The Perfect Breakup?
Oct/090
Someone on our Skribit page (that’s the little widget on the right-hand side of Lifehack’s pages where you can make requests, which I or other Lifehack writers look at for ideas) requested a post on how to act when you break up with someone. While it’s never easy to break up with someone (assuming it’s someone you actually do like), I feel like I’ve been through enough breakups to have learned a bit about how to make it as painless as it can be for everyone involved.
First, some history: I’ve been in four relationships that mattered, three of which lasted for 2 years or longer. I didn’t “date” much at all in my 20s, but have dated quite a bit in my 30s. Not counting situations where I went out with someone only once or a few times and nothing came of it, I’d estimate I’ve seen about 30 women or so that haven’t turned into long-term relationships. So that’s about 35 endings where the other person mattered to me in some way (beyond just being a human worthy of some basic decency and respect). Which is a lot by some standards, not many by others, but which I think has given me at least some perspective on breaking up.
Except in the rare case where both partners realize that their relationship isn’t working at the exact same time and are able to easily and honestly acknowledge that, all breakups are hard. No matter how inappropriate someone might be for us (or us for them, if we’re honest), there is almost always a sense of personal rejection whenever someone tells us, or we tell them, that it’s over.
There are a few things we can do to ease the pain we feel or we inflict. Some of these apply when you’re the dumper, some when you’re the dumpee. And then there are a few for after the break-up, and those apply either way. Let’s start with some tips for when you’re the one breaking it off.
When you break up with someone…
- Know why. Before you act, do a little self-reflection. It’s easy to say “It’s not you, it’s me” but a lot harder to mean it if you don’t know what about you “it” is. You don’t have to tell your soon-to-be-ex everything, but you should at least understand for yourself.
- Be honest. While you don’t have to unleash a torrent of insults on the person you’re breaking up with, at least be clear about the main reasons things aren’t working for you. And don’t lie about remaining friends if you have no interest in this person as a friend. It just drags out the inevitable.
- Don’t drag it out. It can be scary to tell someone you’re not interested in seeing them any more. So scary, in fact, that you don’t – you just act colder and colder, find excuses not to see them, start picking at their weaknesses, putting them through the wringer while you build up the courage to do what you need to do. You’ll both be happier if you make a clean break sooner rather than later.
- Be gentle but firm. There’s no reason to be hurtful, no matter how bad things are going. But do be clear that this is not an ultimatum, an invitation to improvement, or just another argument – this is The End.
When someone breaks up with you…
- Dignity first. Easier said than done, especially if you thought things were going well. But no matter how surprised you are, try to act in a way your parents (or clergy, or some other person you respect) would be proud of. Don’t threaten, attack, list their shortcomings back at them, scream, faint, say you’ll kill yourself, beg, or do anything else – the best that can happen is you’ll feel awful later, the worst is that they won’t break up with you and now you’re stuck with someone who wants out.
- Get to a safe place. Find a friend, a family member, a clergy member, or anyone you can count on and let them support you. Getting dumped is hard work – you’re going to need a little while to process it.
- It really isn’t you, it’s them. Don’t be too hard on yourself – they dumped you for reasons that have to do with who they are, not who you are. Seriously, when we’re really in love, we’re in love with a person’s faults as well as their best features; the bottom line is, if you have faults that drove someone away, it’s because they didn’t accept and love them, and therefore didn’t accept and love you. That’s not an excuse to be awful, it’s just the truth – the worst murderers and rapists and dirtbags in the world still manage to be loved by someone.
- But don’t let yourself off the hook, either. The person that just dumped you had their own reasons, but that doesn’t mean you’re perfect. Consider what you want from a relationship, and why you weren’t getting it from the one that just ended (and you weren’t, I promise). And learn from that.
