The moment you decide it´s time to let go, your next burden is to know how to end a relationship the best way possible.
It may have taken you a while to figure out when to end a relationship, but the moment you make up your mind, it certainly is the best way to do.
Whatever is the reason — whether you fell out of love or you´re not getting what you want from the relationship — the right thing to do is exit gracefully.
It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn’t matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over. ~ Paulo Coelho, The Zahir
If you want to make this process much easier, read How to End a Relationship: How to Breakup Without Regret, Stay Positive and Feel Liberated!
How to end a relationship without hurting
One of the reasons you may be afraid of ending a relationship is the possibility of hurting your partner or yourself. But getting hurt is part of the game. Love and relationships are about taking risks.
Yet there are things you can do to minimize the damage and the pain that this breakup may cause you both. When breaking up, stick to the facts of the relationship. Recognize the good parts and discuss the parts that were not working.
Give the person with whom you are ending the relationship with the chance to ask questions and try to be honest with your answers. Don’t say “It´s not you, but me” when it´s actually about him. Tell him why it´s not working or why it´s best to end things and move forward in separate ways.
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Make him commit and surrender his heart to you, learn how to be “the woman men adore and never want to leave”.
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Don´t play the blame game. If the person you´re breaking up with starts to accuse you with things or challenge you to a heated argument, try to stay calm, tell him the accusations are not true, but avoid retorting the insults (if any) back.
Feel the sentiment beneath his words, but don´t allow your guilt to cause you to change your mind. Be sympathetic to the pain the person you´re breaking up with is feeling but stand your ground.
How to end a relationship gracefully
I have a friend who broke up with her boyfriend through an email. Her boyfriend hated her for that. I had known some women who ended their relationship through a text message or an IM. As much as possible, don´t do it.
Face-to-face or phone contact is a must. It will provide you and the person you´re breaking up with a chance for an amicable breakup, or at least a possibility of laying down things clearly on the table.
Sending a breakup email or a text message is a coward way to end a relationship. It can cause an even bigger damage to the other person.
But of course, not all relationships are equal. With the birth of online dating, many breakups are far from graceful. Online dating has made the breakup etiquette vaguer than ever.
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Do you want to know how to attract the right man? Check out this personality quiz.
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I once had an online relationship with a French guy whom I met through a Christian online dating site, and whom discussed with me his plans to visit me, when suddenly his emails stopped coming. He didn´t arrive on the proposed date.
I went to check his profile on the dating site. I found out that he did arrive in Thailand on the said date but he met up with someone else. I didn´t even get a courtesy of a good-bye email.
On different situation, I ended up a long-distance relationship with an American guy, who was at the time was pulling away for quite a while, because I found love out of the blue offline.
I didn´t hear from the American guy for quite some time, he wasn´t returning my emails and he was also unreachable through phone, and it was clear he was emotionally unavailable to me due to some personal reasons and family crisis.
Although I tried to be patient and to wait for him, eventually I couldn´t wait indefinitely.
So I sent him a breakup email. It was my only option. I still didn´t hear back from him but a day after I sent the email his MySpace profile (we got connected through MySpace) miraculously disappeared. Many years later, I was already married and he was still single, his Facebook profile appeared on my feeds. I sent him a quick “hello”. He blocked me.
But the thing is, whenever possible, a face-to-face breakup or over-the-phone is a graceful way to end a relationship especially if there was some romance, intimacy and more investment involved in your relationship.
How to end a relationship with someone you love
The most common reason why you´re ending a relationship with someone you love is you´re not getting the love back or at least not as much as you invested on the relationship.
If you´re not happy in the relationship and you´re not getting what you are worthy of, letting go of someone you love is the best thing you can do for yourself.
Know that after the breakup, you may find the pain overwhelming that you will try to get your ex back. If this is the case, it´s no longer about the love but it´s more about your fear of being alone.
But letting go of him and setting yourself free are the only right things to do. The right relationship won´t be able to find you if you keep wasting your time on a wrong relationship.
Stick with your decision to end the relationship and follow the 3 effective steps to getting over a breakup.
How to end a relationship when you live together
Cohabiting is becoming more and more popular these days. Although this is something that is not part of God´s idea of dating and marriage, many Christians are also practicing it. While some argue that it is cost-effective, I definitely don´t recommend it because (religious reasons aside) you will lose more than you´ll get from it if you´re a woman.
So how do you end a relationship if you´re living together? I suggest you plan your exit ahead of time. Life can get really awkward and difficult after the breakup when you´re still rubbing elbows with each other in a limited-spaced flat. But planning ahead is especially important if your finances are entangled.
Look for an apartment in advance, a place where you can move into after the breakup. If you have a limited budget to afford an apartment deposit, see if you can stay temporarily with any of your friends, or if you can move back with your parents while you´re still unable to get your own place.
Once your exit strategy is in place, end the relationship gracefully and then move out. Both of you needs the no-contact period in order to heal, so this is the only way to go.
If ever you find yourself asking how to end a relationship? Remember that the best way to do it is gracefully and fairly.
