When Did Walking Away Start Requiring an Enemy?
On relationships, resentment, forgiveness, and the way we treat people when we’re hurt.
One thing I’ve always found interesting about relationships is how quickly people can change the way they describe someone once they’re no longer getting along. You can spend fifteen years with a person. You know their habits, their insecurities, their medical history, what makes them laugh, and the things they worry about but rarely discuss. You’ve celebrated birthdays, raised children, struggled financially, lost people you loved, and experienced things together that nobody else will ever fully understand. For much of your life, this person might have been your best friend.
Then the relationship ends, and suddenly they’re being described as someone you apparently never should’ve trusted in the first place. Sometimes even the good memories get reconsidered. People do discover lies or betrayals that completely change their understanding of a relationship. Some relationships involve cruelty or abuse, and leaving them is necessary. But ending a relationship doesn’t always require turning the other person into an enemy, as though acknowledging that someone was once good to us would somehow invalidate our reasons for leaving.
A relationship can end because someone falls out of love. Two people might grow apart, become incompatible, or eventually realize they’ve spent years trying to repair something that simply isn’t working. Sometimes one person wants to leave while the other desperately wants to stay, and the circumstances can be more complicated than that.
I’ve experienced the uncomfortable reality of being profoundly upset with someone while still genuinely caring about their well-being. You can be angry, disappointed, and struggling to understand someone’s decisions while still hoping they’re okay. I’ve never thought those feelings were mutually exclusive. Human relationships are complicated enough without expecting ourselves to suddenly stop caring about someone simply because things didn’t work out. It only makes things harder when we treat resentment as an obligation.
Nobody Owes Anyone Forgiveness
I’ve never particularly liked the way people talk about forgiveness. We’re constantly being told to forgive, move forward, let go, and make peace with things that may have permanently changed how we see another person, usually by people who have very little understanding of what actually happened. It’s easy to recommend forgiveness when you’re not the person being asked to extend it.
Forgiveness isn’t an obligation, and it certainly shouldn’t operate on anyone else’s schedule. You might forgive someone immediately, or find that it takes years. Even if you forgive them, you might recognize that trusting them again would be a terrible decision. Whether you ever forgive them at all is entirely your business.
I don’t understand why forgetting is so frequently included in the conversation. Some things probably shouldn’t be forgotten. Certain experiences teach us valuable lessons about people, relationships, and our own judgment. Remembering what happened doesn’t necessarily mean you’re consumed by it; sometimes it just means you’ve learned something.
Someone can decide a relationship is over without needing to punish the other person indefinitely. You don’t have to be friends afterward, answer their calls, exchange Christmas gifts, or pretend you’re delighted to hear they’ve met someone new. Never speaking again might be the healthiest arrangement for everyone involved. But why does that decision sometimes come with an apparent need to make sure the other person suffers? If someone no longer belongs in your life, why should their unhappiness remain such an important part of it?
Being Angry Doesn’t Automatically Make Us Right
People can justify some questionable behavior when they believe they’ve been wronged. Sometimes they genuinely have been. Someone may have lied or broken an important promise, betraying their trust in a way that permanently changed the relationship. Their anger might be completely understandable, but having a legitimate reason to be upset doesn’t automatically make every reaction reasonable.
Consider what happens when a disagreement between two people starts involving everyone they know. Mutual friends are suddenly expected to choose sides, and private conversations become public information. Something shared in confidence five years ago gets brought up because someone knows it’ll make the other person look bad. Before long, people who weren’t even present for the original disagreement are being asked to form opinions about it. It’s remarkable how quickly a personal dispute can develop an entire supporting cast. And buried underneath all of that may be a relatively straightforward reality: two people no longer want the same things.
There’s a difference between asking people you trust for support and bringing them into an argument because you know it’ll hurt the other person. Most of us know, at least some of the time, which one we’re doing. This isn’t exclusively about people who have separated. Some of the worst ways we treat one another happen while we’re still together.
An argument about money becomes a detailed history of every irresponsible purchase someone has made in the last decade. A forgotten anniversary somehow becomes evidence that a person has never cared about their partner. Someone might share something deeply personal during a vulnerable conversation, only to have it thrown back at them months later during an unrelated disagreement. There’s something particularly ugly about taking information someone trusted you with and using it because you know exactly where it’ll hurt.
We manage to extend patience and basic courtesy to complete strangers every day, yet sometimes the people closest to us receive far less consideration. I’m not pretending I’ve never said something out of anger or handled a disagreement poorly. Nobody gets through life without doing that. But there’s a difference between acknowledging that we’re human and using it as a permanent excuse for our behavior.
The Children Didn’t Choose Any of This
When two adults separate, they each have their own understanding of what happened. There are disappointments, grievances, memories, and sometimes entirely different accounts of the same relationship. Their children are experiencing something else altogether. They’re trying to understand why the people they love no longer share the life they once knew.
