We Spoke to People in Long Term Relationships About How They Ended Things

Sometimes the relationships we think are gonna be forever just miss the mark and come to an end. 

Even the best relationships can become stagnant or tainted, or you can find yourselves wanting different things and unable to find happiness without chasing that down. It’s not a mark of failure or a pattern you’re set on for life. One day you’re baby-birding beer into each other's mouths and sending each other pictures of the acne on your ass, then one day you’re looking back thinking how on Earth were we that close. 

But that’s how things go, and life moves on. When you come to the conclusion that calling it quits is the right thing to do, figuring out how to have that kōrero can be daunting as hell.

We spoke to 3 people who made the call to end a long term relationship about what drove them to end things and how it went down. 

VICE: Can you describe the relationship? 

Ruby: We met when I was 14 and were on and off till I was like 21 or so. We were best friends, family intertwined, it was really beautiful and one of the only guys I have ever been with that isn’t an actual asshole.

So why did it end? 

I ended things with him because we were becoming stagnant and we didn’t really know what was happening. I think being together on and off, for so long, we had done a lot of things to fuck each other off that neither of us had really gotten over. But we continued to be together because it was familiar and shared so much history together. I also ended things because I met someone else and acted on lust which I really regret.

And how did you do it? 

I ended things over Messenger which is so bad. I was sick for days and didn’t stop crying for weeks because it felt like we wouldn’t be able to get past it in a friendship way.

He took it fairly well and said that he didn’t really know what to say since we had broken up at least 12 times before that.

I was riddled with guilt because I had met someone else, *Jacob, and didn’t tell him that. Emotionally we were so close, and knew each other so well, it kind of felt like I was lying to a family member.

Would you change how you ended things if you could do it again?

If I could do it over I maybe would’ve made the person I had met slow it down and not pressure me into breaking up with this other guy, so I could see the situation for what it was, which was just lust.

And how do you feel about it all now? 

I feel weird about it. After me and Jacob broke up I did go back to this other guy for a while and we did the same thing we’ve always done, which was just not get over the past hurts and break-up again. 

It’s fully ruined our friendship and we’ve been trying to repair it ever since. He can’t talk to me often now and is pretty cut up over the whole thing. It sucks losing a best friend over trivial things.

VICE: Can you tell me about the relationship? 

Nat: This was my longest relationship, with my ex, Tara. We dated for almost 3 years when she was uni age and I was in my mid to late 20s.

We lived together in her dad's house for the second year of being together. And then the third year we tried moving out and were both looking for work and finding our footing in terms of what we wanted in the long term. It didn't go well. We moved back in with her dad and a few weeks later very swiftly broke up.

How did that break-up come about? 

It's the only time in my life that I would say that a relationship ended on mutual terms. We were coming from the same place of just feeling like we had run our course with each other. 

We got back from this difficult 2 month period and were staying in this tiny little pink room in her dads. We were just tired of having to live with part of her family and frustrated that things hadn't worked out for us and that we had had trouble finding work. There was serious economic distress.

There were also cheating instances that had happened in the relationship earlier, but interestingly that was way before we broke up, it wasn't the reason we broke up. 

We truly did just reach this point and just kind of looked at each other one night, sitting in that pink, pink bedroom. And just said, this is kind of done, isn't it? 

I can't remember which one of us said it, but we both agreed… and it was. It really was as matter of fact as the two of us sitting there in this bedroom, having a quiet moment, and I truly can't remember which one of us broke the silence. I think I did. There wasn't a shouting match. 

How did you feel once it was over?

I think we both felt a tremendous sense of relief. We had both had a little dalliance with another person and had cheated in the past. 

I realised through my instance of cheating that the person I was drawn to cheat with was someone who had a very different body type compared to my partner. And I realised after it happened, that it was coming from a place of sort of feeling not entirely sexually fulfilled. She also was sort of denying that she really wanted to be with girls. 

Why didn’t the cheating cause you to break-up earlier?

Every time that happened, we sat down with each other and brought it up. Once, I remember having an argument outside her dad's house, but the other two times were very quiet and very matter of fact. In spite of being difficult, we really handled it maturely, both of us. It felt very emotionally mature in general in that relationship. 

We kind of got past it and then it never was really a problem again, but it was more a lesson for me. It was sort of when I started to think about the idea of ethical non-monogamy even though I didn't really have that vocabulary yet. I started to realise that it was important to look at relationships through the lens of needs. And knowing that in a relationship both people have emotional, physical, mental needs that need to be met, and that not every relationship can meet them. 

