The Gift of Getting Dumped (2024)

Nobody in a relationship wants to get dumped. Romantic rejection is often a huge blow to our self-esteem and a frequent trigger of depressive episodes. It seems like we weren’t good enough to hold on to a great catch or, even worse, a not-so-great catch. We have to recover from romantic rejection, and it seems we need all the emotional support and reassurance from friends and family that we can get to prop up our failing self-esteem. The reassurance is usually along the lines that the rejecting lover wasn’t so great, and you deserve and can do better. You may not really believe it, but it’s good to hear anyway. What your friends and family won’t ask but might privately wonder is why you stayed in a relationship for so long with someone who wasn’t really right for you. Nobody wants to make you feel badly about yourself, so out of fear of offending you they won’t say why they think you stayed in a bad relationship when you could have done better.

Most likely, though, what your friends and family see but don’t want to say is that you were too accommodating to someone who didn’t treat you as well as you deserved to be treated or who didn't appreciate you as much as you deserved to be appreciated. Your friends and family saw the things about your partner’s personality that you thought would eventually get fixed or were perhaps your fault, like your partner constantly finding fault with you in public, which may just have been the partner’s basic personality that would never have gotten fixed. Friends and family might appreciate that love is blind, so they don’t want to judge you for seemingly irrational romantic preferences.

Of course, sometimes we get dumped for good reasons, such as because we’re not treating our partners that well, but deny that fact. There is always some ambiguity in a romantic breakup as to whose fault it is. Officially, all breakups are “no fault”; everyone shares some responsibility. Yet deep down we can’t help but feel that one person’s personality flaws are more to blame for the breakup than the other’s.

So why do people stay in relationships that aren’t right for them and tune out what everybody else seems to see? And why is getting dumped the only way some people can be liberated from a bad relationship?

The Psychology of Security Blanket Relationships

Sometimes we stay in a bad relationship because we are frightened of being alone and have doubts that we can do any better. Maybe staying in a bad relationship is better than being alone. There’s a certain sense of security in at least having somebody and one can daydream that someday the problematic features of our partners’ personalities will get fixed to our liking so we can live happily ever after. Our faultfinding partner will become an accepting partner, a sexually withholding partner will become a sexually indulgent partner, or an uncommunicative partner will become a big talker. One lives in hope of radical transformation at some point in the future to console ourselves for the frustrations and disappointments of the present.

To Dump or Be Dumped?

Taking the initiative to end a relationship is hard to do. We may have self-doubts about whether we are making the right choice. Maybe we are being too picky or perfectionistic. Maybe we have unrealistic expectations. Maybe we really can’t do any better, so we are making a serious error of judgment. And then there is the issue of guilt. We know what it feels like to get dumped and we are reluctant to inflict that misfortune on someone we care about. Maybe our partner can’t do any better than us, so in dumping them we are forcing them to face that reality and we feel their pain. We stay in a bad relationship out of guilt and obligation because we don’t want to disappoint friends, family, and children who will be upset if we dump their friend, their parent, their son or daughter, or their son- or daughter in-law whom they love.

Forgive Yourself

Being dumped evokes self-flagellation, much of it irrational. First, anyone who dumps you is going to need to justify their decision to themselves and probably is going to want you to validate or at least understand the rational basis of their decision. Of course, we don’t want to feel that someone is ever justified in dumping us. That just exacerbates our own self-criticism. Even if we acknowledge our imperfections, we would like to think that they aren’t so bad that we deserve to get dumped for them. There is probably someone out there who wouldn’t think our imperfections are so insufferable, and once you get dumped you are free to find a person who can accept you as you are, warts and all. In the meantime, we can cultivate self-compassion for our imperfections and forgive ourselves for anything we might have done that contributed to the breakup.

Find the Silver Lining

You deserve someone who is as excited about you as you are about them. If someone dumps you, that means you had been settling for someone who was not as excited about you as you were about them. You deserve better.

The gift of getting dumped is that now you are free to find someone who is as excited about you as you are about them, and someone who doesn’t find your character flaws insufferable. We all learn from our mistakes. The lesson you should learn from being dumped is: Don’t settle for someone that isn’t as excited about you as you are about them.

Best of luck in your quest and don't be so hard on yourself.

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