Handling a holiday breakup
Sat, 2007-11-10 00:33 - Kerry
By Margot Carmichael Lester
The holidays are right around the corner and you’re beginning to realize you want to stop seeing the person you’ve been dating. But there’s one thing you’re not so clear on. Can you break up this close to the season without being forever branded a turkey... or a Scrooge? Our experts tell you how.
But first, let’s talk about why breaking up at the holidays is so problematic. “Everything about the holidays reminds us of family, love and ritual,” explains Kathleen Hall, CEO of Atlanta’s Stress Institute. “We see emotional movies. We go to the mall and see lovers holding hands. We go to restaurants and see couples kissing and eating together. Holidays are a sensual time of smells, food, music, lights and decorations. It is a time that we naturally want to share with another person.”
So not being with another person is sort of rubbing salt into the wound. Plus, there’s just the idea that the holidays are supposed to be full of joy and cheer. There’s not much of that going around if you’re in the middle of a breakup. But that doesn’t mean you should put off the inevitable. After all, if you don’t break up “during the holidays,” then you’re probably not going to want to break up just before Valentine’s Day, either. And that’s a good two or three months on. So do it now. But do it with the spirit of the season.
Do the right thing
The key is to remember that you’re doing the right thing. If you don’t want to date someone, stringing him or her along is just plain unfair. Even stringing the person along under the guise of not ruining the holidays is unfair.
“It is a sign that you are willing to acknowledge who you are in the moment and what you want for yourself,” says New York psychiatrist Edward Ratush of the Heart and Mind Clinic. “And that could be very different from who you were when the relationship started. It’s also important to remember that “we are not responsible or in control over whether or not someone else will feel that their holidays are ruined,” Ratush counsels. “That’s up to the individual. You can break up with one person before the holidays who’ll use that to torture him- or herself all through Valentine’s Day, while another may book a singles’ vacation as a way of self-soothing.”
In the holiday spirit?
No matter how wrong the relationship is, nobody wants to be a Scrooge. You can reduce the negative impact by channeling the spirit of the season: Do unto others. “Being attuned to the other’s feelings… and using kindness and non-blaming are advisable,” says Patricia Covalt, the Denver-based author of What Smart Couples Know: The Secret To A Happy Relationship. “Own the breakup.”
In other words, be honest about why you’re breaking up—but make it all about you. Say something like “I feel...” or “I need...” instead of “You didn’t do blah blah blah.” And you might as well say you’re sorry about the timing.
Location is everything
Definitely do not break up with someone right after you two make pie crust together, or under the mistletoe, or at intermission of a holiday concert. That’s just tacky.
Hall suggests breaking it off at a coffee shop. “There is noise and music to muffle the conversation,” says Hall. “You drink caffeine to give you courage and energy to say what you must. You can get in and out and get the dastardly deed done quickly.” Obviously, you don’t want to be cruel and rush out before your former sweetie has a time to react and ask you any questions, but don’t drag things out and over-explain—it won’t help. The news you’re delivering may well be painful, but if you handle it clearly, calmly and without blame, you should be able to end things with grace even during the holiday season.
North Carolina freelancer Margot Carmichael Lester also writes for Monster.com and The L.A. Business Journal.
Comments
Break-ups for losers
I know guys who would break-up with their girl-friends simply because they didn't want to buy them presents for their birthday or holdiays!
"Genetic Simpletons"
The secret to why male organisms evolve faster than their female counterparts comes down to this: Males are simple creatures.
In nearly all species, males seem to ramp up glitzier garbs, more graceful dance moves and more melodic warbles in a never-ending vie to woo the best mates. Called sexual selection, the result is typically a showy male and a plain-Jane female. Evolution speeds along in the males compared to females.
The idea that males evolve more quickly than females has been around since 19th century biologist Charles Darwin observed the majesty of a peacock’s tail feather in comparison with those of the drab peahen.
How and why males exist in evolutionary overdrive despite carrying essentially the same genes as females has long puzzled scientists.
New research on fruit flies, detailed online last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds males have fewer genetic obstacles to prevent them from responding quickly to selection pressures in their environments.
"It’s because males are simpler," said lead author Marta Wayne, a zoologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "The mode of inheritance in males involves simpler genetic architecture that does not include as many interactions between genes as could be involved in female inheritance."
