THE COMPATIONATE PERPETRATOR

A note to the perpetrator

• You can’t be the bad guy and the good guy at the same time. So be the bad guy. Accept the role you’ve cast yourself in.
• Let the other person hate you and resent you. Let them call you every bad thing: mean, base, unloving, idiotic, a cad and a loser, a liar and a worm. They have a right to see you that way. You hurt them and disappointed them. You walked.
• Stay away. Even if you are tempted to give comfort, to defend your action, to assuage your own loneliness. To be “just friends”.
• You will find that the playing field is somewhat leveled by what you’ve done. Knowledge is power, and now you’ve let the other person know the truth about your feelings, and about their prospects with you. Now they can see clearly—if you let them. The information you were withholding gave you an advantage; now you’ve lost it. That’s the price you pay. Don’t try to get it back.
• The person you’ve dumped will now have a chance to get over you and maybe find someone they’ll be happier with. You may not like the sound of this; but it’s your job to suck it up and let it be. You can now be replaced; in time you will be. This is another consequence of your action, so live with it.
• You have now become part of that person’s past. You’re going to fade into history. So fade.


On-again, off-again breakups. When these precepts are violated, as in the case of Compassionate Bob, what often happens is an onagain, off-again breakup. A couple, after all, have been each other’s main companions, and they have more to offer each other than any third person can. And now that they’ve given up on winning it all, the stakes are lower, so it’s not so scary. The worst has already happened . . .
It’s tough being by yourself when you’re used to someone else always being around. So when loneliness or boredom kicks in, one person or the other gets on the phone, and the backsliding begins.

The feeling is: we’re not trying for true love anymore, we have nothing to lose, and I feel like some pizza and TV. And I don’t like eating pizza alone.

What really tangles things up is when you involve your friends in your breakup. In the case of Compassionate boy, girl had given a running report to her best confidante Jill, and even before him dumped her, the two women had agreed that things were not okay with him. He was a user and a narcissist; he didn’t really care about her. Then he did break it off, and Jill supported her in the decision to be strong and deal with being dumped. By this time the other woman had invested a lot of time and empathy into her’s situation,
and into the negative verdict on the relationship. Even the other woman’s husband had gotten involved. All three agreed that things with him would never have been right, that him was bad news, that it was a mercy he had broken off with her, that now she could move on and find someone better.

Then Girl let Boy lure her back. Jill and Larry experienced this as a betrayal. They weren’t able to do a 180 with all their beliefs and suddenly think bad Bob was a good guy. They felt as if she had been toying with them, manipulating them to take a position just so she could try it out. Were they supposed to be jerked around like puppets every time she changed her mind? They had helped her find the truth and now she was abandoning it. Eventually they were proven right, but their relationship with her was now added to
the casualty total.

I hope that this little tour of the warning signs of a breakup, and the tangled ethics that a wannabe leaver has to pass through, may have put some perspective on your own experience, and helped cast it in less black-and-white terms. These matters are complicated on both sides, and the more you realize that, the more you can avoid reacting in a simplistic way. The discussion of the Perpetrator’s Precepts and on-again, off-again breakups can alert you to how things may have been mishandled, and help you guard against ongoing mistakes.

Having pulled ourselves through the doorway of goodbye, it’s time now to look at what lies outside it. It’s time to take stock of the pain and hurt that lost love inflicts, and the injuries—material and spiritual—that result. A person in this situation is a little like a wounded soldier: in need of diagnosis, first aid, and a move to safety.

Then their condition can be looked at more closely and injuries healed. That way they can live to fight a winning battle next time. (The enemy here is not your once or future partner, but the forces that wreck relationships.) So we’ll start by taking a hard, honest look at what a breakup often makes you feel. There are a bunch of reactions that it can cause, involving denial, hurt, despair, and anger. Sometimes several of them
churn around inside you and take turns surfacing. We’ll get to all of them, but we’ll begin at the top of the list, with something called a broken heart.