Ah, oh, no, you've chosen the long break-up option, the worst option in the entire thing.Okay then, let's wade into this together: first there's the tearful argument where one of you says, "Well, maybe we should just break up," and you try to gobble their own sentence into your mouth so it feels like they unsaid it, beg and cry and promise everything, and you both sort of tentatively patch things over – big hug at the end of the night where you rub each other's backs like sick dogs, that sort of thing – and go out to dinner that week and there's a fragile tension there, but this is alright, isn’t it? This is still good?Then you slip again – ten to 12 days later you go out and get pissed and come back to the "WE TALKED ABOUT THIS!" rager – and again you don’t break up, but you have to sleep on the sofa or floor or get a 1AM Uber to your mate's house, and now the writing's on the wall, but neither of you admit it. Horrible Sunday in the flat where you both barely say a word to each other, skimming into one room and out of another, you go and put something on the TV and they go to the bedroom to read, walk in an hour-and-a-half later and announce they’re "going to meet a friend" in that rigid way where you know you're not invited because they're going to talk about you, and three weeks have gone by now and you’re miserable every second of the day but you don’t dare tell anyone close to you about it because speaking it – out loud, with your mouth! – makes it more real, somehow, ratifies your pain, so you just sort of struggle through and watch the engine fail mid-air until the next Big Chat, the Actual Big Chat.You know it's coming because they mute the TV and turn to you full body on the sofa, and you're like Well OK, This Is How The Next Three Hours Of My Life Are Going To Go, but you both agree that with nine months left on the contract maybe it's best if you both just sort of keep going with it, maybe you could fold out the front room bed and they can have the bedroom one, live together as sort of sexless friends and forget all the times you saw each other's genitals, don't ask where they've been when they come home late or not at all, that sort of thing, prepare the meals separately, emails about the electricity bill.But then six weeks after that (and one night you both don't talk about, but you both came home separately wine drunk and had this weird clumsy wrong-angled breathless fuck on the sofa) you're sick of it, so you break contract and move, but you have to have Yet Another Big Chat about that, about how they're going to have to move too and you both need to move separately, and who gets what and who has to email the landlord, &c., and so this feels like a break-up on top of a break-up, and at no point have you dealt with the actual break-up by doing the normal thing which is crying three times then fucking someone in the toilets at a club.So:LIVE OUT THE REST OF THE LEASE ON YOUR OWN!MOVE IN WITH A WEIRD OLDER PERSON AND GET REALLY FUCKING INTO HINGEMOVE OUT INTO YOUR OWN PLACE
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