How do you move on after a break up? Our resident agony aunt, psychologist Niamh Fitzpatrick was live in studio with her advice this morning on Neil Delamere's Sunday Best...
Hi Neil and Niamh,
Several weeks ago, I broke up with my boyfriend of 3 years.
We had planned to start a business and move in together but we weren’t getting on the last while because I felt he wasn’t trying hard to make this happen. But then he’d tell me he couldn’t wait for it to happen, for us to have a future, and that he wanted to marry me one day.
I used to nag him a bit about not getting things done that he knew were important. He’s laid back he says, but I would call it lazy, which I’m not. If I’d ask him to help me he’d get pissed off but I would do anything he ever asked me to do, I have often gone out of my way to help him.
Yeah, I pushed him, but all I ever wanted was the best for him and for him to be proud of himself for working hard, because he used to feel down when he wasn’t working hard or saving money. I just wanted to help him be the man he wanted to be, but he says I pushed too hard. We live a distance away from each other and he says I tried to keep him from his family and friends by making him move away. I wouldn’t have minded if he was to go home every weekend and just be with me as a proper couple during the week, we are both 30 and I think it’s time he got away from home and out on our own.
In the heat of a massive argument over text, I said I didn’t want to be with him anymore. I didn’t mean it and I regret it. But that was like his chance to get out and he said he doesn’t want all of those things we had planned anymore. Now I’m facing starting this new business on my own. I get very down sometimes and I’ve suffered from anxiety since I was a child, which caused problems too because he couldn’t understand why I’d be sad. Or I’d be trying to check in with him just to make sure he was ok and he’d think I was trying to control him by always wanting to know where he was or what he was doing. It was to save myself worry and panic. I explained that lots of times but he still would ignore my calls if he was busy. It only takes 10 seconds to write a message to stop the other person from worrying.
I love him so much and I’m completely lost without him, I still can’t get through half a day without crying. I find it hard to let people in but I let him in, now he throws it all away. I just can’t get my head around how someone can love me so much, and he did, now he says he doesn’t love me because of the fighting. I don’t know how to move on without him. He wants to be friends but that’s hard. Should I forget about him, cut off all contact and move on? Or try to be friends and help each other out and see can he love me again? He says he might if I give him some space first and stop bringing up the past. I don’t want to be the girl sitting around waiting for him to want me and I am that girl at the moment.
I don’t want to be desperate either but we had a great love and I don’t want it to be gone.
Niamh has this advice:
First, it is about recognising that there are different issues within the problem you wrote to us about, I think that they are intertwined.
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The dilemma of how to deal with the break-up.
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The anxiety & depression you are dealing with long-term.
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The development of relationship skills.
You have described this situation from your perspective but it would be useful if we take a moment to look at it all from his perspective.
By your account, he had a girlfriend who wanted to drive the speed of the relationship; who would nag him to get things done; who would tell him that he was lazy; who wanted him to be the man he wanted to be but who pushed him too hard in that regard; who decided that it was time he got out of home and out on his own; who put huge pressure on him to respond every time she needed reassurance that he was OK; who brought up the past.
These are all your words, but reading the rest of what you say it is clear that your intention was not to leave this man feeling pestered and rushed, not good enough as he was, not free to make his own decisions regarding his life, unable to break free from the past etc, but it seems that this is how he felt.
You in the meantime were left feeling that perhaps he wasn’t committed to you and to a future together; that he didn’t understand you; that he didn’t respect you when he failed to respond to your check ins. You each felt unloved in different ways.
It is like you are going at different speeds and speaking different languages.
I think that the anxiety and depression that you have struggled with, plus the lack of relationship skills on both your parts have influenced getting you to this place and as both can be worked on, this shapes my advice on how to handle the break-up.
Given that he said that he could love you again if you gave him some space and stopped bringing up the past, it suggests that his feelings changing may have been more about the behaviours and the dynamic between you than about the person.
So, there is the possibility that you two have un-finished business.
I suggest that you talk to him, check it out, and say something like this:
“With some distance since the break-up and having given it some thought, I can now see that whilst the last few months of our relationship was not great for me, it was also not a nice time for you. I don’t think it was either of our intention to hurt the other in that way and I wonder if our problems stem more from behaviours and a dynamic between us that has been a bit dysfunctional, than from each of us having issues with the other person. You say that there might be a chance for us if you got some space and if I didn’t bring up the past. So rather than bolt the door on this, what if we work with your suggestion, take some time out, then see how we both feel after a month or two. If we both had any interest in giving it another go, we could go to a relationship therapist to learn how to better understand each other and work together rather than pull in opposite directions.”
If he is not interested, then you will need to accept that he was telling you that he could love you again only to soften the blow of the break-up. But this is worth checking out before you shut the door on things between you so that there are no regrets in the future.
Next, you need to address the anxiety and depression that you experience and also address the underlying belief about whether you are lovable as these both influence your own emotional state and they influence your behaviours in the relationship.
Check out somewhere like Bwell which is a clinic with psychologists and psychotherapists who can help with both the anxiety / depression and with the self esteem piece.
They also do relationship therapy so you could explore the relationship skill-set too, either individually or as a couple if you did decide to try again.
Finally, be sure to gather support around you now as you head into Christmas not in the place that you would have expected to be in your life. Family and friends can be a great source of strength for you as they remind you that whatever else is going on, you are loved by them.
Niamh will be back in the New Year but if you'd like to contact her check her website or if there's something you'd like Niamh to address on air, email problem@todayfm.com or send post to Marconi House, Digges Lane, Dublin 2.