After the break-up…
- No take-backs. Seriously. No booty calls, no pre-existing commitments, no getting together just to talk. Not for a good while, anyway – I realize that people can change and make things work, but that doesn’t happen overnight. More often what happens overnight is you get lonely, or you can’t find anyone better, or you get horny. Getting back together can only prolong something that’s pretty much doomed. I know you think you’ll be the exception, but you won’t. Not until one or both of you make some real changes.
- Let hate happen. Being angry at an ex is natural. It might be stupid, unproductive, even awkward, but it’s totally natural – let it happen. Don’t act out towards them or anything, but don’t try to force yourself to process all that emotion out of the way too soon. It takes time – both to deal with your anger over whatever they did or said or were, and to get over your anger at yourself. And you will be angry at yourself: for getting involved with someone who was wrong for you, for being suckered, for letting someone good get away, or for any of a host of reasons. Let it happen.
- You don’t have to be friends. Especially if your now ex-relationship lasted a long time, this can be hard to swallow. Yes, your ex probably does know you better than anyone else. And you probably have a lot of the same interests. Maybe you will eventually be friends, down the road, but for now, you have to be faithful to yourself first – you really can’t put yourself out there for your ex the way a friend should. And if you never get to be friends again, well, that’s sad, but it’s not the worst thing ever. Don’t force it.
- Don’t get even. If you were hurt badly, your instinct might be to hurt them back. Not a good idea. Seriously, as hard as it is, you have to let it go. It’s not a game with winners and losers – the pain you’re feeling is the pain of having invested yourself in a situation that was wrong for you. Going for revenge will only hurt you more (you’re still investing in that bad relationship), and may hurt others around you (like the person you sleep with to get back at a cheating ex).
- Don’t stalk. This should be self-explanatory, but apparently it’s not. Think of breaking up like going to jail – you’re allowed one phone call. (And it should be about the stuff they left at your place, and that’s it!) Don’t call them to ask “why?!?!”, don’t check their email or voicemail with the password they forgot they gave you, don’t hang around their work, and definitely don’t visit them at home. Here’s the thing: psychologically, there’s a threshold beyond which you lose control of what seem at first like harmless issues, and you become obsessed. Stalking really is a sickness; fortunately it’s preventable by simply denying yourself the satisfaction of trying to find out about your now-ex.Here’s the other thing: yes, they’re seeing someone. Yes, they’re flirting with that new assistant at work. Yes, they’re working as an exotic dancer now. Yes, they’re into all sorts of kinky stuff they would never do with you. Yes, they took that trip to Asia you planned together. Yes, they got a better job. Yes, they went back to their spouse. Yes, they got a dog. Yes, yes, yes – everything you’re afraid of is true. Stop worrying about their life and start living your own!
- If you’re being stalked, don’t respond. Stalking is a simple positive reinforcement mechanism: the stalker does something, and are rewarded when you respond. When the phone rings 50 times and you finally pick up and tell them never to call you again, they get their reward – and they learn that they have to let the phone ring 50 times to get it again. Same with email, ringing the doorbell, visiting you at work, etc. Pay no attention, at all. If things get too out of hand, appoint someone — a security person at work, a family member at home, or whoever you can trust – to block all contact. Send their calls automatically to voice mail, set up a forwarding rule in your email program to send their emails to someone else to review (in case they turn threatening) – generally erase the person from your life. Eventually, the pleasure circuit will run out of ways to get that stimulus and your stalker will start to heal.
When my last major relationship ended, a friend gave me some really good advice. In fact, she had me write it in dry-erase marker on my mirror (lipstick would have done the job as well, but I don’t keep any around…). The advice was this: “There wasn’t anything you could have done differently.” You’re you, and you acted in what you thought was the right way at every point. You have to accept that, and the rest comes easier once you do.
Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer’s Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he’s not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
Birthdays, Self-Reflection, and a Better Year Ahead
Sep/090
I recently had a birthday. As I’ve gotten older, birthdays have become for me a time of intense self-reflection: where am I in my life, where do I want to be, what could I improve? They don;t depress me, like they do so many others, but they do make me think.
