What To Do When You Have to End a Relationship With Someone You Love

Break-ups are notoriously nasty. If you’ve been cheated on or lied to they can leave you feeling vengeful or deeply insecure. If you realised you were never a good match you can spend years living with regret, convinced that the whole thing was a waste of your time. Maybe you thought you were forever and were left with trust issues when they walked out on you, out of the blue. There are so many spectacularly depressing possibilities – but not every break-up comes about because your love has crashed and burned. 

Sometimes, a relationship ends when you're still in love. Sometimes, you have to close the book before you’ve finished it – and stop yourself from wondering what the ending could have been. 

If you’ve never been in love, it might be hard to imagine why you’d end things with someone you feel that strongly about, but there's a bounty of reasons that can bring even a happy, healthy relationship to an end. 

Your relationship might come up against practical issues like moving cities, visa issues or job and university offers calling you to distant places.

Sometimes it comes down to having different life goals. You might have to tackle hard truths like one of you wanting children and the other not, with neither of you able to give up on your needs. Not every difference between two people has to end as a compromise, but if it doesn’t, it will more than likely end in a split. 

There might also be small but unresolved issues that prevent your relationship from thriving. Perhaps you continue to fight or frustrate each other and just can’t find a way to fix it. It's as simple as knowing the relationship is not quite right, even though you wish it could be. It’s knowing that you can love someone for who they are, but accept that they aren't the best person for you. 

Finally, there’s the possibility you just fizzle out. You still love them, even if you’re not in love.  

No matter the reason, it’s a hard thing to face; to call things quits when there are still positives to cling to. It’s a natural instinct to hold on and hope it works out when you see potential in your relationship, but sometimes – whether out of emotional need or logical problem solving – pulling the plug is the only way forward. 

Obviously, you need to bring it to a close officially. Have a read of this if you're unsure how to do it respectfully – but the main thing is to be clear and honest. One of the few bonuses of a break-up that’s been forced on you by circumstance is that it's more likely to be mutual. You’re in the same boat, so it’s not on one person to drop the bad news. 

If you’re breaking up because one or both or you are moving, (and you’ve opted not to do long-distance) this gives you a solid end date – and with that comes the decision to commit until that date or end things sooner. Between waiting it out or cutting it off, there’s no obvious “right option”, but it is a must-do to actually talk about it. Don’t opt to avoid the situation and ignore the fact that things are about to end, or you’ll end up overwhelmed when it finally does. Letting the sadness and anxieties around ending your relationship pile up without acknowledging that it’s a painful thing to go through doesn’t help either of you. Even if you’re putting off the break-up, making sure you’re aware of your emotional state will help protect you in the end. 

And what if you are still physically in the same place? 

There’s no need to cut them out of your life unless they were doing you harm, but if you want to stay friends with someone you love, the number one rule is truly accepting that you’re not a couple anymore. If you’ve already put in the hard work to end things, don’t put yourself in a situation where it’s likely that you’ll want to get back together (or worse, where only one of you wants to get back together.) 

The brunt of it is this: you can’t act exactly as you did when you were a couple. Not changing your behaviour prevents you from truly comprehending that it’s over. It’ll only sting more when the first person moves on if you’re still subconsciously treating them like a significant other. 

Even between amicable exes, having a little bit of space from each other is a great shout. You need time to adjust to your life without them as your partner and to envision what that means for your future. 

It’s also super important that your closeness and level of comfort with each other doesn’t lead you to become each other's stand-in therapists. The other person in the break-up is not the right person to talk about how hard breaking up is – it makes things muddy and confusing when you’ve both got skin in the game. It’s not that you can’t be honest with each other, but you need other people to lean on, and so does your ex. 

Similarly, it’s not the best idea to keep sleeping together. Having sweet, intimate sex with someone you love brings with it a lot of emotion and it’s hard to detach from that. Sleeping together casually sounds like a nice fantasy, but for most ex-couples, there’s too much history to successfully attempt being friends with benefits. 

One of the caveats of every break-up is the impulsive what ifs. And these potential scenarios are amplified when you still love someone. It’s dangerously easy to slip into thinking about what would happen if you stayed together, if you tried harder, if you met again when you were older. The possibilities are endless. But also, pointless. You can’t spend your life indulging in the idea that things could’ve been different, or you’ll never be happy with what you actually have. 

It’s natural to miss someone – to crave them – no matter the strength of the relationship. Heartbreak and longing are normal parts of grieving a break-up, so don’t let them trick you into making decisions that you wouldn’t make if you were thinking logically. 

You can know that you love someone and that it feels good to be loved, without needing to be with them. 

Rather than thinking too much about what you miss about being together, focus on the reasons why ending your relationship was for the best. You don’t have to come up with a whole bunch of retrospective reasons to hate them or to justify the break-up – and you can be at peace with still loving them. But it’s important to acknowledge what wasn’t working and remind yourself that that is why the relationship needed to end. 

So, there it is. Ending things with someone you love opens a can of worms that’s entirely different to an angry and bitter blow-out. Some might say it’s harder because you can’t cling on to hating them. Some people probably envy the opportunity to keep a beloved ex-partner as a friend. In worst-case scenarios, you love them and hate them at the same time. But know that there are ways to make it less painful for everyone involved. 

No one is saying it’s gonna be easy, we just hope this helps. 

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Rachel Barker is a writer / producer at VICE NZ in Aotearoa. You can find her @rachellydiab on IG and Letterboxd and see her film criticism on Youtube.