There’s only one right way to do them. You’ll hate it.

This is part of Breakup Week. We just can’t do this anymore.

Everyone has their own baggage of roads not taken in their lives, from jobs to housing arrangements to what they should have majored in in college. But for most people, the biggest temptation is the ended relationships that make you think What if?—what if we’d never broken up, what if we’d tried harder, what if we’d ended up together after all?

Mine have never been like that. Instead, my breakups have all led me to a much more disturbed conclusion: They tend to make me wonder if I am a psychopath.

I understand that it is somewhat normal to break up with partners of one’s youth and, years later, look back to realize that of course you were never actually compatible—you were just in the same place at the same time. That’s how I’ve explained the incredibly abrupt endings of my relationships with my high school and college boyfriends, both year-plus romances that I concluded with somewhat stunning haste. And then there was my last relationship, the one before I met my husband.

I dated “Adam” for almost five years right out of college. We lived together for the final year of our relationship. And while there was a bit of drama before the breakup, the breakup itself was one of the most neutral and calm I have ever experienced. The envelope to renew our lease came to our apartment. I practiced these words, though I can’t now recall if I said them precisely: “I don’t want to marry you, and I don’t think that you want to marry me either. So … let’s not renew the lease?” I think his answer was “Yes, you’re right.” Just like that, we were broken up.

Initially, it seemed as if we would still be friends—we hopped on Citi Bikes after that conversation and went to get ramen together in the East Village that night. But then—and this is the part that makes me feel crazy—we moved out and … never saw or spoke to each other again? I felt not a smidgen of sadness—just a pervasive sense of how weird it was to be the most important person in someone’s life one moment, then total strangers the next.

The reason this haunts me is that it makes me wonder: Was all of my perceived closeness just totally circumstantial? For a little while, in the early years of dating my now husband, I would sometimes find myself studying what we actually had in common, to convince myself that if we were to ever break up, we would still have things to talk about. I wanted to reassure myself that, apparently unlike all of my other relationships, we were bound by things that actually mattered, and that we would continue to be bound by them even if we weren’t together. At least that’s how I quelled my perpetual fear of subsuming myself for the delight of being in a relationship.

This worry, that there was something deeply wrong with me because I could go from being closer to someone than I ever thought possible to having absolutely no contact with them, crystallized for me once when, during a rough patch with a very close friend, she told me that she was worried I was going to “discard” her, just like I did with my exes (and a couple of other formerly close friends). I could admit to more often being the dumper than the dumped. But did I discard people?

Society does not look kindly upon people like me. The break-upper is the villain, and we know this because their actions are often bogged down with language that makes that clear. Take ghosting, or its close cousin the avoidant discard, the new breakup action to rail against, which is just a longer, slower ghost performed by supposedly “avoidantly attached” people. Or take the fact that even though I was quite sure about ending each of those relationships (and significantly happier on the other side of them), I still felt as if there was something wrong with me for doing so. Shouldn’t I have wanted to stay in touch? Shouldn’t I have logged at least a few solid hours of weeping? What about closure?

But no. I am here to take a stand for the break-uppers. And on the other side of these breakups that made me feel like the cruel one for moving on so completely and swiftly, I am here to say that I actually think an abrupt breakup can be OK—even when you’re on the receiving end of it. And trust me, I have been. I once went to visit someone, excited beyond belief that a relationship was finally taking hold, only to be crushed when the next weekend he came to my city and didn’t even expect to hang out. I ended up sleeping on my friend’s couch for days to process. And my now husband, in our earliest months of casually dating, called things off abruptly because he had met someone else, who wanted to be exclusive. I was furious, but underneath it, I was devastated. It sucks to be discarded—and stings so stunningly for it to happen in favor of someone else.

But that doesn’t mean there’s always a better alternative. We have this idea that there’s a “correct” way to leave someone, a maneuver thoughtful and well-timed enough to soften the blow. (The internet is full of YouTube videos and guides for how to do this.) We think that if we give just enough effort into saving the relationship, and just enough warning that it is coming to a close, we’ll be justified in ending things—and perhaps escape the pain that often follows. You can see evidence of this in how upset people get when this “perfect breakup” doesn’t happen: They lament being ghosted, dumped over text, ditched at dinner, and jettisoned an hour before midnight on New Year’s. One friend of mine was recently dumped for what seemed like a legitimate cause, in what seemed like a legitimate way: The guy realized he didn’t have the emotional capacity to be her partner, and he felt he was always disappointing her. He thought about his feelings for a long time and told her about them honestly and in person—just as he “should have”—but did that matter? No! She still found reasons to be shattered by his methods, which included dumping her suddenly, and shortly after sex. (Fair and fair! But I still think he was never going to win this one.)

Protracted breakups aren’t any better, even when there’s plenty of warning. In fact they can be worse: As we saw a few days ago, in another Breakup Week piece, one woman was sidelined by a breakup that has never, to this day, officially ended. Despite going to therapy and trying to save the relationship, they just drifted apart, ever so slowly, over the course of many years, never daring to say “It’s over”—even after they were literally living with other people. It was confusing and excruciating: Their herculean attempt to break up without pain did not, as it turns out, avoid pain. Some couples spend 15 years trying to work it out, and it still hurts like hell when it’s over.

In other words, how you dump someone does not matter. Stop thinking there’s a perfect method! Any way you cut it, it’s going to hurt. But if I had to choose a fighter, I’ll always have a soft spot for the abrupt, bloodless kind of breakup others decry. Sometimes you get lucky and it is as mutual as my last one was. But when it’s not mutual, don’t you actually want the breakup to be faster? It’s better to rip off the Band-Aid than let it fester through months of fruitless trying. Sure, you can go to couples therapy, and yes, you can “talk it out,” but when one of you feels done—some research suggests that there is a specific point at which this happens; we also know it colloquially as getting the dreaded ick—the more humane move is to end things. Let yourself be dropped into the pool of pain. You don’t want to be with someone who has passed this point with you anyway (or you shouldn’t)!

My Situationship Ghosted Me. Where He Went Was Far More Shocking.

One Parenting Expert Seems to Hold the Key to Happy Kids. I Can’t Bring Myself to Take Her Advice.

Everyone Has the Same Advice After a Bad Breakup. I Tried It. I’m Here to Tell You to Do the Opposite.

Sometimes I Wonder if the Way I Like to Dump People Makes Me a Psychopath

In fact, I think we should be breaking up more. As a regular reader of Slate’s prodigious advice columns and archives, I see so many people writing in to say they don’t want to break up … but then go on to explain that instead they’d like their significant other to change, well, significantly. I must say: Dating is the time to figure out if you’re compatible in the long haul without having to change into another person first. I’m not necessarily advocating for divorce (I’ll leave that to my colleague)—but a pre-marriage breakup? Better than years of trying to get someone to change! People can learn how to grow and function in a relationship better together, yes, but you don’t want to be in the business of waiting for someone to become the person you want to be with.

I am not evil. I certainly agree that there are better ways to break up. If you are in a serious, committed relationship, yes, you owe it to the other person to tell them directly that it is over and give them a (limited) chance to react. I also think that if you have been communicating only digitally, I’m sorry, but ghosting actually is fine. If you’ve been on just a handful of dates, a text is adequate. A phone call can suffice in many circumstances.

But also, that is just a rough set of guidelines for the best circumstances. And breakups are often not completed in the best of circumstances! Which is why I think that not following these guidelines is fine too, because the thing that sucks is a relationship ending if you don’t want it to. No amount of smooth breakup process is going to dull that pain. But it’s better than staying put.

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