The Coward's Breakup: Avoiding Her Pain Costs You Your Masculinity

You've felt the pull to just stop texting back. Fewer words, less confrontation, no messy goodbye. It feels like mercy. It's actually cowardice with better PR.

Ghosting was never about her. It's about you, training yourself to avoid every hard conversation for the rest of your life: the colleague you need to correct, the friend you need to confront. Hard moments get harder every time you practice disappearing instead of speaking.

Some guys avoid the conversation because they can't stand the pain it will cause. Others avoid it because they don't care enough to bother. We tell ourselves both are a kindness. Neither is. She is God's daughter before she is your ex, and how you end things says more about your honor than how you started them.

There is a case to be made for choosing the harder conversation on purpose, the one that costs you something now so it builds something in you for good. It's not about finding the right words.

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Transcript

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Right.

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How do you end a relationship? How do you break up with a girlfriend? One of the things that makes me the most mad nowadays is when I hear from young women, uh, older girls who've been dating, and then I hear that they get ghosted or got left on red and haven't heard from him in a few weeks. I guess this means it's over. And there's a sense of non-closure or a sense of, I thought that went great. I don't know what went wrong. And it angers me because of the cowardice and the passivity that I see in guys who avoid or who just ghost someone. And I think it's pathetic and lame. And I think not only is it harmful to the girls that they're dating, but it also is shortchanging the guy's development and capacity for conflict going forward because breaking up with a girlfriend is basically the same skills and tactics it takes to have hard conversations, period, which you're going to be having the rest of your life with your friends, with your colleagues, with your parents, with your kids, with uh your neighbors. The ability to have difficult conversations well is an important skill that needs to be developed. And if you avoid developing it, you'll never develop it. And so when it comes to breaking up with a girlfriend or ending a relationship, here's a few things that I want you to think about. Uh, number one is you need to consider what it means to be kind. Now, that does not mean you don't say things that aren't difficult for the other person to hear, but you want to have empathy or sympathy for what it would be like to hear those things. And so I am not attracted to you, would be very hard to hear. And so, but if you are in touch with the pain that what your words will say will create, that will change your delivery of those words. Um, I just don't feel like we've connected well. It's felt clunky. We're on different pages. Being broken up with is a painful experience. And so you having sympathy for what it'd feel like to be on the receiving end is key. I think some guys have so much sympathy for that that they can't avoid looking someone in the eye. And so they just avoid it. And so if you've spent a meaningful amount of time with a person in person, I'm not saying if you go on one date, you have to meet up with them on a second date to break up with them to not go on a third date. That's not really a breakup. That's just not having a second date. But if you've been a couple or an item or you've been exclusively interacting for some time, talking, whatever you want to call it, if you've hung out with someone more than a few times in person, you, I think, owe them looking them in the eye and saying, I think this isn't going anywhere. I want to tell you why. I'm sorry for how painful this is. I've appreciated the time we've gotten so far. And so here's what I mean by that is what happens to your nervous system, what happens to your heart, what happens to your mind when you look someone in the eye and tell them a hard thing, and that you feel with them and you recognize the big emotions that might create in them, you actually are growing as a man in that moment when you are delivering the hard news in person. I think you should never break up with someone over text, you should never break up with someone in an email. I think whenever possible, you should ask yourself, what would be the most painful way for me to deliver this news? I'm going to choose that way. I'm going to get in front of them. I'm going to sit down. I'm going to look them in the eye. I'm going to tell them the truth. And that's for my growth and for their honor and respect. That uh for their sake, I need to say, hey, I misjudged this. Hey, I was wrong. Hey, I shouldn't have done this. Hey, in this process, I know I've been unclear. And so you want to give clarity about why, and then give clarity about what. The worst thing that could happen is you kind of have this long, meandering, painful conversation, and she walks away and goes, Did we just break up? I'm not sure. And so maybe you need to have some notes on your phone. You may need to read them. You may need to write a letter and then some version of read that letter. Uh, but whatever you need to do to honor the other person, you as a man, the stronger vessel, you need to be thinking about chivalry in these moments. What is honoring that woman who is God's daughter look like in this moment? That when you think about it through that lens, that the Father in heaven will judge me for how I'm honoring this woman in this moment by telling her the truth, by being kind, by being loving, but at the same time being clear, that is what I want the operating uh question to be like is that woman is God's daughter, and I need to honor her accordingly in how I go about this. And so ghosting is unacceptable, passive aggressive text is unacceptable. Trying to get her to break up with you by being annoying and terrible is not an option. That you want to be honorable and clear and kind in ending this thing. And that similarly applies to business relationships or friendships where you're going, hey, I need to spend less time with you because I need to spend it over here. That the more you can be upfront and direct and clear, at the same time, having sympathy and kindness in that decision is going to be key. Now, if you're bad at this, then the only way to get better at it is to practice it. And my encouragement to you is if you avoid doing hard conversations now, you'll be bad at them the rest of your life. Anyone who's good at hard conversations has experienced a lot of pain by getting good at them slowly and bit by bit over time. So lean in, don't lean out, treat others with honor and have the hard conversations and be clear when things need to end or go a different direction.