While I'm yelling: I need words for how wrong this is, and why.

[azurelunatic]

Spotted in the wild from someone I don't know: "You don't have my permission to break up with me."

This statement makes a whole fuckton of alarm bells ring, and I want to label every damn one of them.

Let's start with co-opting the language of consent culture to do something that's profoundly opposite.

The consent culture model of relationships is that they are maintained by mutual consent. Once one of the parties has stopped consenting to the relationship, that relationship is over. Even if the other party does not want it to be over.

The process of breaking up can be profoundly unpleasant, and it's not nice to spring that on someone, especially unexpectedly. However, it is less nice, and in fact actively coercive, to make someone remain in a relationship that they no longer consent to.

Not all relationships are good ones. Not all relationships can be repaired. Sometimes despite legitimate efforts on both sides, a relationship can't be repaired. Sometimes only one person is putting in legitimate effort to repair a relationship. Is it fair to that person? Fuck no.

Sometimes relationships include support, shelter, and division of necessary labor. These are horrible but necessary things that will need to be figured out in the breakup, and often are/should be covered by local law. There are eviction laws. Alimony is a thing that exists. Custody battles are a thing. This hits a lot harder when poverty and disability are factors, and the safety nets in the US do not cover people who from every ethical viewpoint fucking ought to be covered.

What else is there?

Comments

[silveradept]

Thee's also the part where the speaker is asserting that their relationship is more akin to a broken Dominant/submissive relation than a relationship of consent among equals.

[mathsnerd]

"You don't have my permission to break up with me."

Ugh. Ugh. UGH. Reminds me of having arguments with my mother where I would try to quit and walk away to avoid SI/save my rest of sanity, and she'd follow me, saying "You don't have my permission to leave/stop this conversation.".

SO GLAD I can now (mostly) see these traps for what they are: people abusing the choice language to hide abusive, manipulative behaviours to hurt people.

[silverflight8]

You don't have my permission to break up with me.
Eh, I don't care, I'm breaking up with you, not the other way around. I don't expect your permission.

Wouldn't start dating someone who said that though.

[snippy]

I have received almost exactly that response from a person I barely knew from a Usenet group who emailed me without permission (in spite of the .sig language I had asking people to ask first) and then berated me in following emails for not responding quickly enough. I told him to stop emailing me forever and ever and received the response that I didn't have permission, that any discontinuation of a relationship in his culture had to be mutual and negotiated, and that I was hurting his feelings with my rudeness.

And then I posted about it publicly and found that he'd done the same thing to most of the women who posted on that newsgroup.