One of the things about getting dumped is that when it happens a second time around with the same girl, it can be more than just a bit heart-wrenching. When she tells you that she doesn’t want to see you anymore over the phone, it can be twice as bad, and when you’ve just spent a college binge weekend experimenting with controlled substances her news can throw a monkey wrench straight through the carefully laid out scientific blueprints floating around your cranium.

What really helped me get over my ex was not the fact that I was totally too wrecked to comprehend what was going on. While intoxication did take a large portion of the sting (and my potential to react to it) out of the equation…

Tamiqua, (which is not her real name) and I had dated for longer than I was able to readily erase from my memory banks. For a long term solution, I had no choice but to take the hard road to surviving a break up, and for those of you out there in similar situations, I’m afraid your fate is similar.

When you’ve developed feelings for another human being, and cultivated your reaction to those feelings through habitual association and intimate contact with them, the only way to let them go is to wait it out. Once destiny separated Tamiqua and I, the inevitable progression of time, which I spent tackling the hefty goal of chatting up every woman at my university, made us eventually forget those deep associations. Emotions, positive or negative, build with experiences, and moods often attract similar dispositions.

If you’re having trouble getting over her, it’s not because she was that important to you, but rather because if you’re not actively trying by thinking about someone(s) else, then you’re not trying correctly. That may sound harsh, but what you should aim for in all aspects and stages of relationship development/destruction is similar to the old maxim “work smarter, not harder.” if you constantly need to do hard work to maintain your communication at a comfortable level, it usually means the relationship isn’t that much fun anymore, so let your attention wander, just be honest with yourself about it. When your direction splits from hers, take it as a blessing, as Tamiqua went on to birth beautiful babies with the next cat she met.

“Brickbeard” 26, Buccaneer fan

She left me before she actually moved out.

The distance between us kept growing, but I was working so hard I didn’t notice at first. Then one day I was eating breakfast, looking around the apartment, and I realized half of our crap was missing. I’m not the most observant guy in the world, but even I eventually notice when the cat’s gone.

That’s when the break up and the confession came. She’d been slowly moving everything she considered hers out of the apartment since Christmas. As it was currently April, I had to applaud her sense of stealth or risk having to acknowledge my own obliviousness.

Getting over an ex is never easy, but it’s especially hard when she’s still living with you. Getting over her was going to be impossible no matter where she was.

Apparently all her stuff was at her mother’s because she was still saving for a place of her own. I thought about being the bad guy and telling her to get the hell out right now, but that would have made getting her back a lot harder, and at the time I was determined to get her back.

Obviously I’d been doing something wrong. Working too much, paying too little attention to her, something that had made the idea of staying with me a real chore. I started dressing better, wearing that cologne she gave me that smelled like rotten apples, even helping out around the apartment. (There was a lot less stuff to clean – apparently everything that was good besides the TV was firmly in the “hers” pile.)

Once it was out in the open, then it really began to feel like the relationship was ending, as she moved into the guest bedroom. There was nothing but the rock hard futon her sister gave her in there. It was kind of humiliating to realize she preferred sleeping on it to sharing a bed with me.

Even more humiliating when I realized she didn’t always sleep alone in there. She didn’t rub it in my face, but it got the message across.

Getting over her happened slowly. My ex girlfriend lived with me for two months after we officially broke up and it was the most wonderful, awful time. I entertained fantasies of us working it out, her realization that I was the only one for her. It never happened.

I got the cat back, though. At least she lets me watch the Playboy channel.

Mark Street, 24, retail manager

She was a beauty, that Shelly. It even pains me to think right now that she’s my ex girlfriend.

We had been solid since tenth grade. She liked the tortured writer thing I had going on. I was headed to the West Coast to find myself; she was applying to every major university out there she could find. In the end, she settled for a small school. I landed a low paying entry level job at a newspaper close to campus. We were grown-ups, living together and getting on with our lives.

The end of the relationship began when real life set in. Bills and housework and deadlines put a damper on our romantic notions of living in poverty and taking the world by storm. She found out the campus was running over with brainy beauty queens. Suddenly, she was no longer the belle of the ball. She also figured out that tortured writers have terrible mood swings.

One cold night in February the bottom fell out. She was up late with a paper that was giving her grief; an experience she never had in high school. I was in the tiny kitchen of our apartment trying unsuccessfully to come up with an interesting angle on an article about a sanitation workers’ strike. My nerves were on edge. All she wanted to do was talk, and talk some more.

