The Fear of Ending a Relationship

Let's imagine that we know what we want: to leave a relationship. However, we are suffering from a problem that inhibits us from acting on our wishes. We can't bear to cause another person pain, especially someone towards whom we feel a sense of loyalty, who has been kind to us, who looks up to us for their safety and their future, who has expectations of us, and with whom we might have been planning a trip to another continent in a few months. Perhaps we have come close to telling them on a dozen occasions but always pulled back at the very last moment. We tell ourselves that we'll get around to it after the holidays, or once their birthday party is over, or next year, or in the morning. Yet, the deadlines roll by, and we are still here. Our discomfort has to do with the thought of unleashing an appalling upset. They will dissolve into tears; there will be sobbing, which may last a very long time. There will be wailing, uncontrollable cries, and mountains of wet tissues, all because of a truth that currently lurks in the quiet recesses of our cranium. We will have been responsible for dragging a formerly competent and independent person into chaos. It's more than we can bear. It sounds peculiar, but it might almost be better for us to spend the next few decades unfulfilled than to experience even five minutes of unbounded upset. In another part of our minds, there may also be a terror. More than we realize day to day, we are scared of our partner. By telling them it's over, we risk a discharge of titanic anger. They may scream at us, accuse us of leading them on, of being a charlatan and a disgrace. There might be violence and danger. There is a certain symmetry to our fears. We may tell them and, by doing so, "kill" them. Or we may tell them, and they will turn around and "kill" us. Kill or be killed. No wonder we put off the news. The reasonable adult part of our minds knows that these fears of killing and dying can't really be true. But this may weigh very little in how we unconsciously feel. Wielding sensible arguments can, at points, be as effective as telling a person with vertigo that the balcony won't collapse or a person with depression that there are perfectly good grounds to be cheerful. A lot of our mind is not amenable to hard-headed logic. In an ancestral part of us, we simply operate with a sense that going against the wishes of a significant person will mean either endangering their lives or our own. To explain the origins of such terrors, childhood is the place to turn, as it always is when trying to account for disproportionate and limitless fears. Perhaps we are the offspring of a fragile parent whom we loved profoundly and whom it would have broken our hearts to disappoint. They might have been struggling with their mental or physical health. They might have been maltreated by another adult. Maybe they were relying on us to hold them back from despair or justify their whole lives. We may have derived an early impression that we had to conform to their idea of us if we weren't to cause them grave damage, that our wishes and needs could easily have driven them to the edge, that by being more ourselves, we could be more of ourselves.