People like talking about love on Valentine’s Day, as if it always works out and doesn’t involve massive amount of pain for people. Sure sometimes it works out for you, but just as often, you get hurt and you stay out drinking until 6am to feel better, and wind up in a bar where someone is throwing up and being louder then a jet engine. Anyway, getting dumped: it sucks!
The worst one that happened to me hurt so much because it was so unexpected. I’d been hanging out with a girl for few weeks and thought everything was going just fine. That is until one night after a night of drinking capped off with dinner at a Bushwick falafel joint, I asked her if she wanted to go to a show later that week. Only to have her start with the “I really really want to just go back to being friends” shpiel while we stood in cold outside the food place. That one is tame, especially compared to these other horror stories from Brokelyn contributors, but if you’ve never been dumped out of freaking nowhere in the middle of winter while the fluorescent lights of a cheap falafel place shone on you, you should consider yourself lucky. Because that shit hurts. But maybe not as much as these stories.
Graphic designers: Nothing but trouble
When I moved up here I was in a relationship for about a year. We decided to keep trucking to see if we could do the long distance thing. We made plans that he was going to come up from Texas for Valentine’s Day, but the weekend before I had a work party and after blacking out, slept with one of our graphic designers. He was, sadly, irresistible. I was going to just keep it from my dude, as we were already on the rocks and I figured this his trip was going to be our last hoo-rah before we made a dignified break up.
Well the dignified break up turned into me getting belligerent and us getting into a fight in the LES, and me vengefully confessing that I just cheated on him a week before. He left sad and broken hearted, while I soon got fired for sleeping with the graphic designer after word got around the office, since we had signed a contract saying that we wouldn’t have sexual relations with any co-workers. Apparently the company had had issues before with this, and i signed without considering. So all in all, it was like a break up chain: I broke up with him because of a fling with a graphic designer, but work broke up with me because of a fling with a graphic designer.
-Anonymous female Team Brokelyn member
Crocodile Dundee 3: Australia Strikes Back
My most disastrous dumping (or at least, the one that left the freshest scar) was a few years ago, when I was dating an Australian girl who had been living in New York for a few months. She had to leave the country to renew her visa, so she flew back to Australia, but the plan was that she would come back to New York under a student visa within 6 months. We decided that since it was such a short time to do it, we’d go long-distance. A month later, I learned that my job wanted to send me to Australia to work at a client. And not just the continent, but I’d be in the exact city where my girlfriend was living for 3 weeks! I told her the exciting news over one of our Skype phone calls and had every indication this would be great.
So when the time finally came, everything started going wrong.On my flight to LA, I accidentally broke my only set of headphones on the first 10 minutes of the trip. My second leg was from LA to Sydney, and by the time I landed, it was 7am the next morning. My hotel didn’t have my room ready, so I was forced to sit around outside for a few hours, unable to shower from the filth of roughly 24 hours of travel. A few hours later, my girlfriend came down to see me, and I got a pretty chilly welcome. I said, “So, are you happy to see me?” and she said, “I don’t think I want to be in a relationship right now.” That was literally within the first 5 minutes of our meeting. But it got worse, because I didn’t know anyone in Sydney, so I still hung out with her while I was there. One of the nights when we were walking around, she started telling me a story about some DJ her friends set her up with on a date the previous month…while we were supposedly still going out long-distance. That’s when I found out she hadn’t told anyone there that she was in a relationship. Ugh, and it had to be a DJ, too!
Bumpy road to love
2008, a summer of love. My new boyfriend and I were both interning in NYC, and we spent blissful sweaty days at McCarren Park pool parties and spending all of our student loan money on PBR. Everything was going great, until one day at a free Deerhoof show in Prospect Park, he said the one sentence that every girl dreads hearing… “I found some bumps on my penis.”
He implied that I gave him herpes, and suggested that we take a break. I spent the next few weeks crying and taking morose walks through the West Village while listening to “New York, I Love You” on repeat. He called a few weeks later to say that he went to the free clinic and the doctor told him that it was just ingrown hairs.
The relationship never recovered.
Proximity doesn’t mean closeness
My boyfriend and I dated four years, two of which were long-distance between New York and New Orleans. Despite my great pains to get him to move here, he never could pull the trigger, so we broke up. Then, eight months later, he called me to announce he was moving to New York to get a job at my best friend’s company. When we finally met up for lunch after two weeks of radio silence, he told me he just wanted to be friends.
-Kate Mooney
Surprise! I hate you!
Three and a half years ago, I started school outside of Boston, and while there I met an awesome girl–an urban planner–and fell madly in love–with her, with cities, and with life in general. We made salsa verde from the tomatillos we harvested from her backyard garden, we backpacked through southern Mexico on a whim, she turned me onto indie music–the whole nine yards. Two years later, I relocated to Amsterdam to write my master’s thesis. I’d have stayed longer, applied to jobs in earnest, and maybe even started a life there, but the girl and I were still dating, and I loved her too much to stay. So I flew back to see her a month and a half later–a surprise, for Valentine’s Day. I got us a nice hotel room, I brought flowers (tulips, of course, having just come back from the Netherlands), and surprised her during her lunch break on a park outside of where she worked on an unseasonably warm February weekday. She hated it.
