vba send equation command to function

Hard to put a title to it, but that's the best I could think of!

Basically, I have a function in VBA that you send some parameters to, and then it does some maths with it to give a value. One of the parameters I send is either a "<" or a ">", which are later used in an if statement of

if x > y

or

if x < y

depending on which I send.

At present, I send this as a string, labelled "constraint", and do the following;

if constraint = ">" then
  if x > y
    
    *code*
  end if

elseif constraint = "<" then
  if x < y
    *code*
  end if
end if

if that makes sense.

This gets complicated with the other code I have; is there a way I can neaten this up into one if statement?

Cheers, and I hope that makes sense