Slow Down to Break Up
Libby shares her most important advice for people who are breaking up or on the brink (and even if you're not) -- slow down.
Transcript
Did you know that one of the most common times that people break up statistically, like there's actual research around this is right around Valentine's day, either right before or right after Valentine's day. Isn't that so ironic? I know that some of us, myself included have some sort of mixed about Valentine's day and maybe, you know, maybe we think, oh, well this is a sign that, that holiday is actually more harmful than good at the end of the day. But I actually don't think it has as much to do with the actual holiday itself, but really where it lands on the calendar, which as is at a time of transition, winter is beginning to end. The days are getting longer and the weather is maybe not quite getting warmer yet, but you see the light at the end of the icy cold tunnel. And sometimes when you start thinking about the transitioning of the seasons, you think about out the transitions in your life, and you think maybe it's time to start planning your spring cleaning. And maybe it also leads you to think about your relationships and what's serving you.
I think now in this present moment in our whole world, really, we are in the midst of a big transition and we're, we're in the middle of it. Or maybe even just right at the beginning of it, we're looking at this potential radical shift in how things work and how we all live. And what I'm seeing is that it's putting a tremendous amount of pressure on all of, of our relationships. And some of them I'm seeing are cracking and breaking right now, I've talked to a number of people who are in this situation where they are either ending a relationship or they've just ended a relationship, or they are thinking about ending a relationship or there's some other big change that's coming. That's going to change the relationship so much. It's going to be a new one with the same person. If this is the situation you are in this episode is for you. I'm gonna share with you my one big tip for getting through this time when you're in relationship transition or going through a breakup,
So if you listen to my episode on disruption, you know, that I think that change is inevitable and we're in a time of radical change in a lot of different ways right now. And it can be really, even hard to keep up with all the things that are changing all the time. I know a lot of people are like literally cleaning house right now, getting rid of clutter. And I'm definitely one of those people right now, I've been going through my closets and getting rid of toys and all kinds of stuff. And I know that the situation that we're in right now is also pushing a lot of relationships to the brink or in some cases they're falling apart or they're drifting away. And even the relationships that aren't necessarily in danger of ending, some of them are changing substantially due to the circumstances, just being different.
As I said, when I talked about disruption, it can be really hard to just know which way is up when things are in that, in between space where you're are in the transition, but not through it yet. And you haven't arrived at the other side. And that's when you're in this period of just groundlessness and it can be very disorienting. So I want to offer you what I think is so, so important to do when you're in that state, which is to slow way down, like really slow down and take a lot of space. This is my number one, tip that I'm offering you today. I want to acknowledge that slowing down can be hard. Often. We really just wanna get to the next thing. We want to find our footing, get oriented and get moving. Get there wherever there is. We don't wanna mess around.
We wanna know right away what things are going to look like next. We want to get right to the clarity, whatever it is. Are we breaking up? Are we staying together? Are we gonna be friends? And then we wanna just get right on that. We wanna move right onto being friends. After we break up, we want to seamlessly go from seeing each other once a week to seeing each other once a month, we wanna move right to feeling like we can again, know what we can expect and get really clear on what's okay and not okay. And sometimes it can work like that. Maybe sometimes you can make a seamless transition without slowing down or missing a beat. But sometimes it just feels like that's what's happening. Sometimes when a transition feels seamless, what's actually going on is someone is bypassing what they're feeling or shoving things aside or burying things during that transit.
And those things can end up coming up later and maybe even building up into a future blow up. And so if you're interested in potentially avoiding that and just being with what is slowing down can help with that. So what does that mean to slow down? Well, when you think about slowing down a piece of music, it's making more space between the notes or it's staying on one note longer before going on to the next one. So in relationships, what I want you to think about is, is taking and giving space between the two of you or staying where you are before you make any big moves. Taking space is really good. If things are really rough. And what I mean by taking space is time apart. If you know, for sure that this is a breakup or you're in the midst of a breakup, or you've just gone through a breakup, one recommendation that I always give people in that situation is to just have a period of no contact for about a month and by no contact.