I just flew across an ocean for her, in exchange, she fought with me. We kept dating for another few months, during which I went out of my way to visit her frequently in DC as I looked for work in cities from the New England home base of my parent’s place. But she’d inevitably pick a fight every time I came down to see her. I even went to her friend’s destination wedding with her down in South Carolina, but without fail, on the first night, she took me out on the beach, away from the rest of our group, to yell at me for not being a good enough boyfriend. Having been sold on the merit of cities by her, I was super excited that things started to fall into place for me on the job front in New York–perhaps the ultimate American city–but as soon as they did, she passive-aggressively–and somewhat out of the blue–informed me that she “could never live in New York.” So when she finally made the effort to come visit me for the first time and, like clockwork, picked another fight, I called things like they were, and, just like that, we ended it. She immediately started dating someone else–which, hey, being a decent person, I was very supportive of–and I, the better part of a year later, have yet to fall in love again. And the beginning of the end all started with Valentine’s Day, the greatest holiday ever.
Yikes! We’re sure you guys have horrible breakups of your own, so share with us in the comments, so we don’t feel so very alone.
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I was seeing this guy I had met at a bar who seemed like just the right mix of nerd and cool. I was trying to play it cool and stay mysterious by not texting or calling him all of the time despite the fact that I was nearly always thinking about him. I also was trying the whole “don’t put out until the third date” thing for the first time. Anyway, after exactly three pretty awesome dates and public public makeouts we were heading to the train to go back to his place when he suddenly stops mid step going down the stairs to the L train, turns to me and tells me how last week he had made his relationship with another girl official. He apologized and then said “I guess she just got there first,” just to twist the knife a bit. I was so stunned I don’t know what I said next, but I know I left several crazy bitch voicemails that night and I think another the next day.
I’ve always been a dumper and never a dumpee… blame it on the a-a-a-a-a-apathy
cosign, Sam
When I was 18, I was dating this guy I’ll call Al. We dated from March all the way until September. In July, I went with my family and best friend to Ireland, and we stayed there for about a month and a half, leaving my boyfriend in California, promising to call every day yadda yadda yadda.
I actually celebrated my 18th birthday in Ireland. My boyfriend ended up calling me and wishing me a happy birthday at 8am Ireland time (midnight CA time), which for me was a great way to start my day. Right? Right. Wrong.
I got up and got dressed and ready to go out and spend my birthday with my family and best friend. Before leaving our house, though, I checked my facebook really quick. I logged on to find a message from my boyfriend, which had been sent to me 10 minutes after he called me, saying that he didnt think it was working and that he was breaking up with me. I was devastated (hey, I was 18). My family cheered me up for the most part until about 3pm, where I began to get text messages asking for forgiveness. I stupidly took him back. LITERALLY 15 minutes later he changed his mind and broke up with me again. I was pissed. About an hour later, my mom had uploaded photos to facebook of us at a pub with some good lucking guys around me, and he texted me again asking for me back. Nope, sorry dude.
TL;DR
My boyfriend broke up with me over facebook while I was on the other side of the world on my eighteenth birthday.
I’m 3 months pregnant with my first baby and trying to get over the guy who did this to me. When we first met something told me he would change my life in someway, I felt a strong physical attraction and he was all about wining and dining me with dates and gifts. a month in getting to know him he asks how I felt about being in a relationship, I’m so used to guys in the past waisting my time and wanting sex before anything else, I jumped at the offer. Met his family, (living in a new city knowing barely anyone) I grew attached to him quickly feeling like he was all I had. I would spend the night with him every night when me and my best friend/roommate fell out and was looking for a place of my own and later found out that the apartment my boyfriend had me sleeping with him in was his mothers, who was on a business trip for the past few months. It was almost time for her to return and he proposed the idea of us looking for a place together, around this time I missed my first period and no problem with the idea or help with finding a place (he seemed excited about me being pregnant, kissed my belly every night, wished for a boy, because he has girls already, and made sure I took my vitamins every day) He worked 12 hours a day throughout the week so I found myself looking for places on my own during the day. And it got worse, when his mom got back in town she would pressure him everyday to leave and I found myself being snuck in the house every night like a teenager. I grew furious, he was 29, 5 years my senior sneaking in his pregnant gf without a place of his own. During A conversation about his childhood with his mom I found out that he was a 3xs felon and that was the reason she couldn’t see her granddaughters as often as she would like. He told me what happened with his criminal background the next day and basically confessed that it was completely up to me and my credit to find a place because no one would rent to him. I felt used deep down inside, I knew he went to jail before and was a rough kid but never focused on the severity of the charges so I blamed myself also, and didn’t want to leave him I felt like I was in it too deep. It took a while to find a place and we spent nights sleeping in the car, or at hotels when his mom was in bad moods, I grew angry and we began to argue more, my last night being with him we argued through text (something he does often) I would rather argue face to face but he would say it’s not a good idea because he’s (crazy) the argument was over his aunt mentioning a new baby that I had no idea about, she asked him about it in front of me, and he acted dumb like he didn’t know what she was talking about. When I texted him about it (not wanting to cause a scene infront of his family) he flipped it all on me, saying I stressed him out, always jumped to conclusions and he was sick of me. I was hurt. He also told me I don’t give him what he needs sexually, we should be having sex everyday, but how when we don’t have a stable place to live? I was done and knew the relationship was over. He is truly crazy and probably only kept me around to look for a place to lay his crazy head. The next morning I dropped him off at work in his car and he asked me to come back to hand him his spare keys, when I came back we ended up arguing again because he said he was tired of my attitude. I was frustrated and told him I would be finding somewhere to go today since I wasn’t enough for him anymore. And that morning he hit me for the first time. At his job, twice once in the car and once when I got out. I had a suitcase in his car and he dumped everything out on the ground and told me to leave his job. I tried calling my mom to tell her I was coming home (in FL) and he kicked the phone out my hand. I went inside his job and used a coworkers phone to call the police. They came, and I haven’t heard from him since. I left town that same morning and have been depressed, confused, angry, and bitter. I’m starting life all over again but with a baby and it scares me to death. All I have is my family now. Feeling so used I don’t think I can ever give another man the time of day if he asked.