Let us imagine that we know what we want – to
leave a relationship – but that we are suffering
from a problem which inhibits us from acting
on our wishes: we can’t bear to cause another
person pain, especially another person towards
whom we feel a sense of loyalty, who has been
kind to us, who looks up to us for their safety
and their future, who has expectations of
us and with whom we might have been planning
a trip to another continent in a few months.
Perhaps we have come near to telling them
on a dozen occasions, but always pulled back
at the last moment. We tell ourselves that
we’ll get around to it ‘after the holidays’,
‘once their birthday party is over’, ‘next
year’, ‘in the morning’, and yet the
deadlines roll by and we are still here.
Our discomfort has to do with the thought
of unleashing an appalling upset: they will
dissolve into tears, there will be sobbing,
which may last a very long time, there will
be wailing, uncontrollable cries and mountains
of wet tissues – all because of a truth
that currently lurks in the recesses of our
cranium. We will have been responsible for
dragging a formerly competent and independent
person into chaos; it’s more than we can
bear. It sounds peculiar, but it might be
better for us to spend the next few decades
unfulfilled than experience even five minutes
of unbounded upset. In another part of our
minds, there may also be a terror. More than
we realise day to day, we’re scared of our
partner. By telling them it’s over, we risk
a discharge of titanic anger. They may scream
at us, accuse us of leading them on, of being
a charlatan and a disgrace. There might be
violence and danger.
There is a certain symmetry to our fears.
We may tell them and by so doing, kill them.
Or we may tell them and they will turn around
and kill us; kill or be killed. No wonder
we put off the news. The reasonable adult
part of our minds knows that these fears of
killing and dying can’t be true – but
this may weigh very little in how we unconsciously
feel. Wielding sensible arguments can at points
be as effective as telling a person with vertigo
that the balcony won’t collapse or a person
with depression that there are perfectly good
grounds to be cheerful. A lot of the mind
is not amenable to hard-headed logic. In an
ancestral part of us, we simply operate with
a sense that going against the wishes of a
significant person will mean either endangering
their lives or our own.
To explain the origins of such terrors, childhood
is the place to turn, as it always is when
trying to account for disproportionate and
limitless fears. Perhaps we are the offspring
of a fragile parent whom we loved profoundly
and whom it would have broken our hearts to
disappoint. They might have been struggling
with their mental or physical health, they
might have been maltreated by another adult.
Maybe they were relying on us to hold them
back from despair or justify their whole lives.
We may have derived an early impression that
we had to conform to their idea of us if we
weren’t to cause them grave damage, that
our wishes and needs could easily have driven
them to the edge, that by being more ourselves,
we might have broken their spirit. We simply
loved them too much, and at the same time,
felt them to be too weak, to ask them to take
on our reality. We can be three years old
and, without knowing any of this consciously,
have taken such messages on board. And as
a result, we might then have learnt to play
very quietly, to reign in our boisterousness
or mischievousness, our aggression or our
intelligence, to be extremely cheerful and
helpful around the house, to be ‘no trouble
at all’ towards a beloved adult who already
seemed to have far too much on their plate.
Alternatively, we might have spent our most
vulnerable years around a person who responded
to any frustration caused by another person
with extreme anger. It can be hard to appreciate
just how terrifying an enraged adult can seem
to a sensitive two year old. Another adult
might know that this red-faced figure of course
wasn’t going to murder anyone, they’re
just letting rip for a while and will pick
up the pieces of a smashed vase soon enough,
but that’s not at all how it can seem through
a child’s eyes. How are they to know that
this person many times their size wouldn’t
just go one step further and, at the end of
their ranting, pick up a hammer and smash
their skull in? How can they be certain that
the momentarily genuinely out of control parent
who just broke the door wouldn’t for that
matter throw them out of the window too. Child
murder may be entirely alien to the furious
adult, but that’s not how it can strike
a sensitive offspring. One doesn’t have
to actually murder anyone to come across – to
an unformed mind – as someone who seriously
might. No wonder we might be a bit scared
of sharing some awkward news.
Our minds are freighted with fears that stem
from things that happened under precise circumstances
long ago but that continue to have a potent,
subterranean, scarcely recognised and immense
force in our lives today. By taking stock
of the past, the task is to acknowledge that
these fears are very real but only in a very
limited place: our own minds. They don’t
belong to adult reality. The catastrophe we
fear will happen has already happened: we
have already experienced someone who seemed
to risk killing themselves if the news grew
too bad – and someone who looked like they
were perhaps going to kill whomever displeased
them. But these issues are firmly located
in another era. We need to take on board an
always unlikely-sounding thought, we are now
adults, which means, there is a robustness
to ourselves and to our dealings with others.
Another adult is highly unlikely to collapse
on us and if they do, there are plenty of
measures we can take. We will know how to
help them cope with their grief, directly
and indirectly. It may seem as if it will
never end, but that is a child’s reasoning,
not an adult’s. In reality, it will be very
bad for a few hours, or days or weeks, but
then eventually, as happens, they will get
over it. They will recover their good humour,
they will wake up one morning and see the
world hasn’t ended and that they know how
to go on. Similarly, they won’t actually
try to pick up the nearest axe and chop us
into small pieces. They may be furious, they
may shout, there may be some ugly words – but
again, we are now tall and independent, we
can get away, in extremis, we have the number
of the police and a lawyer, we can let the
fury vent, and like a well-built bridge in
a hurricane, be utterly confident that we
can withstand anything that will come our
way.
To further lend us courage, we should remember
a distinction between being kind and seeming
kind. It can look as if the kind thing to
do is never to anger or distress someone – and
therefore, never to give a person we have
loved unwelcome news. But that is to overlook
the more insidious ways in which we can ruin
someone’s life. To stay with a person because
we wish to avoid a few hours of unpleasantness
is no favour to them – if we then go on
to be bitter, mean, snide, unfaithful and
depressed around them for the next few decades.
We’re not helping someone by sparing them
a bad break up scene, if we then deliver a
life-long foot-dragging scene.
A surprising amount of the misery of the world
comes from people being overly keen to appear
kind, or rather, too cowardly to cause others
short term pain. The truly courageous way
to leave is to allow ourselves to be hated
for a while by someone who still loves us.
We shouldn’t imagine that they will never
find anyone else like us: they may believe
it now and might even sweetly tell us so.
But they won’t believe it when they finally
understand who we are. Real kindness means
getting out – even though the holiday has
been booked, the apartment paid for and the
wedding arranged. There’s nothing wrong
with and nothing dangerous about deciding
someone isn’t for us. There is something
very wrong with ruining large chunks of someone
else’s life while we squeamishly or fearfully
hesitate 
to get out of the way.
deciding whether to stay in or leave a relationship is one of the trickiest and most consequential decisions we can face.  Our stay or leave card game can help us towards an answer.  Click now to learn more.
