Dumping Ground

            He dumped me the night of prom.

            That would sound much more shocking and heart-breaking if I wasn’t twenty-six and chaperone at the time.  And also if it wasn’t the third time he’d dumped me.

            There are two vastly different camps on the battlefield of breaking up.  One is either the dumped or the dumper.  Very rarely do the two warring sides come together in the amicable peace treaty of a mutual dissolution. More often, retelling the story of the break up, we begin with the phrase: “I never saw it coming …”

            There we are, blissfully sunning ourselves on the sun-drenched beaches of a seemingly solid, stable relationship when the drone of a bomb squad thunders in from the horizon.  Their hatches open and bombs drop,  We need to talk screams from the sky, hurtling towards us with stupefying speed.  The earth beside us explodes as I’m just not happy throws sand into the air.  The flaming debris of It’s not you, it’s me rains back down into the smoking crater as we scuttle to crouch, trembling, next to the yet unexploded We can still be friends.

            It’s a rite of passage, this psychological warfare we call breaking up.  Show me one person who has dated one—and only one—person their entire life and I will show you a person who lives entirely in their head.  It’s an odd dance we do though, with the stakes raising ever higher as we age.  As children and teens, we are expected to fall in and out of love with the changing seasons.  We applaud our children as they mature into heartbreakers and publically count the devastated trail of lovers they leave in their wake.  Parents affectionately clap their children on the back, beaming, and proclaim to all within earshot, “Yup, this one’s going to break a lot of hearts!”  Much rarer is the scene of a parent cradling their brood in the crook of their arm, stroking their hair gingerly, whispering, embarrassed, “Sadly, this one will get her heart broken too many times to count.”

            But broken-hearted in high school , we find solace in our parents, who assure us that it has to happen to everyone, that we’ll look back on this in our adult years and realize that it wasn’t all that big of a deal.  We are promised that it will get better.

            But it doesn’t.  In young adulthood, dating becomes auditioning a mate.  We are expected to filter through an expansive list of potential lovers and filter down to the promising few.  If we are twenty-two and casually dating our way through an ever-expanding Rolodex, we are reminded that you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince.  If we are twenty-six and without a long-term romance, we begin to receive the not-so-silent reminders that our parents were married and pregnant by the time they were our age.  Every phone call and email home becomes a fresh opportunity for Mom and Pop to thump their finger on our biological clock, setting off the deafening ticking.  At twenty-nine, parents abandon all hope and lavish their love on your pets, substitutes for the grandchildren they’ve realized you will never provide them.  The sad part is, our parents aren’t the only ones abandoning hope like miners trapped in a collapsed mine.

            As relationships flamed out in college, I was unperturbed.  Somewhere in the instinctual, primitive, nomadic corners of my mind, I knew it was all temporary anyway.  Why get hung up on the end of something which had a definite expiration date from the moment of production?

            The anxiety increased substantially as I aged.  As I grew older, I lost the rosy optimism of youth, and the concussive blast of each ended relationship rang in my ears and stunned me senseless.  The end of my first post-college relationship I’m willing to label as approaching healthy and stable left me shell-shocked for months, painfully paranoid it all meant I would die alone, my body undiscovered for weeks and partially eaten by my cats when neighbors finally called to complain about the stench wafting in through the air ducts.

            In retrospect, I realize that we were two vastly different people and the third (and final) breakup was perhaps the healthiest thing that could have happened in our relationship.  In retrospect, I realize that we would have never been content living each other’s life, as I derived no joy from dancing on the bar in gay clubs, and he found no pleasure in growing old on the couch.  In retrospect, I realize he should have dumped me in person.

            There are two types of people when it comes to breaking up: the straightforward and the chicken shit.  The straightforward are honest and upfront, blunt and without the sugar coating.  “We need to talk” leads to an actual conversation and no mystery as to where we stand as an item.  In my experience, very few people can check this box when asked to describe their personal style.  It is hard, it is uncomfortable, and the role of villain is clearly defined.  We tend to go through life as if it is our personal film narrative.  Though the straightforward attempt is the more psychologically healthy of the two, we can’t help but vilify the person in hindsight.  The dawn of each new relationship sees us toting our emotional baggage to a prospective partner’s front door, hoping our overnight bag of communication issues matches their valise stuff with abandonment paranoia.  Yet the specter of exes lingers in our minds, like a silent movie villain diabolically greasing his handlebar mustache.  Though miles beyond The Worst Prom Ever, I cannot fully escape the fear that each new beau will text me a random “You prevent me from experiencing joy” message.

            But at least when we are told we are Joy Killers, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s over and it’s up to us to begin putting the pieces back together.  We spend our weeks attacking feelings of insufficiency with sugar and liquor.  We agonize our friends with elaborate and detailed analyses of everything that went wrong, until they wish we would shut up and just keep drinking the pain away.  Far worse are the break ups where no bombs are dropped, but the other side simply disappears from the map.  No peace treaty signed, no cease fire announced.  Hell, no opening salvo fired.  Its as if they simply burrow into underground bunkers, effectively terminating communication with the outside world, and leaving the rest of the planted to wonder: “What in the hell ever happened to X?”  We wait, we send messages, but when no response is received, we have to accept that we were dumped and never told.

            The Phase Out is the most mind-boggling break up tactic, and yet (in my experience) somehow the most popular.  Perhaps it is an evolutionary holdover from when a woman just had to change caves to lose a determined suitor, or a man need only hop on a camel and take off down a foreign trade route to free himself from the talons of some vicious shrew.  Perhaps even up to the mid-1900s it was simple to evade unwanted attention by tossing out a vague explanation and disappearing into the mist: “Baby, my country needs me; I’m enlisting.”

            But the modern age has decimated the coward’s way out.  Unless you sever all human ties and live off the grid, you leave some sort of electronic footprint.  A hilted lover can leave only so many voicemails and send unreturned emails before they start seeking answers.

            Though frowned upon in polite society, we’ve all engaged in a little cyber-stalking.  We refresh Facebook status obsessively and lurk invisibly in instant messenger programs, waiting for signs that the object of our attention is active.  We react with shock and outrage when we discover we’ve been blocked or unfriended, though the weeks of sending communication into an unresponsive ether should have been the tip off that this was inevitable.  The first status update confirms that they’re not dead, they’re just ignoring us, and we weep our way back to the red wine and Rice Krispie treats.

            Will I find my Prince Charming?  Undoubtedly, though at this rate I will have to kiss my way through half of the Amphibian and Reptile House at the zoo before finding the right one.  Together we will store our matching emotional baggage under the bed to gather dust, and stretch out to sun on the white sandy beaches of Healthy Relationship, with no ominous bombers casting their shadow.  But still, on my deathbed, I will gather my children and grandchildren to my side, and tell them a story of heartbreak and woe: “It was the night of prom, and I received a text message just as I was getting home.  I ate nothing but Rice Krispies and red wine that summer.  I lost fifteen pounds, but damn I looked good.”