What every breakup could look like: a conversation between two exes
By Daniel A. Linder, MFT
My son, Randy, and his ex-girlfriend, Margz, decided to debrief their relationship live on Margz’s podcast, Feelings State of Mind, in an episode titled “This Is What Every Break-Up Should Look Like.” They talked about what they learned about how they wanted to be together and how they wanted to communicate.
As Margz puts it: “No breakup will ever be easy, but Randy and I learned how to significantly reduce the level of suffering we normally anticipate when it comes to breaking up, by being brutally honest about how we felt towards each other and in the relationship.” Randy took the lead, and for Margz it was a first: coming through a breakup with deep love and appreciation for each other.
What they practiced applies well beyond breakups: any difficult conversation, setting a boundary, asking for space, or telling someone something painful to hear.
I’ve shortened and edited the episode to bring forward its core lesson. When we are honest, real and true with each other, even about the hardest things, the result is often not distance but deeper connection.
On the podcast Feelings State of Mind, host Margz sits down with her ex-boyfriend, Randy, to look back on their relationship and on a breakup that, unlike most, ended well. Under a blanket fort built for better sound, they talk about honesty, compassion, and why the way a relationship ends matters as much as the way it begins.
Edited and condensed from an automatic transcript of the episode "This Is What Every Break-Up Should Look Like... ft. My Ex" (September 30, 2026). Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts.
Margz: Hello, hello. Welcome back to Feelings State of Mind. I'm excited about tonight's episode because it's about breakups and the different ways of handling them. Mostly, though, it's about my own last breakup. I want to honor this special being and the relationship we created together. He showed me another way of breaking up: talking to each other, being brutally honest with each other, and knowing the love between us is separate from how our relationship turned out.
Margz: Doing some research, I found that according to YouGov, 58% of breakups end badly, both dramatic and messy. But my last breakup was a good one, I think because he had such a beautiful mindset about our relationship. And what better way to talk about it than to bring him on himself? So, hi, ex-boyfriend.
Randy: Hello, hello. It's so good to be here.
Margz: How are you feeling today?
Randy: A little nervous, but it's fun. We're hanging out under this cover, and it's great.
Margz: We had to make a fort, which, fun fact, I never did as a kid. Apparently it helps with sound. Very cozy vibes. Okay, first question: would you agree that our breakup ended as well as a breakup could?
Randy: Yeah, I thought it was really beautiful.
Margz: Numerous times during our relationship, you said that if we needed to end things, it wasn't going to end like our previous relationships had. If I needed to end things, I would tell you, we would talk it through, and we would share the impact in a way that deepened our intimacy. I think one of the main reasons it ended so well is that it was so important to you. So what does ending it with love mean to you?
Randy: I think it's really intimate to bring another human into your actual experience. True intimacy is when you're honest enough to share that raw experience. When people break up, they often have to tell somebody a hard truth: that they don't want to continue down this path. And they don't know how the other person will respond. Did they see it coming? Will they be hurt? Angry? Will they do mean things, cold things? It can be really scary to bring somebody into an experience that you know might hurt them. But at the same time, it's really intimate.
Randy: If you go into a relationship optimizing for intimacy, and not for specific positive outcomes, you want to make it safe for the other person to share their raw experience with you.
Margz: What I found really beautiful about you was that you weren't afraid of the harsh truth. But there's a way to say things truthfully that minimizes the pain. I think it came from the kindness in your voice and what was behind it. How can you say something hard, but in a kind way?
Randy: I go back to the devastation of being broken up with. My ex basically left me for my best friend, with no communication at all. It was by far the worst experience I've ever had in my life. I spent the next year trying to heal. Honestly, I've spent the last ten years trying to heal from it.
Randy: So I ask myself: she fell in love with my best friend, so what should she have done? Never fallen in love with him? Maybe that's ideal, but sometimes that happens. What hit me over the head was that she didn't communicate with someone she loved. Since then, the recipe I strive for is an equal mix of honesty and compassion. And sometimes it gets clunky. The honesty piece means you have to tell the person what's happening, even if it's absolutely brutal. I need to hear the truth, no matter how painful. But it should also be delivered with care.
