I have never had any luck with relationships breakups being easy. The first girl that I ever dated was probably the worst break up that I ever went through. We were dating for approximately three months and the relationship started on troubled ground.

She had been dating my best friend for about four months and the three of us hung out quite a bit. They had gotten together at the end of the school year and over the summer she had gotten used to being with my best friend on a daily basis.

When the next school year began, my friend was overwhelmed with his new workload from his classes. There came a day when she came over to my house, wanting to hang out and I let her in thinking that we would play cards.

While we were hanging out, my friend called complaining that she had been bugging him. Little did he know that she was able to hear his end of the conversation, I told him that she was at my place and convinced him to talk to her for a minute. Their conversation did not go to well. By the end, she was in tears and I did not know what to do. We ended up kissing.

I think that she had to get over a break up by getting into a new relationship. Our relationship was good for a  while, but her mother did not approve. She ended up moving about an hour drive away and the distance came ended up adding to existing tension just.

After a break up I find myself doing a lot of soul searching. I think that all relationships, good, bad or ugly, can be used to my benefit if I am willing to look at the part that I played in them. Getting over a break up is never easy. I think that this relationship taught me to be a little less impulsive because it cost me the friendship.

There was a girl that I went to school with named Shawna. She moved to my school when we were in 4th grade. We hung out all the time, and went everywhere together. We were really close friends, and began wanting to be more than friends by the time we were in 9th grade. We slowly started dating. We did a lot of the things we had been doing for years.

I finally asked her to be my girlfriend. We dated for about three years. This was my first love, and I thought we would be together forever. I went to pick her up from a friend’s house one night. I arrived early, hoping to surprise her by taking her out to dinner. I walked into the house and saw Shawna kissing, Daniel, another one of our friends.

I was devastated, I took off running out of the house as fast as I could. I could not think of anything but how Shawna betrayed me. Healing a broken heart is much harder than it looks on television. They make it seem bad, but nowhere close to the way I felt. I felt like there was a hole in my heart. This was the first time I had experienced a heartache.

The first few days I wanted to wake up and realize it was just a dream. How could someone I had loved for so long betray me, and with my friend? I did not eat for days, and could barely sleep. This was the worst feeling I had ever felt in my life and it was not seeming to go away. At this time I did not think my life would go on.

A few weeks went past, and I admit I felt a little better. Things just weren’t the same without at least talking to Shawna. I just wanted to hold her again in my arms. After a few more weeks I finally started to move on with my life. Mending a broken heart takes a long time, I still had her in my mind all the time. I tried dating a few other girls, but it just didn’t feel right.

I felt like I was cheating on her still after all this time. A few more months past and I met a girl named Alexis. We hit it off and have been together for 5 years now. I still wonder about my ex girlfriend sometimes and what could have been.

Once upon a time, there was a perfect relationship, with the perfect girl and a good looking guy. They had the perfect apartment, albeit mediocre jobs. Then one day, she came up with the perfect excuse to breakup – “It’s not you, it’s me.”

Getting over an ex is never easy, and the days immediately following those infamous words were filled with pain, longing, regret, wonder…Longing to hold her, a longing to tell her that I loved her, if only just one more time. Regretful for all those things in that past that I didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t say. Wondering what it was I did or did not do to make my ex girlfriend leave. It eventually came to the point where I couldn’t eat or sleep, and all I thought about was how to get her back. It made me almost physically sick when someone mentioned her name, to the point where I couldn’t stand be around our friends because all it did was serve as a constant reminder of the past.

I realized, of course, that getting over my ex girlfriend would not be easy if all I thought about was how to get her back, which was all I wanted at the time, but was proving to be very detrimental to my health – it had been only a month since and I had already lost 20 lbs and was getting increasingly darker bags under my eyes. So, I resolved to stop obsessing over the breakup so much, and go to the bar with the guys once in a while and just kick back.

