Dear Ex-pert
I think I want to go on a break with my long-term partner. Will this inevitably lead to a breakup?
I want to take some time apart, but I am unsure if this is the right decision. We have been long distance for a couple of years, which has been quite hard for us, and I want him to move to my city, but he is not ready to take that step. Will this inevitably lead to a breakup? I don’t know what the rules are and need help navigating this.
From
A lonely city girl
Dear lonely-city-girl
You come to me with an age-old question: is a break really just a breakup? Many scholars have tried to answer this question, but none have been able to succinctly come up with an answer… Until now.
Let’s take it back to the fundamentals. A break can be a good tool to figure out where your head is when you’re in the thick of an intense relationship. If you feel like you don’t have space to listen to yourself because your emotions are so tied up in your relationship, then a break can provide the time and the room to step back and evaluate.
But let’s apply that to your specific circumstance. It doesn’t seem like you have no space to think. In fact, it seems like you’ve identified that you have too much space, not too little. You’ve got whole geographic cities of space. You can’t close that space – even though you want to.
So, what would time apart actually solve for you here? You already know what you want, and you’ve expressed that to your partner. No amount of time apart is going to change that.
The only way that a break will change anything is if time apart makes your boyfriend realise that he can’t exist without you. And so, throwing caution to the wind, he buys a one-way ticket to you carrying all his worldly belongings, ready to make a new life in the big smoke.
But my question to that is: if he hasn’t made that leap in the last six years, do you think a couple of weeks apart will change that? And even if it does, if the only thing that makes him move to your city is the prospect of a breakup, then is he worth keeping around at all?
It sounds like you’ve got the information you need already.
Yours
Ex-pert