My patience was paper thin. I was a writer, a real-life professional whose career was quickly going down the drain. She was merely a student in a freshman composition class. Her writer’s block could spell only the drama of an average grade. Mine, I succinctly pointed out, could mean the loss of our only source of income; and the end of a promising career in this self-made man.

Somehow, she didn’t appreciate my assessment of her plight.

“As a symbolic gesture to end our relationship she swaggered back into our bedroom and tossed every belonging of mine she could find into a pile in the tub.”

Squeezing the last ounce of her apple scented shampoo on top; she turned the faucet on full blast, gathered her things and walked out of my life. I didn’t discover the mess until citrus scented suds flooded the apartment.

Interestingly, that break up didn’t leave me a broken man. For weeks, the heartbreak and angst drove me to write like a mad man. My career was the better for it, though I doubt that was the effect she planned. The worst part is that, to this day, I cannot bear the smell of apples.

-S.D. Lee, age 36, writer

Men come in as many different molds as women. Some are sensitive, thoughtful and attentive lovers. Some are callous, selfish and inattentive. I like to think I’m a balanced blend of the two, leaning perhaps toward the former. My past, though, was a different story.

I met Suzanne in high school. We were almost stereotypical students, she the shy, insecure girl, me the arrogant, confident athlete. We were actually good together. We spent a lot of our time laughing, which is usually an indicator of a good relationship. Maybe if we’d met later in life or if we hadn’t dated each other exclusively so young, things would have turned out better.

Secure in my relationship with Suzanne, I didn’t believe I could actually do anything that would hurt her. After all, if she didn’t know, it didn’t matter. Over the six years we were together, I fooled around with some other girls. It wasn’t a regular occurrence, but as someone once commented, it only takes one kiss to be unfaithful.

The beginning of the end was when Suzanne found out about my infidelities. She was surprised and truly heartbroken by what I had done. I hadn’t treated her as well overall as I should have. Because of that, Suzie had distanced herself a bit from me, but not enough to be unscathed by the cheating. When I realized what I had done to her, it hit me in the chest like a truck.

Of course when she left and it really settled in that  I was getting dumped because I screwed up thats when I felt horrible. I couldn’t bear the thought of her leaving me because I’d been so monstrous to her. I begged and cajoled and finally convinced her to give me another chance. I had no idea it was too late. During our brief time ‘back together,’ Suzie went out with other guys. Any feelings of love or commitment she had for me had been ground to dust by the way I had treated her.

The final breakup came and when the heartbreak settled in it was more than I could bear. I sat in my apartment and wished I would cease to exist. I was forced to face the person I was and I didn’t like him very well, which made spending all that time alone unbearable and getting over the broken heart seemed impossible.

While I was starting to get over the break up I spent a lot of time berating myself and wondering how Suzie had tolerated me all those years. I had no answer to that question. I only knew that I would no longer be that guy. The new me had arrived.

Jess, 39 – engineer

Basically I was dating Mel because all my friends were dating someone at the time too.

In my mind, there was no question that this was NOT a girl I was going to bring home to mom, but I figured short-term she would be worth tolerating for some non-canned home cooked meals and convenient sex.

Sadly I got very little of either over the course of our six-month relationship. What I did get was constant grief. Though we both knew we were incompatible, Mel–like many other embittered women–was sure that this was due to my inability to change into a totally different person.

Whereas two logical people would simply look at their missmatched hearts, throw in the towel, shake hands, and dive back into the dating pool, Mel and I continued to grind on, like two sides of a fault line.I dreamed about breaking up with her. After fights, she would storm home–phone already to her ear as she prepared to inform the rest of the female population of my inadequacies–and I would lay in bed and rehearse our final scene. I had never seen her cry, and while I hate seeing anyone cry her resilience had created a perverse (but thus far unacted upon) desire to see her beg tearfully for my forgiveness, which of course I would deny her.

I spent so much time indulging in these fantasies, I barely had any time to fantasize about other things. Instead of actually ending the relationship I just thought about it all the time and this thought became the soul source of happiness in our relationship. One night post-fight as I was again fantasizing in my bed, my phone beeped. “It’s over.” Short and sweet. In a matter of seconds, Mel had negated weeks of monologue work.

And SHE had dumped ME. Dare I tell the truth? I did the unthinkable. Call it shock, call it disappointment, call it insanity, but I called her immediately, and…I cried…on her voicemail. For weeks I was distraught and my friends were baffled. “But you didn’t even like her man.” How to explain?

Six months of agitation and very little sex, and I didn’t even get to be the one to drop the ball.

Cabanerd, 22