The Broken-Hearted and the Breaker-Upper
Breakups are messy, and perhaps at their very core, far from graceful. It is the declaration that your freely given "yes" to walking with another — choosing to have them in your life as your preferential companion — has turned into a "no." It seems that a lot of good comes from risking a "yes," from allowing something to be born, to be fulfilled, for an adventure to take root. So how can a breakup, a "no," that sudden ripping apart of a promise, be done with grace? Relationships are perplexingly unique. Perhaps your relationship was rooted in few promises, and your emptiness at the loss is about the same as before. Perhaps you were broken up with and, because when feelings are involved, you are now heartbroken and must wait out the unavoidable pain. Perhaps the breakup was mutual (on some level I'd say most probably are, at least to an extent), or perhaps you were the one to take that step and broke up with them. I find this position interesting: being the breaker upper — the one who decided, for whatever reason(s), it wasn't meant to be, or was not leading to fulfillment and must come to an end, and actually committed that perfect crime. Here are just some perspectives/bits of advice on this for the breaker uppers that I'd like to throw out there: