Years and tears

Are broken relation-ships harder to cope with as you get older? Are we less resilient, less optimistic, less forgiving? Do we have more invested in them, so that failure comes as more of a blow?

Personally, I couldn't say, as my present relationship is of very long standing. I can only look at what happened when I was young, when I did in fact get over doomed relationships quite easily.

Of course that wasn't just a question of age. It was also because the relationships had been short, or half-hearted to begin with, or I had my eye on someone else anyway.

The older you are, the longer your relationships are likely to have lasted, so they're harder to end for that reason rather than age in itself. Although I think it's also true that as you age you become more dependent on relationships and feel more bereft and beleaguered if they fold. You have less confidence that you can simply bounce back and carry on.

It also comes as more of a shock if someone you've felt totally secure with for many years suddenly announces that they don't feel the same and their affections have moved elsewhere.

I think it's true too that as you get older, relationships seem more important than they did when you were young, and break-ups seem more disastrous. All around you there are happy couples and close friends enriching each others' lives in a hundred ways, and anything that depletes that precious store looks like a tragic waste.

Or can younger people be just as traumatised and shattered by broken relationships as those who're older, especially if they idealise their partners more and expect a perfect emotional harmony that's unattainable?

All I know is that I'm very blessed to have a relationship that's endured for so long, when many people are battered by one disappointment after another, forever asking themselves what went wrong and why others seem to have the magic touch.

Love derailed

I'm always fascinated by marriages that fall apart in a matter of months. How did this amorous couple become disillusioned with each other so quickly?

What did one of them find out about their partner that was so shocking, so disappointing, so repulsive that they just had to call it a day and walk out?

Sometimes you find out, sometimes you don't. Sometimes the aggrieved spouse is only too keen to dish the dirt on their other half and demolish their glossy image. Sometimes they're just too embarrassed to explain, too stunned by their own inability to see their partner's weaknesses before they tied the knot.

They may discover that Mr Right is a chronic womaniser, an alcoholic, a bully, or a closet gay. Ms Perfect may turn out to be a spendthrift, a neat freak, a self-pitying whinger, or a kleptomaniac.

Of course we all uncover unsavoury characteristics in our loved ones sooner or later. Nobody can keep up a phoney facade of rectitude forever, particularly if you're living with someone day in and day out. Eventually the cleverly-constructed mask will slip.

Most of these peculiarities we can adjust to as a minor aspect of our partner's rich and varied identity. But sometimes something emerges that is so alien, so extreme that we simply can't stomach it. Then the relationship dies overnight.

I scratch my head at the self-delusion of individuals who're well aware of some serious personal failing but get involved with someone else in the hope either that their unattractive defect will stay miraculously hidden or that the other person will be infinitely understanding and indulgent. Not surprisingly, their wishful thinking generally ends in tears, and the house of cards collapses in a startling heap.

Selfish cad

I didn't treat some of my early girlfriends very well. At that time I was a typical hard, selfish male with little insight into other people's inner lives. It took me quite a while to wise up.

It didn't help that I'd been to all-male schools where I never met any girls and was utterly perplexed when my first job brought me into close contact with the opposite sex.

I treated one particular woman very shoddily. She was a warm, generous person, what in the sixties we would have called a flower child - she wore floaty, wispy clothes, put flowers in her hair, read Lord of the Rings and listened to Donovan.

She fancied me enough to abandon a university course in Birmingham, move in with me in London and then take up a hideously mind-numbing job to pay the rent when my existing job suddenly ended.

I liberated her a few months later when I found another job, but by then our relationship was going downhill, or so I believed. Sex was a flop, culturally we had very different tastes, our bedsit was crummy, and I couldn't cope with her extrovert personality and messiness.

But in those days I simply didn't know how to express my thoughts and feelings. So instead of voicing my frustrations and talking them through with her, I bottled them up and said nothing. And decided that I would simply end the relationship and move on.

Which is what I did, with no explanation and no discussion. I told her it wasn't working out, that we had to split up, and that was that. Of course she was hurt, baffled, crushed, but she agreed to break up and move out.

I saw her a short while later, now going out with a lovely, gentle, thoughtful guy who seemed very good for her. So hopefully the sad experience of our own relationship was soon put behind her.

But ever since, I've pondered over how incredibly immature and insensitive I was then, and how things might have gone if I'd been more open and more aware. A lot of unnecessary heartache could have been avoided.

Break-up gossips

People so often jump to knee-jerk conclusions about why a relationship failed and whether it was A's fault or B's fault. In fact the truth is usually a lot more complex than such simplistic name-calling.

Obviously I'm thinking of a certain well-publicised divorce* where one individual is getting pilloried ruthlessly by the media while the other is being help up as a saintly icon who's been taken to the cleaners.

The fact is that nobody outside a relationship can truly understand how it works, or doesn't work, and glib judgments about fault and misbehaviour are usually based on false assumptions and prejudices that have little to do with reality.

While everyone else claims to know exactly what caused the break-up, the couple themselves may be completely mystified. They may have genuinely wanted the relationship to work and been baffled that their best efforts and noblest intentions came to nothing.

It's easy to side with one person, particularly if they're a personal friend, and blame their partner for all the problems and failures. But the real-life cocktail of personalities, expectations and emotions that decides the fate of a relationship defies such black-and-white loyalties.

Sure, some break-ups can be pinned fairly and squarely on one person - the alcoholic husband who beats his wife or the wife who discovers she's gay. But I think they're the exceptions that prove the rule.

And might I suggest that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones? Those who delight in picking over the entrails of other people's wrecked relationships should maybe take a closer look at their own and see if their behaviour meets the exalted standards they apply elsewhere. Or sooner or later the wagging tongues could be fastened on them.

* Oh all right, then, Heather and Paul.

The postcard mentioned in Red's comment. Nice one! It was posted on postsecret.blogspot.com