Sorry, ladies, we men aren’t good at this. We don’t exactly love conflict. (At least not the verbal kind–though we love battling for anything if it involves work or sports.) So we don’t always speak up when we’re having problems in a relationship.
We don’t even know it ourselves, sometimes. We don’t see that the relationship is slipping. We just wake up and realize, shit, I’m really unhappy. But then don’t say it. We feel bad we haven’t spotted it sooner.
Or more accurately, we feel embarrassed. But we don’t like to face that embarrassment. So we stuff it down more, rather than admit we’ve been having conflicted feelings we should talk about. Which of course makes us feel worse about ourselves.
Sometimes we realize it isn’t anything you’re doing wrong. It’s us.
We’re not happy with our lives. Our careers. Our bodies that we’ve let fall out of shape. And–this will sound like bullshit, but men are different this way–we can’t love someone else if we’re not in a good place with those. Women are much better at this than us. If we’re freaked out about our career, we’re a mess. We can’t love, we can’t have sex, we can’t even make breakfast. We’re panicked. And panic means anxiety, and we men aren’t in much of a lovey-dovey mood when we’re anxious.
Then we break up with you.
We don’t even have a good set of reasons, because we’re kinda not even sure why we’re doing it ourselves. We just know we’re not happy, which we sometimes wrongly assume is because of our relationship. But that not having an excuse fills us with more guilt. Which we suppress more by just trying to get it over with as soon as possible.
Sometimes, of course, we do have a set of reasons, and they do have to do with you, or at least the relationship. But we haven’t been vocalizing those because either, a) that stuff’s hard, or b) (and this is the more likely reason) we don’t believe it’ll make a difference. We think you’ll either reject what we’re saying, tell us our complaints are invalid, or just tell us the real problem is us (which it very well might be), or just that you won’t agree it’s something you should have to change.
So we just cut to the chase and get it over with. Again, I’m not defending this, I’m just trying to explain it.
Because yes, if we’re being mature, if we’ve done the work on ourselves to maturely defuse tension as it builds, we’ll start raising our issues as they come up, rather than waiting till there’s a hydrogen bomb of resentment just below the surface and we then just hit “eject.”
But we’re not all at that point yet. And even those of us who’ve gotten there, sometimes we regress a bit. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t saveable.
There are things you can do. (If you care enough to try to save the relationship–and you might not, as this manner of handling things could just turn you off of him entirely.)
Start with considering the following things:
- He’s probably been thinking about this for a while.
- It might have almost nothing to do with you.
- It might have a lot to do with you, but he’s convinced no good will come from telling you.
- He might just need to have his little explosion for a day or so, then he’ll be able to be approached and reasoned with.
You can ask “How long have you been thinking about this?” and words to the effects of “I wish I’d known you were unhappy, maybe there was something I could have done.”
But most effective of all will be you just talking about how it makes you feel. Calling us out on our less than tactful manner of breaking up with you (while entirely valid and earned) will probably just get more defensiveness from us, and we’ll just plug our ears, take our toys and go home.
But we can be snapped out of our pigheadedness by hearing how hurt you are, how much it means for you to make it work, and realizing maybe this doesn’t have to be the end. Sometimes we’re very black and white–it’s either a match made in heaven and we’ll live happily ever after, or “Eh, this is tougher than I thought, it must mean we’re not meant to be together, so, check please!”
If nothing else, give us a day or two. Sometimes we need to walk away from something to learn how foolish it would be to throw it away.
And know this: you’re probably better at handling your emotions than we are. At least conflicted ones. We’ve been taught our entire lives not to complain and to soldier through things, but simultaneously, we’re also taught to “stand up” for ourselves and “not take any bullshit.”
So if you put those two things together, it leads to a lot of guys not verbalizing their frustrations, and instead just doing the relationship equivalent of saying, “Take this job and shove it!” as so many of our male heroes have done in the songs and movies of our youth.
If you can accept that we’ve had horrible training for this, you just might have a chance at rescuing us from our own flawed diplomacy efforts.
Of course, the breakup might actually be totally valid, and you’re really not a great match.
But take a breath, realize it’s not as much about you as you think, and know we’re still a bit of work in progress.
We just might thank you for it on our wedding day.
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