I mean, no text, no emails, no phone calls, no seeing each other, no interaction on social media. I mean, no interaction don't even like each other's posts. And if you can't keep yourself from interacting on social media, sometimes the best thing to do is just do a temporary block. And I know that's sounds maybe harsh, but I am actually, I think blocking someone on social media can actually be very loving and caring. It doesn't have to feel harsh. Sometimes that's the way you need to create distance. And, and it's not necessarily good for you or them to see what you doing every day. You don't need to see each other's posts or see pictures of what you ate for lunch or when they're seeing their partners or whatever. It can be just really, really good to take a break from all of that during this month long, no contact period.
Now, if you're listening to me say, you know, be out of contact for a month and you're like, that feels like a really long time. That might be signaling exactly how important it is for you to take that month because a month actually, isn't a very long time in the scheme of things, but when things are intense and feelings are running high time can get distorted. And also everything can feel very, very immediate, which is a good reason to slow down taking space and having even a period of no contact can actually also be really important when you might only be just at the brink of a breakup, but not yet clear on whether you actually want to break up yet. It's yet another moment when there's lots of intensity and you might be both getting caught up in your whoosh and you might feel this inclination to just pull the plug and break up, to put a stop to all that stress.
But that's honestly one of the worst times to try to make a big decision around what's next. So it's really just so good to take space, slow down, breathe. If what you're worried about is that maybe you're destroying the opportunity for you to be friends later or that the person is gonna trash talk. You and it's gonna be this destructive painful thing. I promise you the space will, will make it more likely that you will have this person in a positive way in your life. This person isn't just going to disappear from your life forever in a month, truly moving on from any kind of meaningful relationship usually takes a whole lot longer than that, but the breathing room is so, so, so important. Now there are lots of situations though, where you're in a transition and it's logistically not possible to have no contact, or maybe it just doesn't feel warranted to you.
Some examples I can think of are, if you are co-parents or you're cohabitating, and you wish to continue that together or maybe you just have a lot of overlapping connections or commitments, or maybe the relationship is just going through a smaller transition. You might not want to, or be able to create so much space that you're not in any contact, but instead you might just want to make more space where you can or just stay where you are a bit longer before moving to the next thing. So I'll give you an example, actually from my own life one of my partners Kyrr and I hit a really, really rough patch a few years ago, like we were having a lot of fights and having a lot of confusion. It was really disorienting and really hard for both of us. And we were both pretty unhappy about where we kept ending up when we spent time with one another.
And honestly, I think if someone had pushed me in that really difficult time to either have things be better and fixed or end the relationship, I probably would've ended the relationship because at the time I couldn't see how to fix things and make them better. And we were both consistently making each other pretty unhappy, but this relationship meant a lot to me. And I didn't want to let it go. And Kyrr felt the same way. We had so much joy and happy linking our lives together. And there were so many ways that we wanted to remain connected. And so we weren't up for calling it quits, but we were also both kind of worn out by the disharmony. So I asked for space and that wasn't easy because they are in a relationship up with my husband Drew. And so it was actually because of that, that we had been spending a lot more incidental, unplanned time together, cuz they were just at my house a lot.
And all that unplanned time together was one of the things that was contributing to a lot of the discord between us. So I, I had to ask to put some boundaries around that incidental time so that I was only interacting with them when I had made intentional plans with them or vice versa. And that meant that we were seeing each other less. And it also meant that there were some boundaries on when Kyrr and Drew could see each other because drew and I lived together. And that was actually a little bit painful, I think for everyone to have to do that. But it also gave everyone some breathing room. It gave us both time to reflect and also to remember why we love each other and what we have together and the dust settled so that we could see more clearly those things and together we found a better way forward and now they're living with me and it's great, but I don't think we could have gotten there if we hadn't slowed down.
And as I'm telling this story, I'm thinking that a lot of people right now might be having a big uptick in the incidental time they're having together, which I don't know that might be for you increasing disharmony. And if that is, is something going on for you, one of the things that might help is to figure out a way to get some space and make some breathing room. And you know, if you're going through a transition where the goal is to remain connected to the person and you've decided you don't wanna like go no contact. But you maybe you'd actually prefer to sit in that discomfort and grief together. I encourage you to create the space again, not by fixing or solving anything, but rather to just hold lot of space for each other's feelings and really work your emotional boundaries. So you have that little bit of space to not get reactive to each other and you know, just be with whatever is.