Imagine a child spending a perfectly enjoyable afternoon with one parent. Maybe they went to the movies, stopped for ice cream, visited a park, or spent the afternoon doing absolutely nothing remarkable. When they return to the other parent’s home, they stop to consider how much they should say. Will Mom become upset if they mention having fun with Dad? If they talk about Mom’s new boyfriend, will Dad react badly? It might seem easier to leave certain details out rather than risk another uncomfortable conversation.
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Think about what has to happen for a child to start editing perfectly innocent experiences to manage an adult’s emotions. That’s a hell of a responsibility to place on someone who never asked to participate in the disagreement. Children notice more than we sometimes give them credit for. They recognize changes in tone and notice when someone’s name makes a parent uncomfortable. An ordinary question can produce an unexpectedly hostile response, and eventually some children become quite good at reading the room before they say anything.
A child shouldn’t have to conduct a risk assessment before telling a parent they had pizza with the other one.
It isn’t always a dramatic confrontation. A facial expression, an irritated response, or a sarcastic comment about the other parent may be enough. Adults might forget it five minutes later. The child may remember and simply learn what not to mention.
A seven-year-old shouldn’t need to understand the politics of their parents’ separation to talk about having a nice weekend. For a teenager, the responsibility might take the form of becoming one parent’s confidant or defending the other against accusations they’re not equipped to evaluate. Neither should be expected to demonstrate loyalty to one parent by withholding affection from the other.
If a parent is abusive, neglectful, or unsafe, protecting the child comes first. But there’s an important difference between protecting a child from harm and allowing adult resentment to determine how that child experiences their family. A child’s relationship with a safe parent shouldn’t depend on whether the parents still like each other.
Your romantic relationship with another parent may be over. Your child’s relationship with that person is their own. While two adults might spend years disagreeing about what went wrong between them, I hope they can at least recognize that their children shouldn’t have to spend those same years navigating the consequences of their hostility.
I’ve spent enough time being a father to understand how much children absorb from the ordinary things we do. The memory that stays with them might not be a big argument. It could be the afternoon they came home excited about something, noticed the expression on a parent’s face, and decided not to finish telling the story.
Sometimes People Simply Need to Walk Away
Not every relationship is meant to continue. You might have known someone for thirty years and eventually realize that the friendship simply doesn’t work anymore. Family relationships can reach that point, too, whether it’s between siblings or parents and adult children. People change, and not always in ways that allow a relationship to continue.
There doesn’t always have to be some spectacular final incident. You may simply have reached the end of what you can reasonably give each other. There’s nothing inherently wrong with recognizing that. What I question is why we sometimes feel the need to establish that someone is a terrible person before we’re comfortable making the decision to leave. You can recognize that a relationship no longer works without rewriting every good experience you had together, and you don’t necessarily need the other person to agree with your decision.
We place a remarkable amount of importance on closure, as though every relationship should end with some final conversation where both people acknowledge what happened, accept responsibility for their respective mistakes, and leave with a mutual understanding. That would be wonderful, but it isn’t particularly realistic.
Some people will never agree about what happened. An apology may never come, and a relationship can end with questions neither person can answer to the other’s satisfaction. There might not even be a final conversation. People can decide they’ve had enough, and that’s where the relationship ends.
Yet we can keep disagreements going long after we’ve decided we no longer want the relationship itself. We might keep monitoring what someone is doing and asking mutual friends about their personal life, still revisiting old arguments years later or becoming irritated when we discover they’re happy. It’s entirely possible to remove someone from your life while continuing to devote an extraordinary amount of attention to theirs.
Would their unhappiness make what happened any better? I doubt it would restore the relationship or change the past, and it certainly wouldn’t give us back the time we spent being angry.
What I’m Still Trying to Understand
I’ve been angry and disappointed, and I’ve cared deeply about people while struggling to understand their decisions. I’ve also had to acknowledge that my understanding of a relationship isn’t necessarily the same as the other person’s. Two people can spend years building a life together without experiencing that life in exactly the same way.
One might remember a period as some of the happiest years of their life while the other remembers struggling through it. Neither necessarily knows everything about what the other was experiencing. That doesn’t make every perspective equally accurate, or mean serious wrongdoing should be explained away as a misunderstanding. It means human relationships are complicated, and sometimes our understanding of them remains incomplete.
I don’t expect everyone I’ve cared about to remain part of my life forever. We may never agree about what happened or remember our experiences the same way, and they may never forgive me. I don’t think I should have to agree with their version of events to respect their decision to move on.
There are people who find their way back to each other, and others who never speak again. I’m comfortable with either outcome.
Losing a relationship, a friendship, or contact with someone you once loved can be painful enough on its own. There are things we can’t change about how those relationships end, including how another person feels about us. But we have some say in what happens afterward.
I don’t expect anyone to pretend they aren’t angry or to forgive someone they don’t want to forgive. I’ve never believed that was necessary. I just wonder why we sometimes continue treating another person’s unhappiness as unfinished business, long after we’ve decided the relationship itself is finished.
Walking away should be enough.
