Breaking Up With Someone You Live With

Breaking up with someone you live with is not much different than breaking up with someone you don’t live with. The biggest difference is that you must establish some healthy post-breakup boundaries and discuss who and when is going to move out.

You must have a peaceful discussion with your ex-partner regarding your belongings, shared responsibilities, finances, children, house rules, sleeping arrangements, who can visit and when, communication, and behavior.

By talking about post-breakup matters early on, you can avoid nasty surprises and arguments that would otherwise ensue. You can make sure that you and your ex are on the same page about how to act and what to expect.

This is required for the breakup to unfold smoothly and be healthy.

So if you’re thinking of breaking up with someone you live with, know that you’ll need to make some changes in the house. You and your ex will have to compromise on how to live together as exes and stick to your agreements.

If you don’t come to any agreements or don’t stick to them, chances are someone will do something that hurts the other person and make the breakup more difficult than it has be.

Someone will trigger strong unwanted emotions such as jealousy, fear, and anxiety in the other person and create unnecessary difficulties and problems that could have been avoided.

Keep in mind that breakups make ex-couples highly emotional and that they bring out the worst in people. You want to make certain that you treat your ex-partner fairly and respectfully at all times.

Respectful behavior is anything that shows you understand what your partner is going through and that you care about his or her feelings. Your empathy is the least your partner deserves for staying with you until the end.

So if you want to know how to break up with someone you live with, break up with him or her at home when the time is right for your partner. A good time would be when your partner has finished work and doesn’t have any important tasks and responsibilities for a few days.

Friday after work or school would be ideal as your partner will need a few days to deal with shock and overwhelming separation anxiety and fears.

During the breakup conversation, explain why you’re breaking up all of a sudden and how you expect the breakup to affect your lives. Your partner needs to know that the end of a romantic relationship means the end of bonding, words of affirmation, and the things couples do together.

It means that you’re no longer going to be intimate and sleep in the same bed. If you were to sleep together, your partner might try to give and receive affection. And that would delay the time it takes him or her to detach and become emotionally independent.

That’s why it’s best not to put yourselves in situations that give your ex hope and smother you.

You’ll have a much healthier and happier post-breakup experience if you draw a physical and emotional diving line between you and your partner.

This implies you mustn’t sleep together or tell each other you still love each other. That’s not how you’ll distance yourselves from each other and move on because you’ll get closer and become dependent on each other for validation and guilt relief.

What you must do is look for ways to disassociate from each other and focus on yourselves. And you can do that by asking for space as soon as the breakup occurs. The sooner you talk about the breakup rules the better.

This post is for dumpers who are considering breaking up with someone they live with. We’ll talk about how to break up with your live-in partner and discuss the rules you should set if you want to have a clear transition.

Tips for breaking up with someone you live with

The first thing you must do when you break up with a person you live with is calmly explain why you’re breaking up. This is the most important part of the breakup as your explanation can give your ex closure or make your ex anxious and blame himself or herself.

Depending on how patient, caring, expressive, and empathetic you appear, you can make your partner’s breakup experience manageable, confusing, difficult, or a living hell on earth.

Your partner’s ability to handle rejection and stress matters as well, of course, but what plays an even bigger role is that you set your differences and hard feelings aside and try to be as honest as you can be.

Answering your ex’s questions truthfully can make healing a lot easier for your ex as it can help your ex find closure and accept the breakup. Lying, dodging your ex’s answers, or answering them half-truthfully, on the other hand, can make your ex search for answers alone and elsewhere, increase your ex’s suffering, and prolong your ex’s healing by months.

As a dumper, you want to help your ex as much as you can so your ex can recover fast, leave you alone as fast as possible, and stop making you feel guilty and pressured.

It’s, therefore, better for both parties that you have the breakup talk and get things over with as soon as possible. Don’t delay important conversations just because talking with your ex is difficult and makes you feel uncomfortable.

Your ex will go through a much more unpleasant and prolonged experience than you. Your ex will suffer from rejection and separation anxiety. And you need to be aware of that, show that you care, and offer support.

Once you’ve discussed what went wrong in the relationship and shown empathy, it’s time to talk about how you expect the breakup to unfold. As I mentioned earlier, you can’t continue to live in the same place and be in each other’s way.

Someone (probably you – the dumper) is eventually going to start dating someone else and hurt the dumpee.

