How To Decide If You Should Break Up, In Five Minutes

Breaking up is hard to do -- but it's especially hard to do in modern times, philosopher Alain de Botton says in a new video from The School of Life.

As The Architecture of Happiness author explains, earlier generations get a lot of credit for their commitment to marriage, but they also had more societal and religious pressure to stay married.

"Historically, the choice was a good deal easier because there were simply so many stern external sanctions around not leaving," de Botton says. "Society strongly disapproved of breakups and cast separating parties into decades of ignominy and shame."

These days, we're more open to the idea of divorce -- but that means the burden of choosing to split up falls squarely on us.

"The only thing determining whether to stay or leave is how we feel, which can be a pretty hard matter to work out for ourselves" he says. "Our feelings have a dispiriting habit of shifting and evading any efforts at rational clarification."

So how do you make the decision to split? Watch the clip above for a short list of questions and considerations to make before divorcing.