How to Break Up With Someone for a Kind, Clean Break

If breaking up with someone were easy, I wouldn’t be writing this article. The question isn’t so much how to break up with someone but how to do it in a way that’s not rife with sadness, awkwardness, and messy miscommunications. No easy feat.

The truth is, breaking up with someone you love—and even with someone you don’t—is hard for a variety of reasons. Maybe you’ll miss their family members, the love and support you got from them during a certain time in your life, or the sex (totally valid). Maybe you’re genuinely worried about hurting someone you care about, or maybe you just don’t want to come off looking like a jerk to your mutual friends. The point is, breakups are never fun no matter how ready you are to move on from a romantic relationship.

“For whatever reason that you’ve made the decision to break up, you also made a decision somewhere along the way that you wanted to date that person,” says Alexandra Stratyner, a licensed psychologist at Stratyner and Associates in New York City. “There are probably lots of feelings of care and maybe even love there, so of course you don’t want to hurt feelings.”

Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as the “perfect breakup.” If you are the one bearing the bad news, however, there are a number of steps you can take before and during that dreaded conversation to make the experience as healthy as possible for both you and your partner.

Here, therapists, psychologists, and other relationship experts share advice for how to kindly and effectively break up with someone.

1. Make sure you actually want to break up.

Before you break up with your partner, make sure that you actually want to end the relationship. “A breakup is something that you want to do once you’ve thought about it over time,” says Rebecca Hendrix, LMFT, a psychotherapist in New York City.

If you’re having doubts and concerns about your relationship, it’s important to share that with your partner before a breakup. “I’ve seen people do ‘surprise breakups’ where you think everything is amazing and then the person is like, I’m leaving today,” says Hendrix. The shock of this kind of out-of-nowhere breakup can be “very, very traumatizing and very hard to get over,” she says.

The healthier (and kinder) option? Share doubts and concerns about your incompatibility. In some cases, the relationship can even be saved by this type of honesty, Hendrix says.

Having a well-thought-out breakup also means that breaking up shouldn’t be a rash decision made in the midst of an argument or a card you play in an attempt to control your partner. That is passive-aggressive and perhaps even manipulative, Hendrix says, and certainly not part of a healthy relationship.

“Ideally, a breakup should never be a surprise,” says Julie Krafchick, a relationship expert, cohost of the Dateable podcast, and coauthor of the upcoming How to Be Dateable (out January 28). “There should be a lot of conversations building up to it that you’re trying to work through, whatever it is that’s making you feel like you’re incompatible. By the time the actual breakup comes, ideally you can both turn to each other and say, ‘We did try and work through this.’”

2. Give the conversation some thought.

Once you’ve decided to end a relationship, it’s important to give yourself time and space to think about what you want to say before you actually say it. The conversation itself will likely be stressful, and when you’re stressed, you tend to lose access to the logical, rational parts of your brain, Hendrix explains.