That can’t happen while you live under the same roof. Your ex doesn’t need to see that you’re in love with another person already and that he or she needs to compete for your love. Your ex mustn’t know whether you’re dating and what you’re doing in your free time.

Not knowing much about your life is necessary because it helps your ex recover from rejection and find meaning in life again.

So make sure that someone moves out of the house as quickly as possible. And while that person is looking for a place to stay, avoid looking for new people to date. It’d be extremely selfish and unfair to monkey-branch to someone new while your ex-partner is still picking up the remnants of his or her self-esteem and thinking about reconnecting with you.

Always remember that you have a moral responsibility to provide answers, assuage your ex’s pain, and avoid hurting your ex. And you have to do these things in a way that avoids promising things you don’t mean and giving away hope.

You must also do your best to avoid crying, blaming yourself, calling yourself names, and making it seem like your ex is the most perfect person in the world, and that you’re entirely responsible for the breakup. That could make your ex sympathize with you rather than himself/herself and prevent your ex from reflecting on his or her shortcomings.

It’s always better to be honest (but not so honest that you’re mean).

Breaking up with someone you live with is difficult because unless someone has friends or relatives to stay with, you’ll be forced to see each other and interact with each other. You’ll need to communicate from time to time and avoid acting on your negative emotions.

This means that you as a dumper will have to ignore uncomfortable emotions whereas your ex will have to remain strong, avoid begging and getting angry, and find ways to cope with the breakup.

Honestly, breaking up with a person you live with isn’t the most difficult part of the breakup. The hardest part is staying physically close to your ex and feeling awkward around him or her. Because you’ll feel awkward and appear cold and distant, the stand-offish body language and tone will probably make your ex feel extremely unloved, unworthy, and anxious.

It will make your ex crave your love and recognition more than ever before.

So be mindful of how you communicate with your live-in ex. Be conscious of the words you say, the tone behind those words, and the actions you take.

With that said, here’s how you should break up with someone you live with.

You may feel bad for leaving your live-in partner, but whatever you do, don’t act like you’re still together. It’s okay to show that you care about your partner’s health and well-being, but don’t give the impression that you care romantically.

Any indication that you might still have feelings will make your ex extremely hopeful and reliant on you for healing.

So try to remain resolute. Don’t look uncertain because your ex will most definitely see it as an opportunity to convince you to come back and ignore the need to get over the breakup.

Don’t let your living situation decide whether you stay with your ex

Whatever you do, don’t base your decision about breaking up with your live-in partner on how much worse your life is going to get if you move out. If you don’t love your partner and don’t want to work on the relationship, moving out is the only option (not an option).

By finding a new place, you’ll be doing yourself and your partner a favor as you’ll be terminating a relationship you don’t have the love and determination to maintain.

It may not feel right at first, but when you stop feeling guilty and see that you’re okay emotionally, you’ll know that breaking up was the right thing to do.

So if you have children, finances, or mental health problems that make it difficult for you to separate from your partner, know that staying in a relationship that makes you unhappy is much worse than clinging to your partner for a false feeling of safety.

By waiting for your children to grow up, you’ll be signing a self-torture sentence for yourself, which will negatively affect your children.

It will make them grow up in an unhealthy/loveless environment.

And if you don’t have children, then you’ll be stressing yourself and your partner because you’ll be staying in a relationship you don’t want to be in and making your partner hungry for your validation and love.

Some people stay with their partner for years because they feel guilty, lack emotional strength, or think they owe their partner or kids favors. But all such people do is remain unhappy, project their unhappiness onto others, make others worry about them, and prolong the breakup.

Sooner than later, most of them break up because they can’t change their perceptions of their partner. They don’t have the willpower, energy, and skills to wipe the slate clean.

So if you think that breaking up with someone you live with is a bad idea solely because you live together and it’d be inconvenient, think again. After some thinking, you’ll realize that breaking up is better than staying in a relationship in which you can’t be your true self.

Are you thinking of breaking up with someone you live with? Why you do want to break up with him/her? Let us know in the comments below.

And if you’d like to keep things private and confide in us alone, check out our coaching options here.

Zan

My name is Zan and I’m the founder of Magnet of Success. I enjoy writing realistic relationship and breakup articles and helping readers heal and grow. With more than 5 years of experience in the self-improvement, relationship, and breakup sphere, my goal is to provide advice that fosters positivity and success and avoids preventable mistakes and pain. Buy me a coffee, learn more about me, or get in touch today.