I needed to get back in the world to distract my mind from my ex girlfriend, which was proving to be no easy task – we used to do everything together, so naturally it would all remind me of her, making my attempts at getting over her all the more difficult. No, what I needed was a new hobby, and after two months of misery I finally found the one thing that provided a release – writing. Writing poetry, short stories, articles, which is why you’re reading this particular tidbit.

So I finally found an escape from the pain, however fleeting, and this helped me to slowly get over her. I slowly began to think of her less and was able to focus on life more, to where I was finally ready to start dating again. In a way, all this time later, I’m glad that it never worked out between me and Ms. Perfect, because I would never have the most amazing wife if it had. The most important thing to remember in getting over an ex is that there is a reason that certain people don’t make it to your future.

Kim was the one for me. I knew I was destined to spend the rest of my life with her; we were going to have a beautiful family and then grow old together. I had no doubts whatsoever that we would live happily ever after. Well, let’s just say we didn’t have a fairy tale ending. This is the story of how I had the strangest breakup of my life and the task of getting over her.

I had been dating Kim for three years until the fateful day. I came home early from work to surprise her with a beautiful bouquet of calla lilies (her favorite flower), a bottle of champagne, and some delicious chocolate covered strawberries. I was looking forward to a romantic evening and was smiling throughout my drive back to our place.

When I got to our house, I had my first surprise. There was a car I had never seen before in the driveway. Alarm bells started going off in my head. I very quietly opened the front door. The first image that came into my vision was a trail of clothing leading up the stairs. I started to feel a little sick to my stomach, like I had gotten a whiff of spoiled milk.

I crept up the stairs and looked into the bedroom. It was then that I experienced the weirdest sight of my entire lifetime. My soon-to-be ex girlfriend was naked on the bed with her new lover. I wasn’t really seeing her however. My eyes were filled with the guy in the room and his performance of an unspeakable act. To put it delicately, he was playing his own flute. And not with his hands. I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or vomit. I dropped the flowers, champagne, and strawberries and left the house immediately.

The ludicrousness of the situation helped me in getting over my ex girlfriend. I met up with my best friend at the bar and he helped me to see the funny side of the state of affairs. He helped me to realize that to get her back was an absolutely awful idea. Any girl that was weird enough to have been involved with the scene I had just witnessed definitely deserved to be my ex girlfriend. We drank ourselves silly and I woke up the next morning laughing. Thank goodness the weirdness of the situation made it an easy breakup.

Jim Duncan, 28, newspaper reporter

Getting over my ex-girlfriend was a long road for me, literally! There was a nine-hundred mile stretch from her house (where I found her cheating) to mine.

I was once a quiet, painfully shy kind of guy. I didn’t venture out much. Meeting a girl in general public was virtually non-existent for me.

So, way back when open chat rooms were ridiculously popular, I found myself self-confined to my dark and dreary house, additively glued to the front of the computer monitor every day after work.

That’s when I found her.

She was the love of my life (or so I thought at the time). We spent months on the phone together. She’d whisper sweet nothings into my ear every night as I sat there absorbing it all up into my lovesick heart.

The time came. I had to visit.

The first umteen trips went great.

I had it in my mind that I was going to move there; replant myself in a foreign state where I knew no one but her. I was going to marry her—the love of my life!

Until…

It just so happened, after scraping the bottom of my piggy-bank, I found just enough money for a (yep, you guessed it) surprise visit.

Oh, how surprising it was, indeed.

I drove sixteen hours to find the one who swore would never lay her eyes on another man…on TOP of another man. I’m not sure if her eyes were open or not, but I had a feeling it didn’t matter much to her.

I never said a word, never made a sound. She never even knew I was there.

UNTIL…

I was stuck in her driveway because my car wouldn’t start. I was crankin’ on that son-of-a-bitch like I was stalled on a railroad track and I could see the train coming at a hundred miles an hour.

I hold the record for the longest stretch of road-rage in history; nine hundred miles of red-eyed, mind-blowing madness.

