How to Leave Someone You Love and Keep Living Anyways

Reflections on the unspoken parts of relationship loss.

Dec 09, 2023

Dear reader,

This is an article about surviving the ending of a partnership. What to do when the person we hold the most dear in our hearts is no longer “our person”—but a person. What to do when our attachment to our partner was the thick rope anchoring us to our lives, anchoring us to the earth. How to keep our hearts open when we trusted in an uncertainty (indeed all relationships are an uncertainty) and got seriously hurt in the process. How to wake up and get ready for work when our sleeping mind has spent the night rocking us with visits from our former partner; as our subconscious does the deep and prophetic work of making sense of this new reality. How to find our single-human-footing in a world where relationships have become a certain kind of religion; where the sense of oneness and wholeness once sought through God is now sought through romantic union.

I am in the ongoing process of learning how to live in this reality. Full disclosure—this isn’t really a “how to” article. What continues to support me is the shift from solving, towards naming, articulating, and giving voice to what feels both unspoken and true. In some way this is more of a “what is” article.

As is true with all of my writing, this is not a prescriptive piece of work, it’s explorative. These are my personal reflections. Take what is useful, leave the rest, or adapt in ways that feel aligned on your journey. If you are experiencing the ending of a relationship, my heart is with you.

I am writing from the lens of a specific kind of break up. That is, a break up from someone who you love, adore, respect and admire, but experience fundamental incompatibilities with. There’s a good chance we have tried to troubleshoot these incompatibilities in many different ways—after all, the survival of our relationship would have depended on making peace with them. These incompatibilities could be different visions around parenthood, around where to live, around lifestyle, around needs, around communication. I am writing about breakups catalyzed ultimately by the feeling that life is contracting, not expanding, because of the relationship.

These breakups carry a specific kind of pain that hating an ex or falling out of love protects us against. We are tasked with the difficult work of figuring out how to move forward while still actively experiencing the sacred invisible string that for many years connected our lives to theirs.

Faith, trust and hope in a row boat— we carry on with the understanding that the universe can never take what belongs to me. If it’s meant to work out, it will. Cry with him or cry without him. If he wanted to he would. Among other platitudes that land with different degrees of resonance or revulsion depending on where we are at in our processes. Nonetheless, we carry on, imperfectly learning how to live again.

Illustration by Line Hachem

3 unspoken feelings experienced while neck deep in the break up portal:

1. What-the-fuck-is-going-on-ness

There is a certain level of shock that comes when one of our worse fears begins to manifest, when we are finally met with having no other choice but having to choose ourselves, having to choose aloneness. The idea of separating from your partner may have at one time been an abstraction. You may have lived in the beautiful human story of invincibility; of no matter what happens it’s us. The frightening reality is that what was once a big sturdy ship can become a life raft. As my friend Billie Rose says, “sometimes Life just gets you”. Life as a force of movement and change beyond our control can get us—traumas, sickness and pain can chip away at even the most resilient of connections.

In the days, weeks and months after the ending of a relationship, the realization of the loss will hit you like a foreign remembrance every time. I can only really relate this experience to remembering someone I love has died. It’s the moment at the kitchen sink when you remember the person who has passed is not just absent within this moment; they are no longer in this realm. They are no longer in their body. You will never have another phone conversation. You will never receive another text back. There is a finality to their existence as it was.

We can’t hold this degree of knowing in grief at all times, it’s too overwhelming, too difficult to wrap the mind around—so it visits us in waves.

This experience of grieving an actual death is the only experience I have remotely akin to the remembering process after separation. As painful and jarring as these moments can be, I believe this is what integration is. This is what landing is. Grab your own slippery hand through the bubbles in the sink. Let the feeling wash over you. Let yourself be impacted. And then let yourself know: we’re going to get through this.

2. Loss of Narrative Self

In a recent episode of Armchair Expert with Jedidiah Jenkins, the concept of the narrative self is discussed. Jenkins says, “I can't recommend writing memoirs enough…creating a narrative story out of your life and figuring out how it fits together in a structure is so profound for healing…it's not life happening to you. You are directing your life, you're framing it, and it gives you a sense of control and authorship and ownership and autonomy.”

When we end a partnership, the narrative of our lives is profoundly altered. Even if reconnection or repair occurs in the future, there is no returning to the reality where we were untouched by separation. This becomes a part of our story. The vision of the life we are building is ripped away. I have been saying to myself, gently, for months now: it just didn’t happen like that. It can feel devastating, ugly and shameful. As a partnered person, we gripped tightly to stories that would support our forward motion through the trials and tribulations of the relationship. Un-partnering requires a level of re-storying. We must make sense of how our narrative has changed. And we must find a way to do so that feels both honest and healing with room for fluidity.