Birthdays are also natural times for me to make new resolutions. New Years Day has never felt like much more than an accident of the calendar, but birthdays – especially with mine falling right at the start of the academic calendar that has dominated most of my life, when I really am making a new start in much of my life with the dawn of a new academic school year – seem like a natural time to start making choices about the year ahead.
Now, I said “resolutions”, and we all know resolutions fail. My fellow Lifehack writers have written about the failure of resolutions over and over again, as for instance in Steve Errey’s post entitled pretty unambiguously New Years Resolutions Don’t Work – Here’s Why. But I think we need to reframe the idea of resolutions, to think about them not so much as goal-setting but as problem-solving.
When we think about resolutions, we tend to think of them as a matter of resolve, that is, of willpower. “I resolve to do x, y, and z.” Of course, if we had the willpower to work on our novel, pass on rich desserts, or be more outgoing at social events, we wouldn’t need to resolve those things in the first place. And so yes, they fail – and often leave us bitter and disappointed with ourselves.
But what if we thought about resolutions not so much as a matter of resolve but of solutions – that is, as a re-solution to life’s problems? My father, a great collector of quotes, likes to repeat Einstein’s dictum that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”; it seems to me that most of life’s problems remain with us because the solutions we’ve adopted don’t really solve them – and so we try the same solutions, over and over, harder and harder, thinking eventually those problems must give ground.
Consider, for example, this situation which many of us are or have been in:
- Problem: Your aren’t advancing in your chosen career.
- Resolution: Work harder, put in longer hours, apply for higher positions more often.
- Re-solution: Are you still committed to this career? Maybe you don’t have the passion and drive you had when you entered it ten years ago. If money weren’t an issue, would you still want to do what you do? What would you do? Inventory your skillset and your passions today and start looking into changing careers.
Maybe that isn’t how you’d address the problem, but you get the idea: a real re-solution needs to address the problem not in terms of what you aren’t doing often or well enough but at the very core, questioning the assumptions that the problem itself is grounded in. If you’re stalled out in your career because you no longer have any passion for it and are just putting your time in to collect a check, then a career change may well be in order – and if so, then it no longer matters that you’re stalled in your current career.
Let’s try applying this to a personal matter:
- Problem: You’ve been dating for months/years/decades and can’t seem to find someone with whom you’re interested in a relationship.
- Resolution: Get out more. Join an online dating service. Visit a professional matchmaker.
- Re-solution: What are you really looking for in a partner? Maybe you’re spending too much time and energy dating people because you should be interested in them, not because you are. Or Maybe you’re dating anyone who seems interested in you at all “just in case”. Take time to figure out the pattern in your past dating life and then act to consciously break that pattern.
Again, this may not be your re-solution, but the principle applies: whatever you’re doing isn’t working, so don’t do more of it, do something entirely different. And you can’t know what to do differently without really examining not just the behaviors that make up your current practices but the reasons you are behaving that way in the first place.
For the last few weeks, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing – re-thinking my goals, my choices, and my habits to see what simply isn’t helping to solve the things in my life that I’m not quite happy about. And, at the same time, the things I am – this isn’t about self-flagellation, but about an honest inventory of strengths and shortcomings, so that the one can be applied to the other.
Two years ago, that process led me to embrace a fledgling second career as a writer; last year, it led me to seriously rethink my approach to relationships and what I wanted in a partner; this year, who knows? I think I have some answers I didn’t have a month ago – and I have another 12 months to figure out what to do with them.
Dustin M. Wax is the project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer’s Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he’s not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
GTD Refresh, Part 5: Building the Weekly Review Habit
Jun/090
At the very beginning of David Allen’s recorded lecture, Getting Things Done Fast, he tells his audience that the most important but single most difficult part of becoming more productive is making time every week for a weekly review. Most important because this couple of hours of “time out” once a week is where virtually all the GTD magic happens – it’s where we make sure everything’s out of our heads and in our trusted system, so we can use our brains for doing Good Stuff instead of nagging us about the Good Stuff we should be doing. Most difficult because… well, I have my theories.
