It's not you, it's me...

At happy hour last night my friend Celia asked me for my opinions on how women break up with guys. Since this is a topic that I am very familiar with and as it plays a vital role in my novel I figured that I will use the Messy Room to dig a little deeper into this quandary of human emotions.

Now as I often mention in this space I have been the recipient of an email that stated quite plainly that the sender never wanted to talk to me again. A lot of people would consider this to be a rather harsh and impersonal way to break up with somebody. It is but I will state that it has the benefit of being incredibly concrete. You might replay phone conversations in your mind and go “Oh, she really doesn’t mean that” but with email every time you open it the result doesn’t change. Trust me, I tried. Kept on reopening it and continually saw that she didn’t want to speak to me again along with a full list of bullet points explaining why that was the case and a pie chart emphasizing just what parts of my personality that she found to be so horribly flawed that I wasn’t even worth knowing. Give a guy something in writing and he’ll believe it. The male species does not view the world in shades of gray so while email is impersonal it does get the point across.

(For the record, I should state that two weeks after getting the email (and my responding in such a way that I am too embarrassed to even put it in my novel) she did call me. We’ve been very good friends ever since. This just goes to show a) the world is an irrational place and b) I have such a magnetic personality that no woman could stay away from me for long.)

While I haven’t encountered this, a buddy of mine had the misfortune of dealing with a technological advance and being dumped via a text message. Without a doubt this trumps email in terms of cruelty. I mean if you already have the phone in your hand the least you could do is call. Being broken up with is bad enough; you really don’t want to be told that you are not even worth the use of daytime minutes. But what is worse is that it means that she is going to condense all of her feelings down to 160 characters and maybe put a frowny face emoticon at the end. That is the sharpest cut of all; having everything you feel about a person being summed up in a freaking emoticon.

But even texting is an improvement over what has become the most common and most cruel method that women have used to break up with me: simply not returning my phone calls. You wouldn’t believe how much I hate this. The story goes like this. I meet someone and we start dating and we are a month or two into the relationship. We’re having a ton of fun together, going out, buying her dinner, all of those wonderful early relationship moments. One night when we are both blissfully happy as we kiss goodnight I promise to call her. A day or two later I call and get her voicemail. Leave a message and when I don’t hear back from her for a few days I call her again. When she still doesn’t answer I leave a message and just figure that she is really busy. This continues for several weeks until I finally come to the conclusion of “Hmmm, maybe she doesn’t like me anymore.” Knowing that if I keep up the calls the phrase restraining order will be in my future I make one last call typically ending with, “Call me back if you want otherwise I’ll see you around”, which is a very polite way of me saying “This is your last chance otherwise I’ll see you in hell.”

Now I know why women break up with me this way. I am an incredibly nice guy. That is just my very nature. I don’t provide them with some brilliant reason to just scream at me, toss a drink in my face, yell “You slept with my sister!” and storm out of the bar. Instead they would have to explain to me why it isn’t working out knowing that I will ask what I did wrong when there is nothing that either of us did wrong. Some things are just not meant to be. That is an incredibly difficult conversation to have with someone so it is just easier to not have it and know that eventually the point will be made. What kills me about that is the fact that it makes me a complete non-entity. I get treated as if I don’t even exist and that sucks. I’ll spend a month or two wondering what is going on, realize that I have been dumped without being told, and then spend weeks moping about listening to The Smiths all day. Just acknowledge my existence that is all I ask.

So this leads us to actually having a real conversation to break up with someone. These are also fraught with peril and I have one that I still list amongst the worst moments of my life. Back in college I kind of dated this girl Lori. I say kind of dated because she was a military brat who still officially had a boyfriend in Germany but would spend all of her time with me as I played the role of boyfriend substitute who was waiting for her to finally break up with her boyfriend so we could become an official couple. When she did finally do that she decided to move right pass me and on to a guy who was, for lack of a better term, a complete douche (not that I’m still bitter or anything). As I made one last ditch call to see if I could change her mind she basically thanked me for my time as a boyfriend substitute and said “for the past year I haven’t felt alive but now I do.” Given that for the past year I had been the only one going out with her I had the unnerving feeling that I had just been compared to a chair. Really nice to have around but you have no regrets sending it off to Goodwill once it gets a little scuffed.

(Her roommate Heather told me that she almost strangled Lori that night because of the way she treated me. She couldn’t believe that an amazing guy like me would be turfed like that. I ended up dating Heather for a while. Guess it all worked out in the end.)

This leads us to the final question: How should you break up with me? Talk to me. Look me in the eye and talk to me. Tell me that this isn’t working out; a fact that I already know but haven’t had the courage to believe just yet. Don’t give me a speech about how any woman in the world would want a guy like me because that is obviously not true. If it was you wouldn’t be giving me this speech right now. There is nothing wrong with telling me that I am an amazing, nice guy but that the situation just isn’t right. Not everyone in the world is perfect for each other and while it sucks royally to care about someone and then be told that the wonderful fantasy world that you invented inside your head will never be it is infinitely more palatable than being misled or ignored. A woman who tells me the truth, lets me know that it is over, has my undying respect. I’ll hug her, wish her all the best in the world, and probably give her one last kiss for the road. In a few weeks when emotions have died down I’ll try to be friends once again. I’ll celebrate when she finds the right guy for her even if it isn’t me. You should never fault the happiness of someone you care about.

But treat me like a human being. Acknowledge that I exist and that for one moment you really did, and possibly still do, care about me. Let me know that you hate having this moment as well. Do that and I promise you; you will never have to fear having my write nasty things about you in my blog ever.