Volume CXXXIII, Number 11 November 30, 2001 f

Ending the relationship
KARA OPPENHEIM

"Wait a minute," my dad said. "I don't get it. You mean that Missy broke up with Duncan just because she thought he was going to break up with her?"

"Yes."

"So she ended the relationship merely to be the first one to do it?"

"Precisely."

"Just so she could beat him to it?"

"Yes. What don't you understand?"

"How can she do that?"

"People do it all the time."

"I don't get it."

I tried to explain to my father that it's a very common occurrence: one person in a relationship suspects that the other may want to break it off so he or she does it first. It happens so often that we tend to take it for granted as one of many ways a relationship may be ended. But my dad's incredulity made me look deeper into this institution of adolescent dating. This week I question: IS IT OK TO BREAK UP WITH SOMEONE JUST TO DO IT FIRST?

First of all, this method is so tried and true that it really is an institution. I don't know if there was a Seinfeld episode about it or not, but if there were George and Jerry would probably call it "the cut-off" or something. "We started dating, yadda, yadda, yadda, I started to get sick of her and just like that she pulled a cut-off!"

As I was telling my dad, after about a month of dating, Missy began to suspect that Duncan was not happy in their relationship. He became increasingly distant and basically made it clear that their relationship was not high on his list at the moment. Missy panicked. She was pretty sure that one of these days Duncan was going to give her some line about "just being friends" so she pulled a 'cut-off' and did it first. Of course, there was no way that she could prove that he really had planned on breaking up with her or not. Perhaps he just had a lot going on at the time. In any case, Missy decided that it would be better for her to break up with Duncan than for him to break up with her.

This probably sounds fairly common and boring. But let's examine it closer. Missy and Duncan had to have started going out for some reason. From the circumstances, it seems that it was probably sexual attraction, although it may have been one of those relationships for the sole purpose of companionship. Either way, it is fairly clear that if they hit bumps so quickly, these two people probably did not really start going out because they knew each other well and really cared about each other.

When Missy decided that she was pretty sure Duncan was going to break up with her, she did not try to make him change his mind. Well, she may have, but obviously not very hard. There was a very good chance that she might get dumped. She quickly evaluated the situation and decided that she cared more about not being dumped than she did about Duncan.

I do not mean to disparage Missy at all. Hers is a vanity that many of us share-especially at a school of such over-achievers like Bowdoin. Missy understandably feared rejection. She may not have wanted to be known as someone who had been dumped, she may not have wanted to give Duncan the satisfaction of being in control of the fate of the relationship, or she may have just thought she would not be able to handle the act of being dumped.

Obviously Missy did not care all that much about Duncan and his feelings. Whether or not she did at one time, there is no way she could be thinking about that in dumping him. One cannot do a cut-off while in love-if you truly care about someone and really want to be with them, you will try to preserve the relationship and re-build it (or just build it) rather than getting out.

So what do I think? Well, despite the fact that people do it all the time-I certainly cannot claim innocence myself-I think it's pretty immature. (Although, being a college student, I cannot completely discard immaturity altogether). Obviously if someone is able to do that to someone they claim to care about, they should not have been going out with them at all. They may think they are being smart by beating the other person to it, but perhaps it would have been smarter to end the relationship when it needed to be ended and not wait until it got to the point of 'the cut-off'.

Epilogue: Missy and Duncan are both single and happier than they ever were together. My dad is still confused.