The Guardian:

There’s something about this time of year that rings the death knell for many relationships. Perhaps it’s the cheerlessness of the post-Christmas period, the inevitable “taking stock” that comes with a new year, or the idea of spending Valentine’s day across a candlelit table from someone you simply don’t love any more. It seems that most of my relationship break-ups and breakdowns have taken place against a bleak, wintry backdrop, and one thing that hits me every time, as if I’m learning it anew, is the impact that splitting up has not just on my life, but on the lives of those around me.

I’ve made friends feel obliged to disown my ex out of loyalty to me, or to be racked with guilt about staying in touch. I’ve forced them to look at their own less-than-perfect relationships and, as a newly single person, been perceived as a threat and avoided or confronted accordingly. My romantic failures have even embarrassed near-strangers, such as the dentist who asked about the client he assumed was still my partner. The thing is, when you’re in the middle of a break-up, you expect to have a monopoly on anguish, and it’s easy to forget that friends and family are suffering in their own way, too — not with heartbreak, exactly, but with a sense of loss, with divided loyalties, social dilemmas, awkwardness, not to mention a rude reminder of how fragile human relationships are in this world.

I don’t know if I’d have really noticed all this if it weren’t for the fact that I recently experienced it from the other side, when a close friend announced that she and her long-term partner were spitting up. I was shocked at the strength of my feelings of dismay — he had become what had seemed like a permanent fixture, not just in her life but also in mine, and I struggled to swallow an unpalatable mixture of sorrow for them and guilt-ridden grief for myself. Grief because, although I knew that in theory I could “stay friends’’ with him, I sensed things could never be the same again. (They weren’t.) He had become a persona non grata overnight simply by virtue of being her ex. After the initial rawness of the break-up had passed, I occasionally met him for lunch or a drink, with my friend’s knowledge. I figured that this was a grown-up way for us to behave, but our meetings became increasingly awkward as the mutual ground crumbled away from beneath our feet, leaving us with little to talk about, and I soon became extremely uncomfortable with my friend pumping me for gossip after I’d seen him.

It was impossible to navigate those first few months without hurting or betraying someone, but worst of all was the feeling that I shouldn’t expect sympathy or support in such a situation, because I wasn’t even one of the wounded parties. I thought that this experience would teach me to be more understanding and tolerant of the behaviour of the large multitude of people affected by my break-ups, but I have to confess that it never feels any less hurtful or shocking to be left out of a social gathering merely to avoid awkwardness, or to learn that friends are still in touch with a recent ex (and harder still to hear “We met his new girlfriend at the weekend’’), or to find out my mum is still sending and receiving Christmas cards from the man who broke my heart some years ago... Some things you just can’t learn by repetition.