And I think, for her, it was illuminating to get back in touch with the queerness that she had come to terms with long before she and I met, but had sort of been denying in order to be a good little heterosexual girlfriend. So yeah, I mean, there were problems along those lines… But they actually didn't really compare to the economic problems that eventually landed us in the red that led to us breaking up.

And how did you both handle the relationship ending?

It felt like the closing of a chapter. I moved to a new place within a week of the breakup and she started a drastically new chapter in her life when she started dating her next partner and sort of living out as a queer woman.

It really was something that didn't feel like a messy trauma, necessarily, for either of us. It felt like the end of a long and important and nourishing chapter in both of our lives, but one that just was not, you know… it wasn't the rest of our lives.

But I look back on it with a lot of fondness and I know that she does, too. We have a really close friendship now that really means a lot to both of us. 

Is there anything you would have done differently?

I wish I’d had the emotional maturity and maybe also the vocab that we all have now about polyamory and UNM and everything that transcends monogamy. I wish I'd had the knowledge to know, maybe early in the relationship, that it was actually a ripe opportunity for both of us to explore something like that, and see if, in fact, maybe something that was missing in that relationship was to have the freedom to have needs satisfied by other people in certain senses. 

But I don't know that any form of emotional maturity would have led to the relationship lasting longer. I still don't think we were meant to be together forever.

VICE: How did the relationship start?

Olivia: I was 19 when it started. We met because we were friends in high school. We weren't particularly close but he was in my friend group, and we would all hang out in uni breaks when we were all back in Wellington.

End of my second year of uni, as I was back up in Wellington, we ended up drinking at his house, got really drunk and slept together. I didn't really want anything, but there was a bit of pressure to get into a relationship and in my stupid 19-year-old depressive state I was like, Yeah, I'll do it. 

I went back down to Christchurch, we did long distance, that was quite difficult. So I was down there for like one more year of university.

Did you see it as something that would last?

I will say as a caveat to this, I have never been someone who really thought that I would be with one person for the rest of my life. Everything basically always ends, whether that's death, divorce breakup, whatever. If I’m with someone I really commit to them, but I'm also not someone who's like, I'm gonna be with one person for the rest of my life. 

Were you happy in that relationship while you were in it?

It was definitely happy at the start. I was definitely in love for a while. But when I was down to Christchurch for those 10 months, he was very insecure and very jealous. 

He would get upset about really, really small things that I don't really think were very fair, like walking around my flat not fully clothed in front of my flatmates. We almost broke up halfway through my time down there, because he was just so insecure. But we stayed together and I moved back to wellington. 

How long did it last after that?

Another two and a half years.

Oh wow. So why did it eventually end?

So it's kind of a twofold complication. First of all, we started living together after we've been together for two years, and he was very depressed, very unmotivated. And I'm totally happy to support people through the mental health stuff. I'm very here to support my partners. But it got to a point where there was a lot of anger. 

He would be very jealous when I would not be spending time at home with him. But he also didn't want to go out. It wasn't a positive sense of being like, Oh, hey, I just don't feel comfortable going to that, but you go have a good time. It was, I don't want to go to that. You shouldn't want to go to that. You should stay home with me. So that really took a toll.

We were also very fundamentally different in terms of political values, which is something very important to me. 

But then he started becoming very suicidal. And so I didn't feel like I could break up with him. So I was essentially looking after him while he was dealing with all of this. 

I tried to break up with him about three times over the course of about a year and a half. He would keep begging and crying. He basically tried to get back together with me by being like, hey, I'm finally addressing all my mental health stuff. And finally going to therapy. He refused to go to therapy our entire relationship, refused to get medicated for any of his issues, and then he  bombarded me being like, I'm going to therapy. I'm reading all these political books etc. 

How did you finally manage to end things successfully?

I was a lot more definitive in my decision. I think in the past, I'd kind of been like, I think we need to break up. But then, like, he would kind of convince me that he would work on himself and work on these things that I took issue with.

And by the time I fully broke up with him, I’d had enough, it was just like, No, this is not continuing. I felt all this relief when I did leave. 

Is there anything that you would have done differently, specific to how you broke up with him? 

Oh, God yeah. I would have stuck to my guns and broken up after like a year and a half. 

One thing that I've sort of come to the conclusion of is that you can feel bad about doing something that hurts someone. But at the end of the day, you kind of just have to make the decision that's right for you. And a relationship is not a happy or healthy relationship if one person is staying in it purely because they are concerned about the well being of the other person. 

Essentially, like: don't set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.

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Rachel Barker is a writer / producer at VICE NZ in Aotearoa.