First of all, weekly reviews are hard because it is simply difficult, in a practical sense, to take an hour or two off and focus on the bigger picture. This difficulty is compounded by psychological factors – for one thing, most of us feel our moment-to-moment involvement in our work is essential, and if we’re not actually working on work – even busy work – we fear things will fall apart. For another thing, spending a couple hours thinking about our work doesn’t feel like work – it can take some time to get into our heads that this “meta-work” is an important part of our work as a whole.
There are emotional reasons as well. For one thing, I think most of us are just afraid, on some level, of spending that much time with ourselves. What kind of stuff are we going to find out? Self-reflection can be scary! Also, most of us have been raised to see such self-reflection as kind of selfish – who are we to deserve that kind of scrutiny? That leads us not to trust ourselves, which leads to a lack of honesty that undermines the weekly review habit – you can’t build a trusted system without trusting yourself!
For me, there has always been some combination of these factors. My schedule is kind of chaotic – not just because of disorganization but because as an academic part of my job is to respond to whatever my 150 students in any given semester throw at me, and to do so fairly quickly. In my other life as a writer, while I can block out time to work, I am somewhat at the whim of editors, clients, and of course my audiences – who knows what emergency next week will bring?
All that chaos has made it difficult for me to engage myself in a weekly review consistently – every effort has lasted a few weeks then fallen to the wayside as the rest of my life piled up (a sign, perhaps, that I wasn’t doing it very well anyway). On top of that, too much of what I do in weekly reviews gets waylaid later on as I put my plans into practice, which has made it harder and harder to trust myself, which again is bad for my trusted system.
A return to trust
I know all this, so when I started the process of recommitting myself to building a system as close as possible to GTD, I knew I’d have to deal with it.
Fortunately, I have a few things working in my favor, and I think I’ve done a couple things right in laying the groundwork this time around.
While I haven’t always been very good about the weekly review, I have generally been good about keeping my lists up-to-date, and about doing “mini-reviews” – scrolling through my list of projects every few days to see if there’s anything I could be adding as next actions. This is one of the core practices that makes up the weekly review, so I’ve got that part down, and can build on it.
What makes me more hopeful this time around is that I’ve added a list of Areas of Focus to my setup, the idea being that not only do I generate tasks from my list of projects, but I generate projects and tasks from my Areas of Focus list. This should help me keep on track, since a) it’s something I don’t do in my “mini-reviews”, and b) it leads into the “looking forward” part of the weekly review, which is the part that I think scares me (and others) off.
That leaves, of course, the practical concern of scheduling the time in. Fridays are a natural for me, since I rarely work on Fridays – but although I’ve been doing Friday weekly reviews for the last couple weeks, I’m thinking Mondays might be better, since they put me “closer to the action” – I have a better idea of what’s going on around me at the beginning of the week than I do guessing what might be going on at the end of the previous week.
Getting weekly reviews done
As I said at the beginning of this post, weekly reviews are important – rather than being a drain on your available work time, done right the weekly review should add not only to your work time but your confidence and calmness about doing that work. For a sense of what a weekly review should look like, have a look at my Back to Basics post from last year.
More than anything else, though, a weekly review is a point of connection between you and your work. We live in a go-go-go society where work – any work – is expected of each of us, all the time. Americans, especially, work harder than just about anyone – not necessarily more efficiently or on more important things, but longer hours and with fewer breaks. It’s all too easy in all this rush of work for work’s sake to lose track of why we’re doing it and of what it has to do with us as people.
A weekly review is about task management and scheduling, but it’s also about reconnecting with our work in a personal way, evaluating our work in terms of higher-purpose goals and life objectives, aligning the work we do today with the dreams we have of tomorrow. We aren’t afforded many moments like that in life, so it’s important that we create them for ourselves.
Dustin M. Wax is the project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer’s Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he’s not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