Margz: I remember you saying how important knowing the truth is to you. Even when something hurts to know, you still want to know, because it's the truth. It's better to know than not to know.
Randy: What scares me now in a relationship is creating an environment that isn't safe for someone's raw experience. What I learned from that breakup is that it wasn't necessarily 100% my fault, but I played some role in creating an environment where she didn't feel safe to share what was going on for her.
Randy: So my ultimate goal in relationships is to make it safe to bring out true experience. And if you really want somebody's true experience, you can't push them toward it being one way or another. You have to engage with real curiosity about what their experience is and be as open-hearted as you can. That's what I strive for. Obviously it's a lot easier when I'm not triggered. The ideal version of me welcomes whatever someone's raw experience is and feels grateful that they're sharing it with me.
Margz: Maybe what's most beautiful is being brutally honest with ourselves about whatever emotions come up. Sometimes it's so much easier to get scared or go into denial. But it's so important to be honest with ourselves, even if what's coming up is harsh or scary, because that's how we move forward.
Randy: And it's not always easy to know what we're feeling. You might have a voice inside saying, "Don't mess this up. This is a really special relationship." And another part saying, "This isn't exactly how I want to feel." What do you do with that? How much do you disclose to your partner? How much do you safely disclose to yourself? It's complicated.
Margz: Totally. I think you made the space safe enough for me through your sheer openness and compassion, even when I was scared or unsure about what to keep to myself and what to share.
Randy: Every time we had a conversation like that, with you being brave enough to share and me being open-hearted enough to receive it and explore it with you, it made me feel closer to you and more confident in myself. A lot of times people give up something beautiful that's sitting right in front of them, something workable and creative, in the name of chasing a fantasy that isn't real.
Margz: With you, I was able to talk about my fears and our fears. I much prefer a partner who wants to talk about everything that's going on and won't be scared of it. It's also good information for quickly identifying the wrong person, someone incompatible with me. We're humans. We're imperfect, insecure beings who need a lot of love and affection. If you're feeling avoidant, as most people often are, and you share that with someone who makes it safe, it opens a doorway to know them better and love them better.
Margz: Are you familiar with the compliment sandwich? For anyone who doesn't know: you're in a tough conversation with someone you care about, so you say some nice things first, then the hard thing, then end with something nice again. It softens everything. If you go straight to the harsh truth, they can feel attacked. A little kindness can go a long way.
Randy: I think it can feel performative. What I've learned is that when it comes to keeping an intimate space where you can connect deeply, there's no way to get it perfectly right. It's hard, and it gets clunky. Performance goes out the window. There's no room for it when you're present with everything that's going on in the moment.
Randy: I understand that if somebody has to tell me something challenging, softening it might make it easier for them to say. But I don't want what needs to come out to get lost because it feels too harsh. I don't want it sugar-coated.
Randy: It's one thing to hear "I'm leaving you." It's another to hear how meaningful being with me was, and then "I've gotten clarity within myself that this isn't what I want." I can appreciate now, for the first time in my life, how rich it is to be honest like that: to tell someone you love them, and have them receive it. It's an opportunity for intimacy. If someone responds negatively to my truth shared kindly, they're missing that opportunity too. When I say what I have to say, I'm coming from love, from my heart, rather than wrapping a breakup in a compliment sandwich to soften the blow. That doesn't soften it. It's harder and hurts more.
Randy: I think breaking up with love is about where you're coming from inside yourself. If you think of a breakup as an absence of love, that doesn't fit for me. That isn't where my desire to break up comes from. Most of the time it comes from love: love for myself, to live the best life I can and be in the relationship I want to be in. But it also comes from love for the other person. They want to be with somebody who's a fuck yes for them. And if I'm not a fuck yes for them, they deserve to know that.
