When a Relationship Ends: Grieving a Romantic Breakup

It is not at all unusual for the end of a romantic relationship to bring people into therapy. The impact of break ups are often underestimated and there can be social pressure that arrives after a breakup. A race to move on, be fine, to have processed the whole thing within an unspecified timeframe that reflects well on your resilience. That pressure does not map onto what grief actually involves, and the end of a significant relationship is at its core, a bereavement.

 

What is actually being lost

When a relationship ends, what is lost is more than the person. It is the shared life that was built with them. The routines, plans, and the particular version of the future that included them. The end of a relationship signals the loss of an identity formed in relation to them: the partner but also the person who was loved by this specific individual, the self that existed in the context of this relationship. Another thing that may be lost is the hope that this was a relationship that would last.

That is a significant amount to lose all at once. And grief tends to arrive as a series of 'firsts'. The first night or weekend alone, the first occasion that was supposed to be shared, the moment of reaching for the phone to tell them something before remembering they are no longer your safe space. The gradual erasure of future events and significant dates from the mental calendar.

 

When you decided, when they decided, when nobody quite did

The experience of a breakup can vary significantly depending on its circumstances. 

When the ending was your decision, the grief tends to come layered with guilt, doubt, and the particular loneliness of having chosen something painful. The person who ends a relationship is not exempt from loss. They are grieving too, often without the social permission that is more readily extended to the person who was left.

When the ending was not your decision, the grief tends to be sharper and the loss of agency more pronounced. There is the additional wound of rejection to contend with. The shock, the question of why, feelings of humiliation, the search for meaning, the particular hurt of loving someone who has decided to leave.

And then there is the ending that happens gradually, without a clear moment. Where over time, both parties started to lean away, to reduce effort, to withdraw affections from each other. Here the relationship may gradually recede rather than breaking. That kind of ending is a different type of grief. There is no single event to point to, no clear before and after, rather the loss of what was, and a shift into a new normal without one’s team mate.

Why moving on is not the same as grieving

The cultural instruction after a breakup tends to be oriented toward ‘moving forward’ and ‘getting over it’: new activities, new social engagements, dating, casual encounters, eventually new relationships. These are not wrong per se, it is just that the grieving process is usually more nuanced than this. The haste to ‘move on’ tends to mean that grief is deferred rather than truly processed.

Grief requires something that moving on does not: the willingness to fully feel the loss rather than push through it. To sit with the relationship’s absence, rather than immediately filling the void. To let the relationship have mattered, which means letting its ending hurt in proportion to how much it mattered. That is not comfortable work and it tends to take (a frustratingly undefined duration of) time. Approaching relationship grief in this way tends to be the work that allows a genuine connection to one's life and new relationships to follow.

 

What makes it harder

Several things tend to complicate the grief process after a romantic breakup. A shared social world that requires navigation. The end of cohabitation and having to relocate in the midst of processing a breakup, especially if this involves the perceived shame of regressing (returning to one’s parents’, or a family home). Ongoing contact, whether chosen or circumstantial. The presence of the person on social media and navigating this window into their life in a way that previous generations did not have to manage. The comparison of their ‘apparent’ recovery process with your own. And the internal pressure to be ‘further along’ than you really are. All of which add layers of self-criticism to an experience that is already painful enough.

For many people there is also a relationship between the current loss and earlier ones. A breakup has a way of activating older griefs. Previous losses, earlier experiences of abandonment or rejection, the attachment patterns that were formed long before this relationship began. These can all intensify the grief and overwhelm that arrive when a relationship ends.

What therapy can offer

Therapy after a relationship ends is not about speeding up the grief process or engineering a particular outcome. It is about having a space in which the loss can be explored fully and respectfully. In therapy, a breakup is allowed to be as significant as it actually is, rather than as significant as seems socially acceptable.

Therapy is also a space to understand what the relationship meant to you, what it's ending stirred up in you, and what, if anything, it has to teach you about the patterns you bring to loving others.

If you are navigating a break up and finding it harder to manage than you expected, or harder than you feel you have permission to admit, therapy might be a helpful option.

Dr Erin Reid is a counselling psychologist offering online therapy to individuals, couples, adolescents, and families across the UK and internationally, and 'Walk and Talk' therapy in Northwest London green spaces. Visit drerinreid.com to find out more.