You Can't Control the Narrative
at least not without mind control
In the last days of their relationships, clients often ask me how to explain an impending breakup to their friends and family. They want their friends and family to “get it,” where “getting it” means everyone is on the same page about what is happening and why. My clients want everyone to think they made the right decision about the breakup, for the right reasons.
That’s only natural. You don’t want your friends and family to think you’re a jerk. You don’t want to lose people in the breakup. You want to emerge from this thing with your self-image and your community pretty much intact.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen, and there’s not very much you can do about it.
Breakup Narratives
A narrative is an explanation, a story about why something is happening. Narratives about breakups are often simplistic. If all the facts about the relationship are like a bowl of beads, a narrative is like a necklace strung from some of those beads. If you pick all the red beads out of the bowl, the necklace looks very different than if you pick out all the yellow ones. It gets even more complicated if you add your own opinion-beads to the bowl. So depending what beads you pick, it’s often possible to construct many narratives that sort of fit the situation.
It’s not evil to construct narratives. Human minds are pattern-matching, meaning-making machines. You’ve probably constructed a hundred narratives already today, unless you just woke up. It’s how the human brain works.
So when a relationship ends, each of the couple’s friends and family members constructs a narrative to explain why this is happening. The narratives have three general flavors:
Team A (Partner B fell short)
Team B (Partner A fell short)
Team Not Taking Sides
Sometimes the breakup is acrimonious, and the couple encourages their friends and family to take sides. Other times the breakup is amicable, and the couple wishes their friends would Not Take Sides. Strangely, the couple’s wishes don’t matter as much as you might think. Even in a bitter breakup, some people will remain neutral, and even in a friendly breakup, some people will take sides. You can’t control the narrative.
Why Don’t the Stories Match?
There are a lot of reasons why so many narratives swirl around breakups. We can start with the obvious: different observers have different personal histories, values, perceptions, and sets of information. With different fact-beads and opinion-beads in their bowls, of course people are going to string different necklaces.
Many people hold belief systems about relationships, particularly ones involving marriage or children, and about what constitutes a “good enough” reason to end a relationship. If your reasons for ending the relationship are not “good enough” by their standards, then they will assign more blame to whomever seems to be instigating the breakup.
Many people feel more comfortable with a story they can understand than one that is private or unknown to them, so they tend to impose a good guy / bad guy narrative even if it doesn’t fit the facts particularly well. Other people feel uncomfortable making assumptions or creating a rift between themselves and the couple, so they tend to impose a neutral narrative even if someone really did behave badly.
Some people think ahead to the social environment they want to occupy after the breakup, and they take whatever side seems most likely to yield that outcome. Some people like to remain loyal to their friends, even if their friends didn’t behave well in the relationship. They support the one they want to keep in their own lives.
And some people need a way to make sense of why this bad thing is happening to the couple but can’t possibly happen to them.
Most of these forces have nothing to do with the couple and their situation. If you are one of the people in the couple, you have very little power to get all of the people around you to see it the way you do. So… then what?
Breakup Fallout
When you end a relationship, particularly a long-standing, committed one, some people are probably going to judge you for that, possibly unfairly.
The only remedy is to ask yourself unflinchingly: are you a jerk?
Have you behaved badly in this relationship? Are you behaving badly in this breakup?
What would it take to meet your own standards?
If you are falling short, according to your own values, then do better. Be not-a-jerk. When you are confident you are meeting your own standards, it will sting less (though not zero) when other people judge you. Sometimes people are just wrong about you, and that’s not your problem.
Meanwhile, as you move through a breakup, you may be thinking about what your life is going to look like afterwards. Community and connection matter a lot.
People in the camp who think you’re a jerk are not going to be in your community anymore. And if you and your ex are not comfortable around each other, you’ll lose some access to the neutral people too. Having to let go of some of your community can be a real loss that you have to grieve. It can also be a relief.
Whatever it is, it will be easier if you see it more clearly and stop trying to change things that are out of your control.
Some people stay too long in relationships that they want to end because they can’t figure out how to prevent other people from thinking badly of them. The answer is: you can’t. Behave as well as you can, and let go of the people who judge you anyway.
Your Partner’s Narrative
So far, all of this has been about friends and family think. But what about your partner?
Unsurprisingly, you also can’t control the narrative in your ex-partner’s head.
A lot of people want to end a relationship and have the other person agree that it was right to end it, and why, when in fact the other person does not agree at all.
Maybe your partner doesn’t want the relationship to end. They think the problems are not very bad or are fixable.
Maybe they agree you should break up, but they disagree about why. Your narratives don’t match.
A hard truth about relationships is that people don’t get more skilled during a breakup. If, during your relationship, the two of you were not great at expressing yourself clearly, understanding the other person’s point of view, and valuing outcomes that truly work for both people, then you are not suddenly going to be better at those things while you are in the process of breaking up. You have less reason than ever to be patient and charitable with each other.
If you couldn’t build shared understanding and consensus during the relationship, then it is unlikely the two of you are going to come out of the relationship with the same story about what happened and why it ended. Your partner might never share your narrative.
If you are waiting until the two of you agree about exactly why to break up, you might never break up. And that might suit one of you just fine – which is also a disincentive to deep understanding.
Consider the possibility that some other people, or even your partner, might judge you, and that there’s actually nothing you can do about that. Having accepted that, decide again what you actually want to do with this relationship, and when.