Margz: So true. I love that. What are your thoughts on people softening the blow by saying, "It's more me, not you"? I think a lot of breakups happen that way because people are scared to be honest.
Randy: This is another angle on honesty and compassion. I don't think honest means sharing every thought you're thinking. Take judgment. I assume every person has a lot of judgment, because that's how our brains work, and there's nothing wrong with that. Judgment is like the artist in us trying to have a voice: "I disagree with how other people do life." There's something beautiful in that. But judgment is also dangerous, especially when it's unsolicited. I might think you're doing life wrong while you feel great about your life.
Margz: When someone makes a breakup all about them, "It's really me, not you," it isn't completely honest, and I don't feel any love coming through. It becomes a cop-out. I'd much rather hear something closer to the truth, like "I wish I were emotionally ready to navigate the turbulence between us, but I can't meet you there. Something isn't working, and I want out."
Randy: And I don't want anyone to have to work so hard to break up with me.
Margz: What if your partner is really controlling or super jealous, and you want to break up with them with love? How would you say that without making it all about you?
Randy: After that really painful breakup, and before us, I was in a relationship for about 18 months, basically the COVID era. It was really beautiful, but at times I felt she wanted less space in our dynamic than I did. I wanted a life with her and a life away from her, and I think that was a little triggering for her. So I broke up with her, and honestly, I felt I did a decent job, because I communicated with so much love. But I got a lot of feedback afterward that it was a very painful breakup for her.
Randy: You can only do your best. I tried to express my love and to assure her that a lack of love wasn't why I needed to break up. You have limited control over how someone receives it. Breakups are tough terrain no matter what, but saying it with love eases the pain and suffering.
Randy: Part of it, too, is validating your own experience. If somebody is too clingy, or too whatever, and that's a problem for you, it's a problem for both of you. These problems aren't one-sided when you're building a relationship together.
Margz: How important do you think it is that a breakup, if one needs to happen, is done with love?
Randy: I want to quote one of my best friends, Oren, who you know.
Margz: Yes, shout out.
Randy: He taught me this way of thinking about it: first, you have to set the boundary, and then you set it with love. What he means is that we're all imperfect beings who sometimes don't have the strength, the skill, or the self-awareness to set a boundary with love. In that case, you have to practice setting boundaries and accept that it might be clunky and painful for the other person.
Margz: I know some people might not be able to offer that. In our relationship, either of us could have just disappeared emotionally.
Randy: If two people build a relationship on a foundation of communicating hard things with love, it makes both people feel safer. Even in the worst-case scenario, when there's big, painful information, you'll show up for it, listen to each other, and care for each other. I think it's better to bring it up early, something like, "If you ever have to communicate something difficult with me, I'd like you to say it with love." It's not "By the way, if you break up with me, please do it with love." It's establishing a core principle: whenever there's a rupture, an argument, or something that needs to be discussed, you come from love. And that implies that if it's a breakup, it will be done with love too.
Margz: I wrote about building a solid foundation for a developing relationship as early as possible: committing to be open to talking about any difficult feelings or issues, including breaking up. Do you agree or disagree with that?
Randy: I think it's odd in the sense that it's not normative. For a lot of early couples, talking about breakups feels strange: "Wait, we're not there yet, we're just getting started." But I disagree with that as a principle. I think it's a great first-date topic. It's so attractive when somebody owns their experience and shares it with you. And it's terrifying to me when I can't trust that a person will do that.
Margz: Totally. I love that. It goes for my friendships too. I don't want to have to wonder whether something is wrong. I want to feel safe enough that I can trust you to bring it up.
Margz: What would you say are the benefits of ending a relationship with love? I have a few, but I'm curious about yours.
Randy: I'd love to start with you, since I've been getting so much airtime.
