parenting and role models to be authentic and trust our gut, but also to make sure we don’t hurt another person’s feelings. When there’s contradictory information, as you would find in a breakup, we begin questioning what is right and wrong and struggle with the guilt and shame that is associated with our decisions,” says Scout.

It’s important to realise that the decision to put your own needs first is not a selfish one, but rather an act of drawing boundaries to protect your own wellbeing. Much like we would care for the other person, we need to get in the habit of doing the same for ourselves. “It can feel as if we’re abandoning our partner when we leave a relationship, but you need to remember that the other person has the necessary connections and services outside of you to support their own healing,” says Scout.

Recognising that they are able to heal outside of you can remove the selfish emotions associated with putting yourself first. It’s a muscle that doesn’t get a workout very often, but the more you put it into practice, the easier each time will feel.

The inner turmoil of ‘Did I make the right decision?’

What they don’t tell you about breaking up with someone is that you’re about to enter the mind-consuming arena of ‘Shit, did I make the right decision?’. What amplifies those feelings is that this was a decision made completely on your own terms. For once you’re not on the receiving end having to accept a situation that was out of your control – this was all you. Having that responsibility can feel incredibly overwhelming, and I often found myself spiralling in the days after the breakup when it came to processing the back and forth of should I have, or should I not have?

Scout’s best advice for processing these thoughts can actually be put into action before you even enter the relationship. “It’s really important to build a framework for yourself and start cultivating self-awareness by understanding your emotional reality. Identify your core beliefs, values and emotional patterns of behaviour before you even enter your next relationship,” she says.

That self-awareness will be the foundation for you to lean on whenever you are in doubt post-breakup. She advises that if you make decisions around this framework, you can always go back to it for clarity and reassurance that your decision was made based on your own values. It’s what will give you peace that you have made an informed choice at the time, to the best of your ability, and will ultimately make the head noise a little bit quieter.

Accepting you are alone again is a hard pill to swallow

For someone like myself who loves companionship, making an active decision that results in you being alone again isn’t a great feeling. It’s the fear of being single for the rest of your life, that there are only so many fish in the sea and the absolute dread of having to redownload dating apps only to answer questions about whether you prefer tomato sauce in the fridge or the cupboard.

“I cannot understate the existential dread of not being in connection. It’s also called the fear of being alone and it’s so big we often don’t give it enough credit to how it holds people,” says Scout. “Start with full acknowledgement that the fear is real, and then I would encourage you to explore it with curiosity, whether that be through journaling, voice memos [or] speaking to a therapist. Get brutally honest about your experience of the fear, otherwise, you will never move forward.”

Scout advises that once you have identified the root of your fear of being ‘single’, flip it on its head and look at all the opportunities that have opened up for you to build a full and rich life for yourself. Is there a trip you’ve been meaning to take? A hobby you’ve had your eye on starting for a while? Do it! By knowing what you want to cultivate in yourself you become content as an individual, and from there you begin to create the potential for other people to be naturally drawn to you.

Learning to be alone with yourself is so much more fulfilling than trying to stick it out in a relationship that doesn’t serve you. Breaking up with someone feels awful, and it may feel like you’ve just given yourself a free ticket into lonely town with a side detour through guilt and shame. But I can guarantee that learning to live with the feelings of being by yourself is so much more worth it than wasting your time, energy and mental health on another person who wouldn’t do the same for you.

For more advice on breaking up with someone, try this.