Your Ex-Boyfriend Will Hate This (2015)

Chapter Sixteen

Getting by Giving Up

I’ll start this chapter with a bit of familial homespun wisdom from one of the men I admire most, my grandfather Howell Dean:

“You can’t be afraid to put something down, just because you’re worried someone else might pick it up.”

At the time he said this to me, we were discussing a job I was unhappy with and wanted to quit. Among my many (faulty) reasons for not wanting to do so was that I knew my employer would find someone else to fill my place as soon as I gave notice. My grandfather responded with those sage words, which not only influenced that decision but many others I’ve made since.

Among them were times when I felt conflicted in a relationship. I’d be at a point where it was clear that our best days were behind us due to constant fighting, disagreements about the future, or the unfortunate-but-necessary acknowledgment that we weren’t very compatible, although not because I didn’t love the girl I was dating. Often the problem was quite the opposite. The fact that I had deep feelings for her made it that much harder to admit the other fact staring me in the face—we weren’t right for each other.

In these situations, I remembered what my grandfather had said to me. The truth is that irrational optimism isn’t optimism. It’s cynicism given a cruddy coat of paint, and it isn’t fair to you or the other person. All that time you spend making excuses is time that both of you could be spending finding someone better for you. Notice I’m not saying better, but rather better for you. Too much time is spent during and after a bad relationship assigning blame, when it doesn’t matter even one iota unless a magistrate is involved.

No one wins a breakup. It’s easier to say that both parties lose, and research confirms it. You know that cliché about how certain people are “addicted to love?” Well, those poor, hapless “certain people” include all of us at one time or another. A study conducted by Rutgers University, Yeshiva University, Stony Brook University, and the State University of New York examined brain activity in college men and women who had been recently rejected by a romantic partner.[xlvii] Studying participants via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), researchers discovered that love is as powerful a drug as any you can get on the streets of Bogota. Participants had gone an average of two months without seeing their former partners before beginning the study, yet the “rush” they experienced when shown a picture of their ex-lovers was still palpably real. Compared to a photo of a neutral subject (like an unfamiliar person of the same age and gender), a photo of an ex produced much more heightened activity in several key areas of the brain, including those areas regulating motivation and reward, craving and addiction, and physical pain and distress.

The findings were scientifically significant enough that the American Psychological Association published them in the Journal of Neurophysiology. One of the report’s most alarming truths was this:

“The passion of ‘romantic love’ is a goal-oriented motivation state rather than a specific emotion.”

Let that sink in for a moment. Science says you’re not “in love” with your ex any more than a junkie is “in love” with heroin. You both want to get high, plain and simple, and both of you’ll put aside long and short-term goals to get it. The only difference between you and the junkie is that the junkie doesn’t need any high-minded justification to seek out a fix.

Imagine that Romeo is madly in love with black tar heroin rather than Juliet. It’s not the timeless romantic saga we revere. It’s Trainspotting in tunics.

Nobody said that breaking up is the easiest thing in the world to do. A sociological study by the University of Queensland showed that both parties suffer in the short term.[xlviii] On average, the woman’s income dips by about 2 percent post-breakup. And while the man’s income increases about 20 percent afterward (don’t shoot the messenger), the study found that men reported greater unhappiness up to four years later. So that was clearly money well-spent, fellas.

We talked earlier about how an essential prerequisite for healthy relationships is having a firm sense of who you are and what you’re worth. Quoting three separate studies, an article in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin reported that breakups take a hard toll on the way we view ourselves.[xlix] It found that one of the most difficult aspects of getting over someone is shifting our “self-concept,” our ability to define who we are.

“Not only may couples come to complete each other’s sentences, they may actually come to complete each other’s selves,” the study explained. “When the relationship ends, individuals experience not only pain over the loss of the partner, but also changes in their selves.”

Using the “map” metaphor from the first chapter, our identity is like a point on a map. When we get lost, the easiest way to right ourselves is to retrace our steps to the starting point, but you can’t find your way home if you never knew its location in the first place. People who aren’t happy unless they’re in a relationship are perpetual babes in the wilderness; they don’t know how they got where they are, and they sure as hell aren’t walking out of there unless someone else shows the way.

Is that you? If so, is that how you want to live?

The whole point of reading a book like this (other than for the brilliant humor and wordplay contained herein) is to seek new insight into how to do things better, to live smarter, and to be happier. Being with someone is, generally speaking, better than being alone, but not under all circumstances. In fact, there are plenty of examples, both in your own life and the lives of people you know, where the best company at any given moment is no company at all. It all comes down to perspective.

A close friend and mentor is a wonderful lady named Dr. Patricia Guest. As Program Director of the Pre-Trial Diversion Program in my hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, Dr. Guest has spent decades in the service of a noble cause: helping convicted felons rehabilitate their lives and avoid recidivism. Since starting the program in the 1980s, she has overseen literally thousands of offenders who turned their lives around through commitment, hard work, and the judicious (pardon the pun) introduction of a better model for living. These are people who would’ve likely been lost inside a broken and corrupt prison system that mostly succeeds at forming better criminals, when better men and women are desperately needed.

Dr. Guest is fond of saying there are four essential questions in life:

1) Who are you?