Margz: Okay, I'll start with one. When it goes well, you get real closure. If someone makes it all about themselves, or ghosts, neither person gets to talk about what went wrong or why the relationship didn't work. Sometimes it didn't work simply because two people are incompatible. If you can talk about that, even as you both leave, it becomes so much lighter and easier when it's expressed with love. And if they can take that with them and work on it, they'll show up for the next relationship in a healthier, more beautiful way. Both people grow, and they get real closure, which I know is rare. It's so healing. With us, I really grew to love you, and I'm so grateful to have met you. I want you to know in your heart that you are loved by me.
Randy: That makes me feel good. When my love is received, it feels really good.
Margz: Because it ended with love, even though breakups are hard, we were able to minimize the suffering.
Randy: Exactly. And that speaks to another benefit: what comes after the breakup. I think of a relationship as an almost never-ending ecosystem that shows up in many forms. We met on a dating app, we didn't know each other, we built a relationship, we broke up, and now we're recording a podcast together about our relationship and breakup. That's unbelievable, isn't it? Breaking up with love pays dividends. It's a testament to our underlying friendship, which is a more powerful force than a lot of people realize. When it comes down to it, all relationships at their core are about seeing and loving a human as they are.
Margz: You opened my eyes to that. I feel sad for all the people who cared for each other so deeply in the beginning and then broke up badly. I felt cared for and loved by you every time we came together to talk about whatever needed to be talked about. It isn't weird when we run into each other, which happens all the time since we live so close. I wouldn't avoid you, because we ended so well, and that's why we could record this together. And I know that if I ever needed to call you, you would pick up. You wouldn't look at the phone and decide to call me back later, if at all. There are so many benefits to ending with love.
Randy: I think we all need to build more language around how we relate to each other, and so much of that comes from the way we break up. When I think about how our last conversations went, both of us were so intentional, honest, and raw. It's what led me to love you and see you more deeply, even though we went our separate ways.
Margz: Same to you. I saw you in an even more beautiful light, and I was even more grateful for how we broke up. It's easy for people to break up in disconnected ways, acting fine and never registering the emotional impact.
Margz: It's a lot lighter and easier to say things with love. But I want to talk about the more difficult stuff. Say I cheated on you, you're really angry, and you want to break up with me because of it. What would you say?
Randy: As you know, I'm poly, so "cheating" isn't a common word in my world, but you can cheat in the poly world too. It's lying. It's breaking agreements. I get what it means: someone betrayed your trust in a deep way. The first thing I'd want to communicate, in the language of breaking up with love, is that it felt like a betrayal, that it really hurt, and that trust was broken.
Randy: There's an expression I love: trust is gained in droplets and lost in buckets. So I'd say, "You broke trust in this relationship, and the question is how we want to move forward from here." That's why it matters so much whether you still want to be in this relationship. I'm not the type to leave immediately over it. I'd leave based on how the repair conversation felt. If I didn't feel a desire from you to engage on that level, to help me understand why you did it and what needs weren't being met, we couldn't heal it. And I'd want to know what role I might have played. As painful as it is, it can be a relief to hear the truth.
Margz: That's so fair: having the conversation that decides which direction the relationship goes, and how to move forward.
Randy: I think people break up before they break up, because the conversation feels so painful. For some people, "I will never be with someone who cheats on me" is simply the line, and that's reasonable. But I think it misses an opportunity to heal, because most often you played some role in it. It doesn't happen in a vacuum.
Margz: What if we've just grown apart? We're living separate lives, we're not hanging out as much, and when we do, it's just "eh." How would you break up with me with love?
Randy: Like with betrayal, I think it starts with accepting the truth myself: "I feel like we've grown apart." That can be a very uncomfortable thing to admit, especially if you're attached to the person. Then I'd bring it up: "Can I share my experience of the last couple of months?" Hopefully you'd say, "Of course." Maybe it's "The last three times we hung out, I wanted to connect with you, and you were on your phone." Or maybe I was on my phone because I was avoiding a painful topic. It might be both of us, or one of us. And that brings me to curiosity.
