Breaking up with someone can be painful and difficult. Breakups can make you depressed and even damage your heart and immune system. For that reason, being the one who says “it’s over” can be torturous, especially if you’re hurting someone you still care deeply about. Even if there’s no love lost between you, no one really enjoys being the bad guy.
Although moral philosophers have not paid much attention to the end of relationships, the issue seems ripe for a consequentialist to slide in with a simple motto: to break up well, reduce suffering to a minimum! In a way, this is already the approach of many social scientists, who understand “the good divorce” as a kind of separation where suffering is mitigated for members of the relationship (and other affected parties like children and dependents).
However, things are never that easy—not even for consequentialists. Even taking dependents out of the equation, breakups raise questions about moral responsibility. If I fall out of love with my partner, am I to blame for the intense emotional pain they subsequently suffer? Do I have to somehow repair the harm done? (The answer seems to be that I’m not morally responsible for that suffering, although the sufferer may be justifiably angry at me). Should I try to not fall out of love or make considerable efforts to fall in love again? (Some have said that maybe I should try psychedelic therapy to do so).
There is also the question of justification. Falling out of love may be a good reason to break up, whereas you might feel utter contempt for your friend’s ex, who dumped her just because she loves Bridgerton. But we all have a right to relational freedom: an entitlement to establish, continue, and end personal relationships according to our choices. In principle, then, it isn’t a moral failure to end a relationship because your girlfriend doesn’t have a “Pilates body.” Your motivations might be evidence of other things that are wrong with you (for example, that you’re a misogynist), but I believe you’re free to end the relationship for those reasons, even if they are not very good reasons.
Which leads us to the talk. The moment when you tell your partner that things are over, and they ask you, “Why?” Philosopher Monika Betzler thinks that people have a moral obligation to explain their motivations to break up and to actively include their partners in the decision, unless there are some extenuating circumstances. Sometimes your reasons might be hurtful opinions about your soon-to-be ex-partner. Maybe they have become an insufferable bore. Maybe you cannot stand their mum. And yes, maybe you aren’t physically attracted to them because you’ve been brainwashed by the manosphere. In those cases, it’s best to say nothing (although the breakup still needs to be communicated in order to be an effective ending of the commitment we enter through serious romantic relationships). Other times, your only reason might be a desire for “not this” that you can’t really formulate as a more substantive explanation. Betzler believes that, even in those situations, people initiating a breakup have a duty to make an effort to find their reasons and to give their partner an opportunity to voice their side and give their own reasons for trying to salvage the relationship.
I see the appeal in Betzler’s approach. It highlights the value of dialogue and disrupts socially widespread views of breakups as a zero-sum games where the winner takes it all. But introducing the language of duty and the language of reasons into the ethics of breakups misses important features of intimate relationships and introduces significant moral risks. The love that is characteristic of intimate relationships may itself not be explainable in terms of reasons but instead as a felt experience of meaningfulness. Love is a way of making sense of the world, and reasons do not help us articulate why that sense of meaningfulness has slipped away when we fall out of love. It just is there or isn’t, as Annie Lennox sings in the chorus to “No More ‘I Love You’s.’”
When we don’t have or don’t know our reasons, acting according to a hypothetical duty to explain our decision to break up can result in mistreatment of our partners. I have argued in a reply to Betzler that duties requiring discussions in terms of reasons increase the risks of confabulation. Confabulation is a common constituent of human reasoning: when pressed to explain our behaviors or attitudes, we often produce reasons that are backed with poor evidence, despite not really knowing why we acted in a specific way, believe something, or feel a certain emotion. Philosophers have argued that confabulation is not inherently bad and can even have some moral, epistemic, and prudential benefits—even specifically improving some aspects of romantic relationships. However, acknowledging the risks of confabulation means recognizing the potential harms that it can cause in breakups, where you might confabulate that your partner’s character or behavior explains your decision, while in reality it had nothing to do with them. This can have far-reaching consequences for the person who’s being broken up with, who might come to falsely believe that they’re the problem when they’re not.
My view is that regardless of whether subsequent harm happens, a duty to provide reasons easily draws us towards what Peter Goldie calls “the quest for narrative closure”: an attempt to give coherence and meaningfulness to traumatic experiences in the shape of a “narrative that neatly ties all the ends together,” which results from people’s inability to accept that “the simple fact about life is that ‘stuff happens.’” Goldie believes that aiming at narrative closure can prevent people from moving on, but I see this drive as leading to a situation where we fail to take our partners seriously.
