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We may have a quarrel from time to time just like any healthy couple, but at the end of the day, not being dumped beats being dumped any day.

This is a sort of hyperbolic expression that means something along the lines of:

Je préfère mille fois ne pas être largué à être largué.

I expressed the idea of "beats ... any day" with "préférer mille fois", but I wonder what is an idiomatic expression for this in French? The main idea here is that doing (or not doing) something is incomparably better than the other way around.

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    There is an idiomatic phrase in French for this kind of situation, but it actually means the opposite: "mieux vaut être seul que mal accompagné", ie "being alone is better than being in bad company". If you are keen on using an idiom, you might twist it the other way around, eg "contrairement à ce qu'on dit, je préfère rester mal accompagné qu'être seul".
    – Greg
    Commented Oct 9, 2017 at 9:14
  • Is it a twist on an idiom? I thought the real way was: Better being dumped rather than being dumped any day.
    – Alex Perrin
    Commented Nov 21, 2017 at 9:43
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    "c'est toujours (/mille fois) mieux de ne pas se faire larguer"?
    – Quentin Ruyant
    Commented Nov 30, 2017 at 11:28
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    @Alone-zee Your "je préfère mille fois" is perfectly valid and idiomatic.
    – guillaume31
    Commented Apr 6, 2018 at 15:07
  • @guillaume31 Quite true but "préférer (infinif) à (infinif)" is very dated. One would rather say "préférer (infinif) plutôt que de (infinif)" (formal) or its common shorthand "préférer (infinif) que (infinif)" (far better in that context).
    – xhienne
    Commented Jul 5, 2018 at 12:55

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You're not far from it... if you want to avoid having a subject, you can simply use "il vaut mille fois mieux" or "c'est toujours mieux," for example:

Il vaut mille fois mieux ne pas se faire larguer que se faire larguer.

C'est toujours mieux de ne pas se faire larguer que de se faire larguer.

But what you have works too.

In any case a literal translation of "any day" would not be understood with the meaning of the English idiom, so best to stay away from that.

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