Polyamory Week 2022 - The Hidden Truth About Breakups
You can find all posts for Polyamory Week 2022 collected here.
Breaking up! The greatest fear in any relationship. The end of it all. The ultimate decision. The bell hung around our neck that declares to the world that we have failed at love.
Dear god, we have some terrible ideas about what a breakup is.
Considering my marriage ended during Lockdown, it’s no wonder that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this over the last couple of years. It was actually the topic of one of the first articles I wrote when I started writing full-time. Because while my breakup was a traumatic experience and pretty hard to get through, I didn’t have any of those feelings of failure we’re supposed to feel. A relationship I had believed would last the rest of my life had ended, yet I didn’t feel like a failure.
In fact, it felt like I had done something right.
Sometimes, a breakup is the healthy choice
So, why did ending my marriage feel like the right thing to do, rather than a sign we had failed to keep it together?
Well, the obvious answer seemed to be my polyamory. My first thought was that it must have been because despite one relationship ending, I still had another one. And yes, my girlfriend was a rock, and I don’t know how well I would have coped without her. But the more I thought about it, the less that idea sat right. Because I’ve known several people who’ve been in loving, long-term, monogamous relationships who have had “good” breakups.
So what was it?
And after some thought, it came to me. If I was sad at my relationship ending but considered it the right thing to do and was on good terms with my ex, then logically, it must be healthy for that relationship to end.
For any relationship to be healthy, all participants need to be aware of and accept that ending things might one day be the best thing for all concerned.
The lies of “True Love” and “The One”
We have this ridiculous idea of “True Love”. The fairytale concept that tells us that once you find your soulmate, the love you share will be forever. That finding The One is the hard part, and once you’ve reached that point, it’s all gravy.
And one of the many things wrong with this idea is that you can judge the success of a relationship using time. That the only real signifier that two people were meant to be together is that they stuck together ‘till death did they part.
Which is, of course, complete and utter nonsense.
The truth is, as I’ve come to realise, you cannot measure a relationship by how long it lasts. A relationship that lasts fifty years isn’t necessarily better or more fulfilling than one that lasted fifty weeks. Yes, those relationships will have been very different, but you will have got something out of each of them. One simply kept giving while the other reached the point where it was no longer worth maintaining.
How do you decide if your relationship can be saved?
There are plenty of reasons why we have this belief that relationships must be maintained at all costs. (I won’t go into detail here, but let’s just say the three roots of the problem tend to be religion, the Patriarchy, and Capitalism.) And, obviously, I want to promote the idea that this is not the case.
But I also want to clarify that I’m not arguing that relationships are disposable. Many people assume this is what polyamory involves, which isn’t the case at all. Any long-term relationship is a serious commitment, no matter the number you are part of. And even if one of them is in trouble, in many, many cases, it’s worth putting in the effort to try and save them. As often as not, there’s something you can do to salvage them.
When I’ve thought about this for previous articles, I came up with three things we should ask ourselves when realising we were facing a potential breakup:
It’s okay to admit your relationship needs work;
It’s okay for a relationship to have run its course;
It’s okay to decide that despite all the time and energy you’ve committed to a relationship, it doesn’t mean you have to keep doing so past the point when it’s any use.
I never expected polyamory to lead me to see the true nature of how and why relationships end.
The great benefit of my journey into polyamory has been putting me in situations where I am forced to consider things from a different angle. If my marriage had ended while I was still monogamous, I would have only had all the standard justifications for my feelings. I might even have forced my emotional response to fit with how I thought I was supposed to feel, which would have been incredibly healthy.
So yes, the immediate benefit polyamory gave me during my breakup was another partner to support me. But the real, long-term benefit was putting me in a place where I could better understand the true nature of what that breakup meant.
And that’s the lesson here. If your relationship is worth saving, then by all means do everything to bring it back to health. But if that isn’t possible, despite all your efforts, don’t see it as a sign of failure. See it as a sign of growth.
