You Ended It, Now YOU Move On.

At one point or another, most of us have been there: we’ve been broken up with. We know what it’s like to feel torn apart at the seams, and we suddenly recognize what our old stuffed animal felt like back in 1989 after we chewed him apart a little too much. Maybe it feels as if life will never be the same since that person who played such an important role will now be out of the picture. Maybe we feel hopeless-- will I ever find someone to love me as much as he or she did?

Oftentimes when someone breaks up with us they shoot off a barrage of excuses. “I just want to be young and party unattached” or “I’m just not at a place in my life where I can have someone else relying on me.” Truth of the matter is that, yes, maybe your significant other is telling it straight. Or, if you know me, you know that I always refer back to the basic premise of my favorite book: maybe, just maybe, he’s just not that into you. A lot of the time we don’t know why exactly someone chose to end things with us, especially when we haven’t done something especially wrong or offensive. It doesn’t take an episode of cheating to make someone want to make a swift exit from the relationship. Sometimes it just happens, for whatever reason, and the person ending it doesn’t provide a proper explanation. It sucks but it happens. We all deal with this.

So maybe the person doesn’t give us a good explanation as to why they’re ending things. Perhaps the breakup leaves us wondering what we did wrong or how we could have salvaged the relationship. At one point or another, though, I hope that we all come to the same conclusion: it’s over, it will be over forever, and there’s not a heck of a lot that we can do to change it. I know it sounds pessimistic (and it actually is) but hey, that’s reality. Can’t spend our lives chasing something we really shouldn’t have. As my roommate explained, “In some situations you realize that you wasted just way too much energy on something to make it work when, in reality, it was no longer worth the fight but it takes a bad break up to make you realize it.”

So months later, when you finally get over it, something interesting inevitably happens: your ex comes crawling back. Now I’m not suggesting that it ALWAYS happens, but, a good chunk of the time when things ended expectantly, it does. Usually it’s when you least expect it, like you’re sitting at your desk at work on a Thursday at 4pm and-- oh hey-- one new email in your inbox. Your heart stops because, well, that name hasn’t appeared in your inbox in months!

Sometimes, in the worst of situations, it’s in public. An ex might approach you when other people are around, just so that you feel the need to be a polite and proper person and actually have a conversation. Or, unfortunately, sometimes an ex isn’t so kind. In the case of my roommate, her ex-boyfriend isn’t even attempting to put on a gentlemanly act. Rather, he’s resorted to the oh-so-mature behavior of public embarrassment, screaming at her across the room at parties and talking trash behind her back to all of her friends. Now, if he’s not embarrassing HIMSELF in public, I don’t know who is. Hello, YOU made the mistake, and now you’re taking it out on her, right after she’s gotten over you? I say let him keep shouting and making scenes. Pretty soon other people besides us will realize that he’s beating himself up for what he did and trying to place the blame on her!

As Bob Dylan sang, "I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind.You could have done better but I don't mind.You just kinda wasted my precious time." Sometimes, we just have to look back on things and realize that, yes, maybe we think we wasted some of our time, but everything usually works itself out well. We learned from our past relationships (I hope!) and, believe it or not, the person who wrongfully ended them (if that’s the case) usually learns their lesson as well, as evidenced by the ones who come crawling back. After all, isn’t it nice to realize that we’re living in the present while an ex who hurt us so much in the past is still living in it?

What Goes Around Comes Around-- Really.

Back in the day, when I was a little college baby (man, I’m dating myself already!) I interned in the newsroom of a major business news magazine in Manhattan. It was beyond an amazing experience, maybe not the work itself but the whole living in the city as a 21 year old, staying out way too late, having a little too much fun and definitely spending a little more money than I should have been.
Years later (I won’t tell you how many though) I’m still using what I learned from my entire experience that summer. For example, I can still look back on the nights that I didn’t come home until the sun came up. Bad idea. Fun at the time, but really, bad idea. Going on dates with boring accountants? Also might seem like a good idea at the time, but when you’re sitting at the table in a Thai restaurant and your date can only discuss the best times to file your income taxes, you soon learn that accepting the date was also a bad idea.

But, of course, we also learn good ideas while misbehaving-- err, uh, having a good time-- during a more wild part of our lives. Who would have thought that it’s always wise to keep a little toilet paper in your purse when heading out to the bars? We really have no way of knowing when that place that offers $5 free refil Bud Lites will run out!

And that you should always be aware of your surroundings. You never know when you’ll overhear a fashion designer talking to a religious Jewish man in a 24-hour deli at 2:30am. They might both then ask your opinion on fabrics to pair for fashionable yalmukes, or Jewish head coverings. You also never know when a NYU law student will approach you while you’re eating hot dogs in the middle of the night in Union Square, offer to read your tarrot cards and, believe it or not, be correct in saying that you’re going to have a fabulous sexcapade in the fall. Not kidding here, by the way. Both really happened.

What I also learned was that it’s more useful than I realized to stay in contact with all of the people you meet on these interesting journeys. I certainly don’t have the name of the law student, and I definitely don’t know if the men in the diner ever successfully developed a JCrew-esque designer yalmukah line. I probably should have kept his card though-- who knows how famous he might be now!

I wouldn’t have realized but the people I met that summer have helped me in ways greater than they would have imagined since then. The intern coordinator at the magazine? Unbelievably kind and helpful whenever I email her with a writing question. My friends that I met at work? A couple are still close to me and help me get through each and every day at work-- thanks, Gchat!

But, what I’m realizing now is that these relationships really are reciprocal. I’m trying to not laugh out loud at my desk right now, but it’s hard not to. Here’s why:

I recently learned that a reporter from the magazine was in search of stories from real people who had quit their job in a funny way. I wasn’t sure that what I did to my awful boss was funny per se, but it was definitely a bit dramatic and perhaps just what this kid was looking for. (I wrote about my bad boss on this blog back on May 19th.)

Essentially I had been abused for months upon months but, like so many Americans, I couldn’t quit my job because I needed the health insurance and the money. But, when I finally had another job lined up, I happened to know that Mr. Asshole was on the side of the road somewhere waiting to get his car towed. I recognized that it was the perfect opportunity to finally stand up for myself, explain how I had been mistreated and quit my job. Ultimately, of course, this made his life more difficult-- he had to interview people and hire and train someone new. Poor baby. Real work can be exhausting!

Anyway, this supposedly is just the type of story that this writer was looking for. I don’t know that I would have qualified this story as “funny” but it’s certainly a good example of how, as I said in the last post, karma is a bitch. It also shows that it’s important to maintain our connections with other people, not just so we can help ourselves but so we can help others. In this case, I think I can aruge that I helped both the reporter and myself: he got his story, I got the satisfaction of saying my piece. Now I’m not out to hurt anyone or damage anyone’s reputation, but ahh, revenge is sweet, isn’t it?