[Two Pronged] Text breakup

Jeremy Baer, Margarita Holmes

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Why do some men prefer to break up through text?

Dr Margarita Holmes and Jeremy BaerRappler’s Life and Style section runs an advice column by couple Jeremy Baer and clinical psychologist Dr Margarita Holmes. Jeremy has a master’s degree in law from Oxford University. A banker of 37 years who worked in 3 continents, he has been training with Dr Holmes for the last 10 years, as co-lecturer and, occasionally, as co-therapist, especially with clients whose financial concerns intrude into their daily lives. Together, they have written two books: “Love Triangles: Understanding the Macho-Mistress Mentality” and “Imported Love: Filipino-Foreign Liaisons.”

Dear Dr. Holmes and Mr. Baer:

My boyfriend broke up with me through text. Why is it that some men prefer to just break up with their lover through text? Aren’t they man enough to face this struggle?—Yna 

***

Dear Yna,

Thank you for your message.

The way people break up is intimately related to their view of the person they are leaving, the nature of the relationship they had and the reason the relationship ended.

A man who has deeply loved a woman only to find that she has been sleeping with his best friend for the last 6 months will react differently compared to a man who has never really loved his girlfriend and just been discovered sleeping with her best friend.

 A 5-year relationship may end differently compared to a 5-week dalliance, an Internet romance to a sweethearts-since-high-school relationship (or commitment). And just as their feelings at the time they break up are different, so will be their attitudes to the method they employ to communicate the message.

We have left behind the world in which people exchanged letters and embraced a more immediate world of emails, chat and messages (voice, text, Skype, Viber, FB etc.). If people actually live near each other, face-to-face meetings also take place but such meetings can be relatively rare in so many cases these days.

How breakups are conducted may therefore reflect not just the feelings of the parties but also how the relationship was conducted. So if texting constitutes a huge part of a relationship, texting might easily also be a perfectly natural way to end things.

Of course, none of this means that you are necessarily wrong in your assessment that a breakup via text can simply be a coward’s way to avoid the pain, embarrassment and emotional toil of a rollercoaster confrontation between a philandering man and a wronged woman, or a wronged man and a philandering woman for that matter.

Only you know the true facts of your case and for whatever reason, you have chosen not to share them with us. You could tell us more and we could be more definitive, but I am sure you actually already know the answer in your own case.

All the best—Jeremy 

***

Dear Yna:

Thank you very much for your letter.  Frankly, it’s very difficult to respond to it adequately because you start out by sharing an experience with your boyfriend then generalize from it saying, in so many words, that all men behave as your ex does/did, which simply lacks logical rigor.

In effect, the only hard information you have actually shared with us is that 1) you had a boyfriend and 2) he broke up with you via text.

The way you seamlessly start with these two facts and then a mere two sentences later can seduce people into agreeing or disagreeing with the reason men behave this way (rather than questioning the possibility that not all or even most men behave this way) says a lot about you.

You have tremendous powers of persuasion but you have to decide where and when you feel it is okay to use this skill.  When you shared things with your now ex-boyfriend, was it primarily to share with, and to listen to, him the way couples who enjoy a balanced power relationship? Or could you effortlessly convince him to do/believe things your way, despite anything he might have felt to the contrary?

Are you aware of how you move from a statement of fact and then leap not only to conclusions but also hypothesize here convincingly why this (false) conclusion might be so? 

You see, oftentimes, the same processes that drive our letter-writing style also drive our text-writing, not to mention our speaking, styles. Your letter-writing style is such that even trained analysts have extreme difficulty deciphering its meaning, not just for lack of information but because we couldn’t adequately respond to the 3 mixed messages you packed into just 3 sentences, when the average person often needs an entire paragraph just for one mixed message.

If this is a typical example of the way you communicate with your boyfriend, could it be at all possible that your communication style was the very reason he chose to break up with you via text in the first place? Para matapos na.  (So that it ends, period. No qualifiers, no ifs, ands or buts).  Just a mere text and it’s over. No more being overwhelmed with your tremendous powers of persuasion.

I will be the first to admit that my hypothesis, although confirmed in quite a number of my clinical cases, may have no merit where your relationship with your ex is concerned.  However, based on my clinical experience, I do know  that couples separate more because of how they fight (process) rather than because of what (product—the particular issue) they fight about. But given the paucity of information share, this is the best I can do. I only hope that, in the just-as-likely event that this has no bearing on your particular past relationship, this can be helpful to you (or a few of our readers?) in other ways. 

I hope you’re not sorry you wrote to us. We do want to help you. And the best way we know how is to point out some things in your behavior, unconscious or not, because these are the only behaviors you have control over and might decide to change should the spirit move you.

All the best—Margie

– Rappler.com 

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