2) Where are you?

3) Where are you going?

4) Who are you going with?

Ask yourselves these questions, and take a moment to consider your answers. If you have definitive answers to all four, you’re ahead of most people. At certain points during my life, I could answer only two of them. It took the first decade of my adulthood to discover who I am and even longer to embrace that person, warts and all. After coming to terms with big dumb me, it was just as hard to sort out where I was in life, and it has been even harder figuring out where I want to be as I get older.

I’m over forty. Yet as old as my body feels on certain mornings, from time to time I still have trouble conceiving of myself as an adult. My father is an adult. He has been the architect of a better life for so many people, including my brother and me, whose success and happiness owe a huge debt to Grant Sullivan. He the person who inspired this book, and it was his gentle encouragement, sound advice, and charitable nature that unequivocally made its completion possible. That’s what an adult is and has always been to me: someone whose debt you can never hope to repay and whose love means never having to.

That’s my dad—the best model for adulthood I’ve ever had and the best argument for leaving my stupid, selfish youth behind without lamentation. He just turned sixty-six, and he makes sixty-six look like the wisest, most fulfilling, most exciting, most purely joyful age to be. He made sixty-five look like that, too, and every other age for as long as I can remember.

People assume you become envious of youth the older you get, and maybe that’s true for most, but my envy is for the age of sixty-six. The old man makes it look so fun!

Okay, you’ve got a cool dad. I get it. But how does that make it any easier to break up with someone, dear author?

Glad you asked, actually. Of the many invaluable nuggets of wisdom my dad has given me, his views on breakups have always struck me as particularly level-headed and insightful, even comforting. He has always thought that every breakup is purposeful, even the ones that hurt like hell—sometimes especially the ones that hurt like hell.

We’ve all been hurt in relationships at some point. If you’ve never been dumped by someone, most people would consider you very lucky. I happen to believe everyone needs this lesson in humility once in his or her life. Getting dumped forces us to reevaluate ourselves and whom we choose to be with. If handled constructively, it can even be cathartic.

Someone is giving you a wake-up call. Someone you really care about is telling you something is missing or needs repair. Maybe you’re skittish about commitment. Maybe you’re possessive or needy. Maybe you suffer from irrational jealousy. Maybe you aren’t willing to put in the hard work it takes for relationships to thrive. There’s a reason you’ve been dumped, and rather than ignoring or flatly denying certain issues, use the sudden infusion of unpleasant truth for its creative potential.

Not every breakup means the same thing. Sometimes the truth it imparts isn’t what your ex would have you believe. Breakups aren’t a spectator sport. There are no winners, and even in the most one-sided relationships, both parties have a hand in the outcome. Evaluated through the objectivity of distance (which hopefully comes someday after the initial hurt), you can find plenty of fault on both sides for the relationship failure. Anyone who claims utter blamelessness after a breakup (except those involving abuse, which is always and unequivocally the abuser’s fault) is either lying or deluded.

If you encounter someone who insists that none of his past breakups were his fault, proceed at your own peril. He has a lot to learn, and he may be too old to teach. Besides, it isn’t your job to make a man out of him. That failure lies with his parents, and just because they shirked their responsibility doesn’t mean you should take up the cause. Some guys never grow up, and some never want to.

Couples in marriages or long-term relationships often talk about the importance of arguing constructively. Fights are going to happen.

First and foremost, avoid speaking out of anger.

Anything you wouldn’t say with a cool head is best not said at all. Anger is like alcohol. It not only loosens the tongue, it also leads you to say things you would be mortified to have repeated back to you later. A cool head may not always resolve arguments in your favor, but it will minimize damage.

Lose the battle; win the war.

This popular adage is often applied to relationships. If the goal is to sustain healthy partnerships, then no single argument is more important than the goal of preserving harmony between you and your mate. Anger is the enemy of long term survival. Like any mind-altering drug, it obliterates perspective and amplifies the moment. It’s impossible not to get angry in a relationship unless both parties are heavily sedated, and who wants to spend a lifetime under the influence of horse tranquilizers just to prevent the occasional spat? Battles happen, but they don’t have to lead to mutually assured destruction.

The adage applies not only to individual relationships but also to the whole of your relationships. Your past couplings can be viewed together as one meta-relationship and assessed in the same way. As with any single relationship, you can trace the ups and downs in your past as a series of phases in your romantic development. Mistakes are made and hopefully learned from. You get better at certain things through trial and error. You get hurt and learn to avoid those behaviors (or types of people) that caused it. Losing the battle and winning the war means minimizing the emotional casualties of bad relationships so you can keep fighting for the ultimate goal: finding true love.

There are romantic battles you just can’t win, and when that happens, you have to know how and when to retreat. The most famous boxer of all time, Mohammed Ali, was once asked about the key to winning an upcoming championship fight against an opponent who was known as a brutally dangerous puncher.

“You can’t hit what you can’t see,” he said.

There are men who’ll hurt you, but even the worst among them is harmless if you aren’t there to hurt. Let them apply their cruelty elsewhere.

You’ve got a war to win.

In the next chapter, we’ll talk about a wicked little virus that exists in all of us and for which modern medicine has never found an antidote—jealousy.