Let's save you seven minutes and drop the bottom line on you right now:
If your main motive for separating is to get back the sense of freedom you have lost, a serious disappointment is probably waiting for you.
I want to explain my thesis quietly and at leisure.
One of the critical variables regarding the continuation or ending of a romantic relationship is not the partner's specific traits, but your own mature or infantile conception of what a relationship is in general.
The 2000s have made us weaker and more foolish where human nature is concerned, and the babble of idiotic messages we are exposed to about romance has created in us the following unfortunate phenomenon: more and more people develop plainly unrealistic expectations about this thing called "a relationship."
And there is no area in which our prior expectations are more distorted than the sense of personal freedom.
It is well known that no significant achievement in life is possible unless you define for yourself the things you are willing to sacrifice, and the concessions you are willing to make for the sake of that achievement.
Where a career is concerned, the situation is relatively less catastrophic. People understand they will have to study a lot to acquire a skill, people understand they will face tough competition, and people have already internalised — some of them — that it will take a long time to reach the first million.
But where love is concerned, it's dreadful.
Our expectations are derived from fictitious models, shallow, excessively colourful and plainly unrealistic — in short: Hollywood films.
And it seems that the issue a hundred per cent of couples are forced to grapple with at some stage of the relationship is the issue of personal freedom.
We would all like love, and connection, and depth of conversation, and cuddling in public — but without impairing our precious personal freedom.
If our partner so much as dares to demand attention when it doesn't suit us, we are alarmed at the invasion of our private space. If our partner wants us to see how hard it is for him, and even insists on telling us about it and having us listen — we lament bitterly that he is taking our space.
So let me tell you something about that precious personal freedom.
To hell with it.
Human beings are machines based on contradictory needs. From birth to death we want a thing and its opposite. Our primal need for liberty will forever come to blows with our no less deep need to belong.
In the absence of significant people in our world, we are defective and deficient creatures. Without frameworks of some kind in our lives, we weaken and fall apart.
It is so painful to say this, but we steadily lose the absolute freedom to do and be whatever we please in every minute that takes us further from nursery age.
But that isn't the important message I have to send.
Absolute, fictitious freedom will disappear from our lives whether we want it to or not. That isn't the point.
The point is that in order to be happy and whole in this world, we have to impair our own freedom in a measured way, on our own initiative.
Because if we don't do that, the world will impair our freedom anyway, and it won't consult us, and the contract it offers us to sign will be far less good than the contract we would draft ourselves.
And in translation — if you leave her, although you love and value her, only in order to sniff a few breaths of free oxygen, it is likely that you will find yourself trapped in a new romantic routine with the same whiffs of suffocation in the good case, or chained into a lonely and dreary framework that gives freedom of movement to your body, and a prison of sadness to your soul.
That doesn't sound like a profitable deal to me.
Don't leave something good only to win "freedom" back. In most cases, you will come out of that transaction embittered.
And just a small suggestion: go and message the partner you love very much, right now.