Surviving the breakup was difficult. For months afterward, it seemed as though I was dreaming. She was all I had consumed for a solid year. Suddenly, she was gone—an emptiness words can’t explain.

But, in the end, I pulled myself out of the mud and soldiered forth.

Since breaking up, she has tried to contact me several times, trying to win my heart back. Ha! Dream on, hooker!

Don Compton, 30, Chat Room Moderator

My first really tragic break up happened when I was eighteen years old. My girlfriend at the time had left me for my best friend so it felt like I had to get over a break up twice. First I had to get over Beth, my new ex girlfriend, and I also needed to deal with the betrayal of a friend that I had known for most of my life.

The following evening, I invited some people over to my apartment and I proceeded to get completely and utterly wasted. The only things I remember about that night are drinking half a bottle of Jack Daniels, half a bottle of Gordon’s and carrying a bottle of Rumpleman’s Peppermint Snaps around the apartment saying “Rumpelstiltskin” repeatedly until I fell face first on my kitchen floor.

The next day, I would soon regret the previous night’s activities. I woke up throwing up, but was so stubborn I decided to go to work despite the fact that I was violently ill. I was a door to door alarm salesman. I lost three sales that day because during the middle of my pitch I would have to quickly run away to vomit. Getting over my break up had taught me never to subject myself to the level of alcohol poisoning I had that night, and that alcohol was definitely more enjoyable in moderation.

After a break up, I have always been self conscious. I pondered what was wrong with me, and why Beth had left me. I also wondered why Jon, my best friend, had placed more importance on a relationship with Beth than our friendship. I also had thoughts of vengeance toward both of them. Ironically enough, karma would come into play.

Eventually, I moved on. About a month after getting over the break up, I got a call from Beth. Jon had left her for another man. I hadn’t known, but he was bisexual when he stole Beth from me. Now, he had decided that he was completely into guys. She asked me to take her back, but despite feeling mean, I couldn’t help laughing. In fact, she hung up on me while I was still laughing at her.

It seemed that Beth was the one that needed to get over a break up now. Yet, I didn’t have a care in the world.

John Warbuck, 27 years old, Self employed

It has come to my attention that mending a broken heart is much easier when the person with the broken heart is a female. Females have multitudes of heartbreak routines and a steadfast support system of friends. When a girl gets her heart broken, the immediate remedy is ice cream and The Notebook. After her eyes can no longer produce tears, the circle of girlfriends comes over to bad mouth the heartbreaker. The circle of girlfriends and the heartbroken girl hit the clubs, the mall, or anywhere else where males run rampant. A rebound relationship complete with pictures to plaster all over social networking sites proves that her heart is whole again.

Yes, so much easier being a woman with a broken heart. However, for all the males out there, it is a much more complicated process. My girlfriend and I had been going out for eighteen months. I thought everything was going just dandy. Then, the complaints started.

“Why can’t you express your feelings?”

“Why can’t you ever be romantic?”

“Why is it always physical with you?”

On and on and on it went. I tried appeasing her grumbles. I tried to limit the amount of time spent on adult activities. I tried throwing out sentences filled with love whenever I could. I tried to please her, but the complaints piled up and soon she was fed up. After eighteen months with the girl I thought I was going to marry, it was over. She was my first love. I was eighteen, and she was seventeen. It was over.

She asked me not to contact her anymore, to make the healing process easier. I tried to focus on my own healing process, yet I did not know how to go about it. This was my first time trying to get over a broken heart. Going to my male friends was not an option. It is said men are not sensitive. This might be a stereotype, yet I found it all too true in regards to my friends. I went into a period of depression. I relived all of our memories repeatedly. What had gone wrong? What could have been different? The few girlfriends I had were amazing and pulled me through. One girl in particular was extremely effective. We went to the same college, and she spent time counseling me every day. She sure was effective. So effective, in fact, that she became my new girlfriend! Five years later, we are still together, engaged and with no complaints!

Tom Whindfield, 23, Algebra II teacher