“So, are you going to write about job stuff or girlfriend stuff?”

“The word makes me think of girlfriend stuff but I don’t think I want to write about that.”

To get ideas for posts, I go to a site called “Can I Get A,” which is supposed to be used for improv suggestions. You can get a word, a location, or a relationship. I go for a word. The other day, I brought the site up on my laptop, hit the “Word” button and “Rejected” came up.

My girlfriend saw it on my screen and that’s when she asked me. “So, are you going to write about job stuff or girlfriend stuff?”

First thought best thought, right? Also, write about the thing that scares you. Both of those cliched bits of advice would point to me writing about breakup stuff. But I meant what I said, I don’t really want to write about it. The reason is simple. Breakups are boring.

Yeah, you heard me. Boring.

They hurt. That’s for sure. But so do broken bones and root canals. Those are boring too.

I had this realization while talking about a breakup on stage. I went through all the details. I listed all the things she did wrong (I was clearly very mature about it if that was the stance I was taking). I reenacted the heartless way she let me go. I laid it all out for everyone to see. Look at my wound!

Not only was it one of my longest stories, it was also my least successful. I could feel the audience’s disinterest as I told it. The first few times I thought that perhaps it was just an off night but then, as I kept at it, I realized that nope, this just isn’t that compelling.

We were dating. She didn’t want to continue dating me. She ended it. The ending sucked. There. That’s the story.

I think I’ve had four major break-ups. When I say “major” I mean that the relationship was either long or significant and the pain was proportionally bad. In three out of four I was dumped.

The worst part of getting dumped, I’ve found, is that you just kind of have to take it. If you say what you need and want to say to the person who dumped you when you need and want to say it, you look bitter at best, stalker crazy at worst.

Break-ups are like weird dreams. Your weird dream is only interesting to you. You can try to explain it to someone but it never really works, despite the fact that the person you’re telling has totally experienced a weird dream of their own and knows first hand how disorienting it is.

And so it is with breakups. Universal as they are, each one is yours and yours alone to experience and get over.

It’s hard to tell when a relationship was successful. I think in our western world, we define success as when a couple gets married and stays married. But the dark underbelly of that ideal is that the measure of a successful relationship then is that it ends in death.

But is there such a thing as a successful breakup? There’s really only successfully healing from a breakup, I guess. I saw an ex a week or so ago. We happened to be at the same party. We saw each other. She waved. I waved back. Then she went back to talking with her friends and her husband.

It felt… alright. It was like remembering some interesting fact. Oh yeah, we dated. Man, that was a long time ago.