Resist or retreat?

Last night I was pondering how to give my valediction to someone for whom I have cared for a long time. It was agonising. It caused great mental pain, and probably physical as well since a physical pang of disillusion did make my wobbly.

As often as not, once-besotted, starry-eyed people metamorphose from best companions on earth into archenemies just because one side suddenly find that the relationship is foredoomed, or simply because one side is falling for another romantic entanglement. It is never easy to be on either side of a breakup, and thus how to break up gracefully is indeed art, as much as how to enter into courtship. That's why I have to be punctilious in proposing to split up.

Preparing a farewell address is probably even more difficult than writing an introductory chapter for a PhD thesis. It took me five months to finish the first chapter of my doctoral work in my first year, then one month to turn it into an article for an academic journal, and finally almost two years to get it published, but how long will it take to orchestrate a parting tune?

I don't know. My mind is flummoxed at the moment.

In the sphere of academia you publish or perish; over the tortuous course of studying a foreign language you write or rot; on the meadow where love blossoms you resist or retreat. I have been doing fine in the first two arenas. I have three articles published in academic journals and one in a government gazette; I maintain a weblog and keep writing in English. However, I decide to retreat, to withdraw from the coliseum of love as I know there is no Camelot for me.

Is it really a wise option to forgo a fractious yet still solid relationship and start being tortured by an unrequited affection for a perpetually unavailable diva, or is it better to reset the discolouring relationship to default? Whatever, I gather I was anathematised right at the beginning.