That's another way to make space is to hold space. Taking space. Really again, it can just give you this chance to just be and breathe and sit with the discomfort and let your feelings be where they are without bottling them up, bypassing them or fixing them, which can help them move through you. Now I'm not saying that if you do all this, if you slow down, you take space, you take 30 days you take 30 days, no contact if you're breaking up or, you know, depending on how you decide to do it, I'm not gonna tell you that all of a sudden after you do that for a month or 30 days or longer, that you're just gonna magically feel better. You're not gonna be magically healed after a month. I think grief doesn't work like that. It's not linear. It kind of you go through a period of time where you feel better and then you go through a wave where it's hard again.
And it generally takes a really long time to get to a good place when there's a major change that happens in your relationships, especially if there's a big loss there of some kind. But what the month will do is it'll give you a chance for your intense emotions to calm down and it'll give you some clarity. It will. It's sort of like if I think about a wound and how, when you're first wounded, you're very inflamed and it's hard for things to heal when they're inflamed. So this is a chance to like, just put the bandage on and leave it alone so that the inflammation can calm down and then you can figure out what comes next. Now let me be clear. This thing that I'm recommending, slowing down, taking space, going no contact leaning into your discomfort and pain. It's hard. You're gonna want to fight it.
You're gonna wanna cheat. Every person that I give that 30 day, no contact advice to, they want to break it. They want to find some, excuse, some loophole, some reason why you can just send one text message about something or figure one thing out or have one last, go at a disagreement or get one last word in something. And every person who I've spoken to who has not heated this 30 day advice has then done the thing and then come back to me and gone, oh, I really wish I hadn't done that. And then they just have to start all over again and reset the 30 day clock. And, but once they do that, they usually commit to it and they find that they feel a lot better afterwards. So if you find yourself like you're, maybe you already know this advice about taking a big, long break or taking a lot of space.
If you, if you know that, but you're still fighting it. One thing I encourage you to ask yourself is why do I feel so urgent about this right now? Why can't this wait? And maybe ask yourself, is there some unmet need I'm trying to get, and I'm trying to fulfill it with this person right now. And cuz the thing that's often can be going on is maybe something feels unresolved and that is fueling that urgency. You know you again, it's this desire again, to fix, to make it feel better. I encourage you instead of breaking the no contact or not respecting the space that you're trying to create to instead look and see if there's another way to meet that need more often than not. You can actually meet that need for yourself or barring that you can maybe reach out to a friend or another partner to see if they can help you feel better.
Okay. So take some space when you're in a transition, slow down. That's my number one tip. I know I've already said a lot about this, so I'm actually gonna leave it there so that this one idea can really sink in. However, if you want more, I have two additional more in depth resources on relationship transitions that you can check out. The first is that I did a pretty long interview on this topic with the folks at normalizing non-monogamy, it's one of their focus Friday's episode. It came out at the end of March and I will link the episode in the show notes. I'll also link a document I created several years ago called the peaceful relationship transitions playbook. This document offers a guide on how to have a breakup conversation. And I just wanna say here, even if you're not in the place right now where you think you are or will be in a relationship transition, I still encourage you to check out these resources.
Another idea I got from Jesse Lou Gleason is that it's actually a pretty good idea to discuss with current partners. What a breakup might look like between you in advance while things are actually feeling good. I know that sounds like, Ugh, so romantic, right? Like, Hey baby, let's spend tonight instead of, you know, being sexy or watching Netflix or whatever let's spend tonight talking about what's gonna happen when we break up. But stay with me on this. The reason it's a good idea is because it can be really valuable to talk about what might happen and even negotiate what you both might do in the aftermath when your emotions aren't running high. When you're not in that intense heartbreak place. Instead you can preemptively take care of each other when you are feeling the love towards each other and make a plan together so that you're not making it all up in the heat of the moment during a rough time when you're not able to think straight and might feel more inclined to do things and behave in ways that aren't really in alignment with your values and how you wanna be.
So to recap, my number one breakup tip is to slow down, take space and really be right where you are in that uncomfortable in between. I promise you the result, if you do this will be a revelation. And if you want more tips like this one, check out the normalizing non-monogamy podcast where I talk about this or, or download my peaceful relationship transitions playbook.
