Here are a few tips on how to handle the timing better and hopefully ease the pain.
1. Bad time: Right before dinner comes
There you are sitting in a quiet romantic booth staring at the menu. The waiter takes your order and leaves. Then your heart gets stabbed when your date starts off a conversation with the dreaded: “I have to tell you something…”. Choking back tears in a crowded place while waiting for a meal will ruin anyone’s appetite.
Some believe that if bad news is given in a public place, it will detract a person from making an embarrassing scene. This is not always the case.
Better time: If you’re planning on calling it quits to someone, give them privacy. A better time to do it is in their home after the date. This gives you a chance to leave and leaves them in the comforts of their home to cry. If you’ve only been dating for a short time, in your car would be fine. But be aware you may have to wait for them to get out of your car. Some will desperately ask why and you may have to have a long depressing discussion with lots of reassuring sentences.
2. Bad time: On the way to the date.
Prepped and primped ready to impress in public then as you sit in the passenger side captive, they slam on the brakes to your heart. Rambling about how they’ve met someone else. You think to yourself, “Dang it! What a waste of pretty!”
Better time: After the date either in the person’s home or in the car. Minimize ruining a perfectly good time or evening. Stay cordial to the very end.
3. Bad time: Sunday or the start of the week
Relaxing sleeping in Sunday morning, snuggled up on the sofa until the afternoon watching reruns with nothing to do. Or having lunch with the family after church service then lightening strikes upon you and hell just froze over. You get a phone call or text that puts a dramatic freeze on your soul.
Better time: Toward the end of the week around their weekend time. Even most managers know this rule. Give bad news at the end of the day or week. This allows the person time to wallow, letting out the cries of self-pity, sulking in internalizing. And hopefully get it out of their system and start their second day off feeling refreshed and moving on toward another goal.
Most of us start our week with a to do list a mile long stretched out over the week. Mix in heart broken emotions will get anyone’s concentration level frozen with dazed confusion. For those that know the next day appearances of crying, it isn’t pretty.
4. Bad time: In front of someone or through someone.
The phone rings, it’s your best friend you haven’t talked to in a month. She wants to share some good news and bad news. First, she’s in love! Second, she says she wants to come clean about something. Then you hear a recognizable voice as if they were on the phone the whole time listening. The love of your life has just confessed, your ears turned deaf.
Breaking up on any social networks, three way call, or leaving personal belongings on your ex’s doorstep is off limits. The only time to bring a friend in is if you feel the person would get violent and you need a witness.
Better time: Alone one on one or over the phone. Give a person respectful privacy when delivering bad news. They will most likely slam on you behind your back to a trusted friend anyway. Don’t give them even more reasons to raise the heated tension borderline hatred by smashing the barrier lines of embarrassment.
5. Bad Time: Right after sex or getting an expensive gift.
After giving your beau a beautiful piece of pricey jewelry for the holiday season, the evening turns intensely hot and heavy, probably the best you both have had. Sharing smooth sensuality, an intimate meaningful moment holding each other afterwards, then slap in the face they want to break it off. The tender caress turned into a whipping cat of nine tails with no lives left.
Better time: If you are planning to break up with a person, avoid both; sex and gifts. The person will only end up feeling used. The break up is a rip of the heart enough. If you planned on breaking up with them don’t set out to get your last wrapped packages you think you deserve to get. They may stuff something down your chimney in revenge.
Breaking up by technology is a lot more impersonal, but is the most preferred way to break things off - through phone, email, or text. It is a way to avoid seeing hurtful expressions on a person’s face or lack there of. To not give in to changing your mind simply to try to ease someone else’s pain but yet hurt inside yourself as you aren’t being true to your own soul.
To avoid a call, text, or email from the broken hearted is a lot easier to do than to sense the person’s pain whose heart you broke. Sure it may hurt, but it hurts them just as much to feel guilty to speak to someone they know is hurting because of them.
Try your best to ease someone’s pain by lovingly giving them their time and privacy in a comforting place to grieve through the process. Give them the respectful decency to weep in the privacy of their own comfortable home where they have access to hug a pillow and plenty of tissues.
