If you are the one being left, you may suffer the ego-crushing dissonance of “I’m a good person and I’ve been a terrific partner” and “My partner is leaving me. How could this be?” You could conclude that you’re not as good a person as you thought, or that you are a good person but you were a pretty bad partner, but few of us choose to reduce dissonance by plunging darts into our self-esteem. It’s far easier to reduce dissonance by plunging darts into the partner, so to speak—say, by concluding that your partner is a difficult, selfish person, only you hadn’t realized it fully until now.