To take our partners seriously, our actions and attitudes need to meet three requirements: honesty, particularity, and wholeheartedness. Honesty requires that we present ourselves to others as we take ourselves to be. Particularity requires us to treat our partners not only as individuals that count but as individuals with whom we share a concrete relational history, shared meanings, and expectations (including expectations about honesty). Wholeheartedness, as I understand it in the context of romantic life, requires that we take our concerns and commitments to be genuinely ours.
The pressure to come up with an explanation can erode one or several of those three elements. For example, when confabulating, people tend to draw from generic explanations that seem socially acceptable in the context. Someone who doesn’t have or doesn’t know the reasons for their decision may confabulate and end up believing, wholeheartedly and honestly, that “it’s not you, it’s me” is their genuine reason for ending things. But that is an empty turn of phrase that is not particular at all: it has nothing to do with the individual or the relationship. Feeling obligated to give reasons is undoubtedly one of the motivations for people resorting to generative artificial intelligence to write breakup texts or scripts for them: these explanations are neither honest, particular or wholehearted.
The combination of a sense of duty with a consequentialist understanding of good breakups may lead us to reach for so-called “therapy-speak,” which is mental-health discourse used outside therapeutic settings in a way that is wrongful. We all have heard of “conscious uncoupling.” Although I am all in favor of disrupting the understanding of breakups as failures or as inevitably conflictive, by using therapy-speak we risk eroding particularity, almost like we can create a template that we can use interchangeably use in different breakups with different people: “Dear [insert name here], I have treasured our time together and I gladly/hopefully/cautiously [delete as appropriate] embrace a new stage of our joint growth.”
This is not to mention that assigning a primary role to reasons in the process of breaking up can reinforce noxious, “civil” views of affective experience, according to which emotions shall be tempered by reasons. I can’t see many scenarios that top breakups as situations that call for seemingly arational or irrational reactions like ranting, crying, screaming, or being overly angry or sad. We must have the chance to be unreasonable when we get our heart broken. Although this opportunity must indisputably be restricted by other moral considerations (such as the impermissibility of verbal or physical violence or the enforcement of power imbalances), we must avoid the temptation of an over-encumbering emphasis on reason in the moral philosophy of breakups. Instead, we should see reason-giving as merely one form of dialogue that might be appropriate in some breakups but not in others, while recognizing that other kinds of interactions also have their place at the end of love, even counting as forms of dialogue.
So here’s how a moral philosopher can be of help: by acknowledging that breakups are morally messy and disorienting experiences, where it’s difficult to know what is the right thing to do or the right thing to say. The morality of breakups is then best understood not through the language of duty but through the language of care. Attentiveness can help us determine what are the particular demands of the situation and the person we have in front of us, as well as alert us when we’re failing to be honest or wholehearted. Moral imagination can assist us in figuring out what to do.
Still, we must not overestimate the role of care, either. During breakups, we must be prepared to do the wrong thing. Disorientation and moral failure are features, not bugs, of relationship dissolutions. This happens to all parties involved, including the person who is ending the relationship because they don’t feel it anymore. When we initiate a breakup, we often will try to treat the other well, and we will not succeed. What we think is the best for them might turn out to be the worst possible course of action. We might have to make some impossible choices. Breaking up is hard, and no checklist of duties or soft-cushioning scripts will prevent this.
Luckily, we need not restrict questions of moral responsibility in breakups to the time when the relationship is in fact ending. Relationships that matter often matter for a long time, so there is always the possibility of trying to repair the harm done. For example, once the disorientation lifts, we might reach out with an explanation that is honest, particular, and wholehearted. We might offer to our ex-partner an opportunity to give them what we failed to give during the separation (like an apology, genuinely listening to their grievances, or answering their questions in a way they find helpful). We should also be prepared to never be met with anything but rejection: this is a price to pay for our relational freedom, but it also arises from the fact that, once, you were that person’s world, and they will never see you as anything else but the one causing them the loss of something important.
Pilar Lopez-Cantero
Pilar Lopez-Cantero is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie/YUFE4 research fellow at the University of Antwerp. She works on philosophy of emotion, moral psychology, and political philosophy, with a focus on questions about personal relationships, travel, and the city.