In Literature and The Narrative Self, scholar Samantha Vice writes:

…Selfhood or identity is constituted by the narratives that we tell about ourselves. More precisely, we are characters—usually the protagonists of the stories we tell or could tell about ourselves. This claim about selfhood is usually conjoined with a transcendental claim, to the effect that we also necessarily impose a narrative structure upon the world, that narrative is the 'lens' through which our lives are experienced. Experience, in other words, is essentially narrative in form.

Vice is saying that the stories we tell ourselves and others about how our lives are unfolding actually impact the experience of our lives. As a therapist, I witness the ways my clients gradually engage in the re-storying process—over time often coming to understand their most difficult experiences as a door.

“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” ― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With The Wolves

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman and researcher Jason Riis write in their article Living, and thinking about it: two perspectives on life of two distinct selves; there is the experiencing Self that lives life as a string of moment-to-moment experiences. These moments are fleeting and as such, the experiencing self is temporal. And then, there is the remembering Self. The remembering self is more “stable and permanent”. Kahneman & Riis write, “it is a basic fact of the human condition that memories are what we get to keep from our experience, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.”

I bring up this concept of the Narrative Self, the Experiencing Self, and the Remembering Self because it is all of these selves that we become acutely aware of when going through a relationship loss. There is the Experiencing Self at the kitchen sink getting hit by a grief wave. There is the Experiencing Self at a family function having to navigate invasive questions and the simple trigger of “how are you doing?” There is the Experiencing Self that somehow has to work, to make money, to be a “professional” while the inner world is crumbling. And then there is the Narrative Self. The self that had a story about how things would be. The self that believed in a certain degree of certainty, of safety, of continuity, of “we” and “us” and “our”. All of a sudden the narrative self is an “I”—meanwhile it can feel like everyone else is floating around in their we-us-our bliss. There is the Remembering Self too, meaning-making through memories that have us feeling a vast spectrum of emotions between relief, regret, liberation, fear.

But if breakups teach us anything perhaps it is that at some point, the fear of being together can become greater than the fear of being alone. Togetherness is no promise of whatever it is we are seeking—joy, self-actualization, growth. Togetherness is just togetherness, it may not be a deliverance from anything. And so we shut our eyes tight and jump, trusting that there is a Future Self on the other side who will catch us, even if we haven’t met her yet.

3. My Out of Control Part

For a long time I never identified as someone who had any issues with control. When I thought of people who were controlling, I thought of people who were rigid with little tolerance for alternative ways of doing things. That wasn’t me. Actually, I could use a little more structure and regiment.

However, when going through relationship loss, I re-experience and am reminded of how my own controlling tendencies can manifest. I have a great deal of compassion for this part of myself too; ultimately I identify her as a strong protector. This part of Self recognizes that life has been upended in every way imaginable, and everything is raw and tender. She is also highly critical of people—of how they show up, of what they say, of their insights (or lack thereof), of their lateness, of the things that make them sad (trivial), of the things that make them happy (unimportant). She guards my tender inner landscape fiercely, trying to keep me safe from the messy and imperfect ways that others will inevitably be present.

At her most intense, this control part will keep me entirely isolated. She screams:

Don’t you understand I am going through the worst year of my life? Don’t you understand I will never be the same? Don’t you understand I can never go back? Don’t you understand the person I care most about in the entire world is no longer here? Don’t you understand this is what mattered most to me? Don’t you understand he got sick? Don’t you understand we had names picked out? Don’t you understand we were a family? No, none of you understand and none of you have ever really lost a damn thing. None of you have ever really suffered.

This part of me will shut out any contact with the outside world. Through isolation or avoidance of true intimacy, she enforces distance with others. The risk of making my emotional situation more dire because of inadequate support or misunderstanding is too great. The risk of being missed and experiencing a further sense of isolation is too high.

On a day-to-day basis, when in the break up portal, this part has a very active inner dialogue with me about how others are failing me, how I am failing myself, how I am truly and utterly alone in this experience, what we need to do to get it the fuck together, how everything needs to be healed and fixed, how to go back and repair my relationship, how to move forward and forget about it all—and so on.

This part of me is really struggling with the uncertainty and imperfection of it all.

What I am learning about her is that there are certain words that calm her. The word “trust” in particular, is a good balm. When she is trying to solve it all, I ask her if she can try on trust instead. We meditate on the word trust. We breathe slow and deep together. I envision myself letting go of heavy things; sometimes I actually clench my hands as tight as possible, hold and then release them. She likes that. I remind her that there’s a lot we cannot know. I remind her we have some of our best downloads in the spaces between thinking—when shampooing our hair in the shower, or taking a walk to look at the Christmas lights, or laying on a yoga mat. And so when she comes up, I’ve started to interpret her presence as a bid for these activities. She is exhausted. There is so much she has been working to figure out, to keep safe, to help us. We came up with a list together called Recipe for a Good Day. Finding small ways to create a sense of control feels like a major source of grounding.

My control part is also the part of me that knows how to take care. She knows that when everything is crumbling, I can create a soft landing for myself through a morning practice, a prayer, an early bed time, a deep stretch.