Sometimes we can only acknowledge how unbearable a relationship had become once it ends.
Your partner leaves and, alongside the hurt, you notice that you have also changed, for the better.
You’re no longer waiting for the next difficult conversation or trying to work out what the atmosphere between you means. The loss hurts. But the relief is harder to explain.
It can feel especially uncomfortable if the relationship was, by any ordinary measure, decent. There may have been love, affection and a shared life you genuinely valued, which you may still want back. So why does some part of you feel lighter now they’ve gone?
Relief can easily be mistaken to mean that you struggled to admit to yourself you wanted the relationship to end. I think it can tell us something more interesting about what staying in the relationship required of you.
Losing the life you knew
When someone leaves, you lose the ordinary structure that you both developed around being together. There’s no longer another person whose presence features in your plans, decisions or thoughts about the future.
This type of familiarity can feel reassuring, and therefore difficult to give up. Even when a relationship is disappointing, frustrating or increasingly difficult, it can still give life a recognisable rhythm. You know what the problems are and roughly how the week works. You may even know the argument you’re likely to have before it begins. None of this makes the relationship reliable, but it does make it known.
Liza Catan (2011), drawing on the psychoanalyst Henri Rey, has described the end of a relationship as a falling away of familiar structures. While Rey’s work focused on more severe psychological states, the core idea he illuminates still applies to ordinary relationships . A relationship can feel both secure and constraining over time, while leaving can expose us to a freedom we’re not entirely prepared for.
This helps make sense of why someone can spend months feeling hemmed in by a relationship and still panic when it ends. Sometimes the fact that the relationship is simply there offers enough security to stay, even when other needs are being compromised.
The freedom you were afraid to want
There are times when people want more space long before they want separation. They look forward to being alone, then feel hurt when their partner seems too comfortable without them. They imagine having fewer obligations to another person, but the idea of no longer mattering to that person strikes a different chord.
Rey was interested in what happens when being close to someone starts to feel too much, but being apart from them doesn’t feel comfortable either. Catan (2011) describes how the wish for more freedom can quickly be followed by anxiety once that closeness is gone. Sometimes we want more space and still feel uneasy when we get it.
Then your partner leaves and the space you had been wanting arrives all at once.
Home may feel calmer, or perhaps there’s some relief in making a decision without having to imagine how it will land with somebody else. At the same time, you can miss them badly and still hope they’ll call. Both things can be true at the same time.
For some people, another uncomfortable thought shows up too: I’m relieved they did what I couldn’t.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you had been planning to leave. It may mean you had been living for some time with a conflict you couldn’t work out how to resolve. You may have felt that ending the relationship would have made you responsible for the hurt that followed, whilst staying meant continuing with something you were no longer sure you wanted. When the other person ends it, the decision is painful, but the indecision is over.
Who are you when they’re no longer there?
In a long relationship, your partner becomes one of the people who helps you know who you are. Certain parts of you become more familiar because they are frequently seen, expected and responded to by them. When they leave, that way of knowing yourself may also disappear.
Ringstrom (2018) suggests relationships help us know ourselves. When a partner notices certain parts of us and responds to them, over time, this can help make those parts feel more familiar to ourselves. We partly learn who we are through the people we are close to. Over time, a relationship can bring out certain sides of us, while others become less visible.
You may, for example, have become the person who kept things steady. If your partner often felt uncertain, competence may gradually have become an important part of how you understood yourself with them. Once the relationship ends, you haven’t only lost the person, you’ve lost the environment in which that version of you made sense.
Goldner (2014) writes about intimate partners becoming deeply involved in one another’s psychological regulation. This is one reason the same person can be experienced as both reassuring and exhausting. Their presence may be difficult at times while also helping to hold a familiar emotional world in place.
So the space after a breakup can feel oddly disorientating. There may be more freedom after the relationship ends, but you have also lost someone who helped make certain parts of you feel familiar and known.
The relationship starts telling you who you are
Over time, people in relationships can develop patterns that don’t fully belong to either person.
Ringstrom (2018) describes the relationship as coming to have “a mind of its own”, where each person responds to the other, who responds in turn, until the interaction becomes difficult to separate into a simple story of cause and effect.
Jessica Benjamin’s idea of complementarity gives this another dimension. Two people can become caught in positions that depend upon one another and become harder to step out of. One person may experience themselves as pursuing because the other withdraws; the other may experience their withdrawal as a response to being pursued. Both feel as though they’re reacting to something the other person has started (Benjamin, 2004).
The important point is less about who started it than about what repeatedly happens to each person once the pattern gets going.
A relationship can make it harder to be anything other than the version of yourself you have become simply by being in it. You know how your partner sees you, and eventually you may start anticipating yourself through that expectation. You become the needy one, perhaps, while they become the distant one. Even attempts to behave differently can be pulled back towards something familiar.
When the relationship ends, the pattern is no longer being repeated between you. You may still carry the expectation that somebody will respond to you in the old way, but the person whose responses helped keep that version of you in place is no longer there.
This may be where some of the relief comes from. You no longer have to keep falling into the same role.
Why you might feel relieved
Relief after a break up can leave you questioning whether the relationship was ever good, or if you should have left sooner. If you’re relieved, perhaps you were never happy. If you miss them, perhaps the relationship should have continued. Neither conclusion gives much room for ambivalence.
You can have loved somebody and become tired of who you were with them. The relationship may have made life feel secure, even though you needed more space than you realised. So when it ends, you may still feel the loss, but also relief that those old patterns are no longer being played out between you
Relief doesn’t determine whether the relationship was good or bad, and it doesn’t tell you that you should’ve left sooner. It may simply draw your attention to what had become difficult in the relationship.
So after someone leaves, it may be more useful to ask: what changed in you once the relationship was over?
The answer may take a while to become clear. The relief is simply one place to begin looking.
References
Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition and the Intersubjective Third. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 5–46.
Catan, L. (2011). Panic and flight: Claustro-agoraphobia in the consulting room. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 27(3), 242–257.
Goldner, V. (2014). Romantic bonds, binds, and ruptures: Couples on the brink. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 24(4), 402–418.
Ringstrom, P. A. (2018). Relational psychoanalytic perspective on couples psychotherapy. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 38(5), 399–408.