How To Tell If You Need a Break From Your Boyfriend or Girlfriend

Do you know when it’s time to push the pause button on a dating relationship?

What sorts of issues should lead you to take a break versus working through them while continuing to progress in a relationship? 

Two practical guidelines may be helpful in discerning whether it’s time to take a break in your dating relationship:

1) Take a break if red flags arise.

2) Take a break before getting serious if either of you has not seriously discerned your call to married life. 

Red Flags.

Consider taking a break, at least a temporary one, if you notice red flags or if those in your inner trusted circle, be they friends or family, notice red flags. What is a red flag? A red flag is a behavior, past or present, that would inhibit your significant other from making a total gift of self; in other words, a behavior or history of behaviors that would prevent them from being free to make a total gift of self to you. 

An example of a red flag would be an active pornography addiction. Porn rewires the brain in ways that, without intervention, make healthy relationships near impossible. A man or woman who is addicted to porn cannot simultaneously be capable of the self-mastery that’s necessary for prudent discernment and decision-making in relationships.

This is not casting judgment on a person who actively struggles with pornography, and it does not mean that a person who currently uses porn will never be capable of entering willingly and fully into marriage, but an active, untreated porn addiction, as with any form of active addiction, is a direct contraindication to moving forward in a relationship. 

It all comes down to freedom.

Taking a break for something like a porn or drug or other addiction is not abandoning someone in their time of need, and it’s not uncaring. It’s recognizing that they are in a state of unhealth, of illness, that must be addressed before anything else, like growing in relationship and discerning lifelong marriage, can happen.

A person with a broken leg must heal before they can walk or run, and trying to run before the leg is healed would be disastrous. Trying to date someone actively struggling with untreated addiction predisposes you to enabling and codependency, neither of which ultimately help the struggling person. 

Other examples of red flags could include infidelity, manipulative or isolating behaviors, or a criminal record. Again, taking a break is not casting judgment on another person, it’s an acknowledgment that a valid marriage must be freely entered into, without coercion, fully consented to, permanent, and open to life, as each spouse’s answers to the Questions Before Consent and statements during the Marriage Vows make clear.

Pressing pause now to resolve red flags can decrease the chances of a painful divorce and exploration of annulment down the road. 

Don’t put the vocational cart before the horse.

I’ve written before about my own experience learning the hard way that vocational discernment needs to happen before entering into a serious dating relationship. Simultaneously discerning marriage with one person while keeping the door open to or even exploring religious life is like trying to straddle two horses at one time—someone is going to get hurt.

For this reason, and unlike my own behavior, both you and your significant other need to make a firm commitment to absolute transparency with each other from the very beginning of any relationship. Certainly, when you’re just getting to know someone you might talk to or message multiple people at once. In this pre-dating stage, you might not have ruled out religious life either. And of course airing all one’s deepest emotions, wounds, and hopes right away isn’t appropriate. 

But, in the same way that a formal dating relationship (i.e. acknowledgment that I’m your girlfriend, you’re my boyfriend) should be mutually exclusive of other romantic pursuits, it should also be vocationally exclusive.

Date with clarity.

Do discern your vocation well, as both married life and religious life are good and beautiful callings, but don’t try to discern both at the same time. And if, as I did, you find that you’ve already entered into a serious relationship without closing the door soundly on the other vocational path, pray for grace and courage, and then humbly acknowledge this fact to your significant other.

Strong relationships depend on deep trust and intimacy, and those things are only possible when we are secure in the knowledge that both we and the other person are on the same page emotionally and seeking after the same thing (discernment of marriage) in freedom. Freedom is key. When I failed to close the door on religious life but starting dating James anyway, I wasn’t truly free to enter into a relationship with him, and tremendous pain resulted. 

Taking a break from dating when there are red flags or when one of you hasn’t seriously discerned your vocation is an acknowledgment of the depth and seriousness of Christian marriage, which we’re called to enter into freely.

Sure, taking a break can be scary, but doing so opens us to the possibility of receiving the fullness and beauty of what God is calling us to in our vocation. As we read in Galatians 5:1, “For freedom, Christ set us free.”

May you be free in your dating relationship!