Make up or break up?

Are you feeling under pressure? Is your significant other overstepping boundaries? Are they picking out your underwear? Are they just plain psycho? Maybe it’s time to break up.

“It’s not you, it’s me . well, actually, it is you.” Breakups happen every day, sometimes leaving a person in the dark. Love is more than just chocolate and flowers. It can cloud your judgment and, in many cases, suck you into a relationship that should not have happened in the first place. Once the first kiss is over with and the butterflies in your stomach go away, what do you have left – real companionship or the empty shell of infatuation?

Relationships do not always work out, and many times problems are ignored until it is too late and too much damage has occurred. It is in those times, when the effort put into a relationship is not producing any changes for the better, that a couple reaches the breaking point. And if two people are not equally committed to making a relationship work, then it is also time to break up. Relationships need to end when the bad times start to outweigh the good. A healthy, lasting relationship should bring out the best in both people, not the worst.

The following is a guide for proper etiquette when breaking up.

1. Never break up with someone over the phone or through a letter, e-mail or text message. Doing it in person is always the best option because it shows the person more respect than cowardly trying to get out of the relationship does.

2. When breaking up, make it official and for good. Don’t call them afterward, unless your intention is to get back together. Calling the person is going to create false hopes.

3. Give the person time to heal before attempting to communicate again.

4. Let the person who got dumped decide if there is a future relationship as friends.

5. A gift is a gift. Don’t ask for it back after you break up.

6. Don’t try to keep tabs on what the other person is doing post-breakup.

7. Don’t bring other people into the breakup mess. Keep it between the two of you.

8. Be civil if you see the other person. Don’t act like a jackass.

9. Respect the other person’s opinion and feelings. This may be the reason you are breaking up in the first place.

10. There is no good time to break up. You are just prolonging the inevitable.

Sure it sucks to be in a breakup situation, but if one person is unhappy the entire relationship cannot work. It takes two people to make a relationship healthy and continue; take one person out and you no longer have a bond, just two people bound by a socially constructed title. It’s never a good idea to try to keep someone in a position they no longer want to be in, this will only strain the already rocky foundation of the connection a couple once had. If you believe in fate, this situation can only lead to the person you were really meant for, and if you don’t, maybe this will better the social life you once had.

We date for a reason: to find a person that we’re compatible with. Incompatibility can only result in a breakup, and though, as painful as it is, it can only lead us to better people and better things.

Jessica Ford is a journalism senior and Elizabeth Yi is an animal science senior. Ford and Yi are the love, sex and dating columnists and can be contacted at thenakedtruthcolumn@gmail.com.

Last week’s winner of the pick-up line challenge was Luke Ayer with “I may not be Fred Flinstone, but I can still make your bed rock.”