Why do you care how you break up with someone?

I should preface this by saying that I’ve never broken up with anyone or had anyone break up with me. I also don’t care, that doesn’t change the fact that I’m right.

First let’s point out the ways to break up with someone. As far as I can figure you’ve got: face-to-face, phone, letter, email, text, have someone else do it for you or just stop talking to them until they figure it out. The one other option I thought of would be to change your Facebook status to “single” and see how long that takes them to catch on.

Really, all of these that aren’t face-to-face get negative connotations associated with them. Telling someone to their face is generally accepted as the “correct” way of breaking up with someone. My question is, why the crap do you care how you break up with someone?

I’m going to assume that if you are breaking it off, you have ill feelings toward them, so what difference does it make how you do it? Why would you choose an in-person confrontation when you could simply shoot them a 160 character text letting them know it’s over. It’s instantaneous and you have to be brief. If they respond, you can just delete it and even block their number if you want.

Phone is ok, but you still have to talk to them and deal with the verbal repercussions that might come from the incident. Letter is good, because you don’t actually have to talk to them, but it could take awhile and you might get stuck seeing them before they get the letter. Email is about as good as a text, but in an email, you aren’t limited to a length, so you could ramble and make it worse than it needs to be.

Having someone else do it subjects one of your friends to the awkwardness that is this situation itself and may cause them problems themselves. And the stop talking method might sound good for you conflict avoiders, but will probably cause more conflict in the long run, since your significant other will most likely seek you out.

The Facebook one is probably the funniest (for you), but could make them more confused than anything, so should most likely be avoided.

So there you have it. The next time you break up with someone, do yourself a favor and do it with a text. If they were breaking up with you, they probably would.

---

More Reviews

---

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Doing Things, People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.