FAMILY FACTOR OF BREAKUPS

When you’re first getting to know a new person, there is (or should be) plenty of time to render a negative verdict without feeling too guilty. That’s why I recommend that you exercise this privilege, look for compatibility, and walk away when you discover that it isn’t there.

Walk away early.

Because it will be much harder, later. And one of the reasons for this is that your partner becomes family.
After you’ve lived together for a while, after you’ve met and maybe bonded with each other’s relatives, after you’ve gone through some ups and downs and weathered some rocky miles, you start to feel that you
could no sooner abandon this person than your own parents or your own children. Maybe that basic loyalty is what keeps many couples together through the thin times. They just don’t see it as an option to jettison the other person. So they make the best of things. In the old days, “till death do us part” had this meaning. You have now become my family, flesh of my flesh; you are now instated as part of my nature, closer than blood. Leaving you is unthinkable.


When the padlock of family snicks shut, it just seals in a larger ethical question that faces the would-be breaker-off-er. How can you purposely do something that will make someone else less happy? How
can you administer a blow that will cause pain to someone you care about? This question is easier to deal with—or easier to avoid—if the relationship is causing you more discomfort and pain than him; because
then you can just say, “A little pain on his side is okay if it relieves a lot of pain on mine.”

When that won’t work, a moral searchlight switches on . . .