The finding could also shed light on why diseases show up differently in men and women.
Complicated chromosomes
Wayne and her colleagues examined more than 8,500 genes shared by both sexes of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Of those genes, about 7,600 have different expressions (alleles) that do different jobs in males and females.
The flies were identical genetically, except for their sex chromosomes.
In flies and humans, thousands of genes made up of DNA are packaged into tiny units called chromosomes. Each parent contributes one set of 23 chromosomes to offspring, resulting in little ones with 23 father-given chromosomes and 23 mother-chromosomes — 46 total. One pair of these is called the sex chromosome. In this case, the females have two X chromosomes (XX) and males, XY.
Many genes are found on the X chromosome, whereas few are associated with the Y chromosome. For female fruit flies, the X-chromosome genes can come in two flavors called alleles that not only interact with each other but also with other genes.
For instance, if one allele is dominant over the other, that allele would get "expressed" while the recessive allele would stay hidden. Though under cover, the recessive allele kind of hitches a ride on the X chromosome and can be passed on to future generations.
Genetic simpletons
That's not the case with males.
"We find direct evidence that the expression of the genes on the X has this covering behavior in females whereas in males they're out in the open," said study team member Lauren McIntyre, also of UF.
Males only have one X chromosome, so what you see is what you get. If that particular gene gives the male a boost in terms of sexual selection, say a gene responsible for fluffier feathers, the gene would be selected for in the game of natural selection over successive generations. But if the gene is no good for males, it would get selected against over time.
"Having one X means your genes are more open to selection in males," UF researcher Marina Telonis-Scott said in a telephone interview. "So in a female if you have a recessive allele that confers a sickness, it can be concealed within the two X's but if you've only got one, such as the male, you're more open to selection."
And the reason males are genetic simpletons, it turns out, is sex. The researchers suggest this uncomplicated (compared with females) genetic pathway allows males to respond at the drop of a hat to the pressures of sexual selection. That way they can win females, produce more offspring and start the cycle over again.
While not as prominent a trend, they also found a similar pattern in so-called autosomal genes, which are those found on any chromosome save the sex chromosomes. Many of the fruit-fly autosomal genes, however, did work in concert with genes located on the X chromosome.
Human implications
The "elephant lurking in these results," of course, is how they would apply to men and women.
The researchers caution the results don't directly translate to humans. "The X function is thought to be quite different in flies than humans," McIntyre told LiveScience. In humans, one of the X chromosomes gets inactivated in females, though research is finding this inactivation isn't always absolute.
However, the results could help explain differences in symptoms and responses to diseases in men and women, the authors say. Sexual selection does occur in humans, they note. In addition, fruit flies and humans share an evolutionary history, the authors point out, which is the reason why we share more than 65 percent of our genes with the tiny insects.
"If we see a mechanism in flies it may also be true in everything that shares that evolutionary history," McIntyre said.
On a basic level, the genetic machinery works in a similar manner in flies and us.
"There's a health aspect in figuring out differences in gene expression between the sexes," Wayne said. "To make a male or a female, even in a fly, it's all about turning things on — either in different places or different amounts or at different times — because we all basically have the same starting set of genes."
------------------------
Anyone who knows me, knows I say, "I wish I had my sons before I ever dated... it would have spared me so much heartache!" Having boys has taught me the male-mind is not nearly as malicious as I had once thought, but boys are simply more simple and less complex than gregarious girls.
I my house, my boys like to eat, sleep and be happy playing with their toys, making lots of noise, and doing it all on their terms. Who do they look to provide this world of mirth and merriment? Mom. If I'm not around, who's next-best? That depends on who's available. My girls are MUCH craftier than that. I'm not always the direct go-to source. Many-a-time I have seen quite the mess made by mischief makers caused by "creative thinking", all stirred by big or little sisters. How do I know?
They ARE my daughters, aren't they?
So in the dog-eat-dog world of dating and mating, wise is the woman who lets the cheap or cheating bastard slip-by her before the holidays. Why?
"For females, the drawbacks of sex with lots of partners include an increased probability of inbreeding, higher chances of predation, more risk of catching disease and physical injury or exhaustion from the frequent sex." Mating Game