When there’s a break-up, it’s easy to malign the dumper, the one who takes hearts and crushes it into an unrecognizable mass and leaves an aching gap in your soul. Dumpers are most often portrayed as heartless beasts that laugh maniacally over the crumpled figure of their despondent ex as they make their hasty retreat. Dumpers are the recipients of much hate and vitriol spewed from the spurned. I know this, because I’ve been the evil dumper and the righteously hurt dumpee, and I’m beginning to wonder after all this time if maybe relationships are never black and white, but varying shades of gray, that dumpers and dumpees are two sides of the same coin.
I have just broken up with someone that I love very much for a long time, but like so often happens, the current of life began to carry us in different directions, and because I was the one who saw it, I was the one that had to cut the tether before our ships were capsized. I did everything I could to try to put my feelings away in a box in the back of the closet, hoping it would make us return to smooth sailing, but the nagging feelings kept creeping out in the night to take their rightful place in my heart. When that didn’t work, I got angry, “Why can’t you see that something’s not right here, dammit!” I said in my best effort to Jedi mind-trick him into seeing things the way I did. “Why do I have to be the one to hurt you?!” I would often think as I simultaneously resented him for being so blissfully unaware. I then tried to change myself to better fit the awkward shape that the relationship was quickly taking on as, through personal counseling, I grew beyond the person who I had started the relationship as. I was willing to do anything to keep from hurting him and so I sacrificed myself and ignored my growing doubts and sadness, which did feel better for a little while, until my stoicism started to burn an effigy of my own inauthenticity and my true feelings began to leak out. At some point, he finally caught on that I was unhappy and I had to come clean. I broke my own heart because it came time to tell him he wasn’t in mine anymore.
As I am still dealing with the devastation of the end of our relationship, I have a better understanding of what it is to be the person who walks away. Dumpers hurt too. There is still a hole and a certain finality where that person used to be. Where your life with them ended and your new unclear life begins. Where the heart is involved, breaking up almost always is like surgery of the soul, especially if we are the ones that perpetrated it. Especially when we know others will be disappointed and angry at us, when we know intrinsically the pain of rejection and heartbreak that we cause. No one gets away from it.