Randy: By bringing it up, I'm creating a portal for us to decide to be real with each other. The second you decide to be real, you're entering the unknown. You don't know the other person's experience or how they'll respond to yours. There's no way around it: you have to be vulnerable and willing to get hurt. I'd want to know, "What was this like for you?" And you might say, "What are you talking about? I thought it was great." Then it gets awkward, because I have to tell you it wasn't great for me.
Randy: Then the question is: is there enough here, enough fight, for us to work through this together? Go to therapy, try different experiments, listen to each other a lot more? Or have we hit a point of no return, where it's in our best interests to go our separate ways? And hopefully the other person receives that and responds with love too.
Randy: The same principles apply when one person develops feelings for someone else, which I think is common in the monogamous world too. If I were the one leaving, I think it would be harder to deliver that painful information than to receive it, because I'd be the one causing the pain. If one person falls in love with someone else and wants to be with them more, I'd want to say something like: "Given how much I love you, here's what's happening. I know this is a horrible thing to have to share with you, but this is where I am. However you respond, I'm here to talk about it now, or to give you space if you want it. And I want you to know I still love you."
Margz: What if you want to break up, but the other person doesn't? Like they're basically not letting you break up with them. I've seen this play out in sitcoms.
Randy: I think this is getting into the world of codependence, when you become so emotionally entangled with someone that you confuse their emotions with yours and can't tell them apart. If you're very codependent and you tell someone you want to leave, and they say you can't, well, of course you can always leave.
Randy: In the end, the person breaking up has to decide: How long do I want to play this out? Do I want to go through the process with them as they come to terms with this reality? Or do I need to set a boundary and do the best I can? You need both people to buy into the idea that breaking up with love is a beautiful way to break up. If one person doesn't, the breaking-up-with-love story can't really breathe.
Margz: That's so true. Both people need to be on the same page about it.
Randy: And if early on someone says, "Forget that," that's a big red flag, especially for my way of thinking.
Margz: This was such an amazing episode. I feel like the listeners learned so much, and I'm grateful you came on to share all this wisdom. What's your final pitch to listeners about ending with love?
Randy: I love the question. My philosophy is to encourage everyone to be really gentle with themselves, on both sides of this. Be gentle with yourself when you find uncomfortable emotions about another person. Validate them and accept them. All of those emotions are real, worth paying attention to, and ideally worth communicating. And when people you love have difficult emotions about you, most of the time it isn't about you. It's not personal. Find the grace in your heart to listen to them and get to know them better as they tell you something you don't want to hear. It's a muscle that will enrich all our lives if we build strength around it. So I encourage everybody to build it.
Margz: I love that. Thank you so much, Randy, for coming on. I'm so grateful our paths crossed, because our relationship was healing in so many ways, especially in how we were able to end it. One thing that made our breakup so much easier was that you taught me to be grateful for all the beautiful parts of our relationship, to take that with me into my everyday life and into future relationships, and to focus less on the sadness and more on the gratitude.
Randy: Aw, thanks, Margz. Thank you.
Margz: All right, everybody, thank you for listening. Maybe I'll see you in another episode.
Feelings State of Mind is on Instagram at @feelings.stateofmind, and feedback is welcome at feelings.stateofmind@gmail.com.
What Margz and Randy describe is something I’ve seen again and again in forty years of working with couples. Honesty, offered with compassion, rarely destroys a relationship. More often it deepens one.
Each time one of them risked saying something true, and the other made it safe to hear, they grew closer. Intimacy isn’t built on agreement or comfort. It’s built on being known as we really are and being received anyway.
They ended as partners and continued as friends, close enough to sit under a blanket fort and talk it all through in public.
That is the silver lining. Whether you’re beginning a relationship, deepening one, or ending one, being fully honest and real with each other can leave you with deeper connection, understanding, appreciation and love, even when what you’re facing is a breakup.
— Daniel A. Linder, MFT
Daniel A. Linder, MFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and the creator of The Relationship Model of Addiction™ (TRMA™) — a framework for understanding addiction and relationships as a lifelong journey toward emotional nourishment and connection. Learn more at RelationshipVision.com.