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.

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

Getting over a relationship that blossomed in the summer can be difficult. The cache of memories built over escapades in the hot sun are unforgettable–unless you’re black out drunk. Unfortunately, that’s what I happened to be most the time to start my senior year in college.

Lara and I started dating early that summer and decided to keep it going into the school year. What can I say, I was a catch: a drunk that skipped class and slept on the stained couch of a bunch of stoners because I didn’t want to pay rent. However, our relationship progressed and really got serious when I moved into her apartment. I even went as far as telling her that I loved her–while tripping on mushrooms.

But after a few months, things changed. Lara was taking full-time classes, while I was ahead to graduate and only needed a few credits, leaving me plenty of time for extracurricular activities at the bar. This displeased her. One day I opened my email to find a message from her that she was ending the relationship and we were breaking up. Talk about being preemptive, I still had a damn key to her place. And who knew heavily drinking at the age of 22 was relationship ending material? Usually, that isn’t terms for breaking up until kids are involved. We didn’t even own a cat.

I didn’t reply. Instead, I returned to her apartment, set the key down in front of her and left without saying a word. Needless to say, I was back to sleeping on the stoners’ couch. I smoked their weed and drank my beer in hopes to hazily move on past the relationship break up.

Over time it became apparent to me that I did love her, and maybe she was right: the drugs and alcohol were a tad excessive. So, that second semester–my last semester of college–I actually substituted the booze and weed for studying. Surprisingly, the components of human-computer interface design did a much better job of keeping my mind off the break up than whiskey.

But, it was in the bar where it would all continue. I saw her again for the first time since the break up. We drank, we kissed and we have been together ever since. So, I guess the moral of the story is: getting over a relationship doesn’t require alcohol, just to rekindle it.

I didn’t date in high school. I barely had crushes, I didn’t know how. Flirtation was a language I’d never learned, and dating was a completely different country.

It’s no stretch to say that I was kind of a nerd, but I had friends and she was one of them. The Christmas after I graduated high school, she went for it. She kissed me! I asked her to be my girlfriend, she agreed and everything was great.

One week later she called me up and told me she wasn’t ready for a relationship yet, but of course, we could still be friends.

Being just friends meant we could go to dinner, ride our bikes in the park, talk for hours, hold hands, even snuggle together during a movie. It was exactly like dating, except without anything concrete.

Since she was technically my ex girlfriend, I finally told her I needed some space. Getting over an ex can be hard, even harder when you’re still sort-of-not-really dating. She asked why I needed space, so I finally called her out. I told her I still had feelings for her, and I needed to know if she had feelings for me.

She did, but she valued our friendship too much to mess it up with a relationship.

Seriously. getting over her was hard. We stopped talking. The first week was the worst. Every time I was bored I would pick up my phone and then remember that I couldn’t call her. Over the past 2 years she had not only been my best friend, but my only friend.

I dated other people, but always found myself fantasizing about a way to get her back. I would imagine her showing up on my front porch in the rain, begging for me to forgive her. It never happened.

Eventually, we got back in touch online. One day I got an e-mail from her, telling me she still thought of me, and sometimes thought of leaving her boyfriend for me.

I should have been thrilled, but instead I was mad. I thought about how she had jerked me around for years, and how she didn’t really want me, she just wanted me to want her.

After so many years, I see how she and I would have grown apart no matter what. A relationship would have been a disaster, but so was our friendship, so what’s the difference?

Finally getting over her took me six years and we only really dated for a week. I’m sure that must be a world record.

R. Miller, 26, Student

Summer

To say that we had some fun together would be an unforgivable understatement. Emily and I had a frigging blast. She was wild and spontaneous but had a thriving inner life, while I was hunkering over Camus with an untapped longing for action. We complimented each other in nearly every way and got into a terrific amount of trouble with our families, with the law and with each other. It was young love, neurotic and complete. She was the only person I saw when she was in the room.

Fall

Things began to take a turn for the worse when it became clear that I, well, I thought that this was going to be forever and she didn’t. Within a short period of time, it was clear that it was going to take a lot of effort to sort out our differences, and Emily made the decision to call it quits over a 2am phone call. I managed to make it through the call pretty well, and it wasn’t until I hung the phone hit the receiver that the dam broke.

I’ve never been able to relate to people who describe crying after a break up as a cathartic process. Maybe it’s because I keep things bottled up, but crying is a violent and angry process for me that I find difficult to deal with.

The next day, it was incredible just how dull the world outside suddenly appeared. It might be melodramatic, but it was true; a world without her seemed pointless and empty.

Winter

PostEmilypartem depression came on with a rush of emotions that I had never felt before, and I was immediately hooked. In the aftermath of a breakup, no one wants to hear that time heals all wounds because your pain is the only thing you have left from your love. Instead of thinking and doing the things that I knew would make me feel better, I became obsessed with my sorrow and wallowed in it shamelessly. 80′s torch songs were resurrected from ancient playlists as I commiserated with Phil Collins over candlelight and boxed wine. I tortured myself endlessly with the indie pop songs that we use to cruise and make love to as messages from well meaning friends went unreturned. In other words, I became ridiculous.

Spring

I don’t clearly remember the first time that I realized that I had gone through an entire day without thinking about Emily, but I’m certain that it is was in the spring. New life was emerging from the ground as the world turned green, and there was this unfamiliar freshness to things that took some time to get used to. In a matter of weeks, I found myself in my favorite record store buying new albums that I had never listened to with Emily and was able to think that she might have dug a particular track without feeling any sense of loss. It took some time and some awkward false efforts, but I started getting myself back out there. Those phone calls from friends got returned, and, slowly, time did heal those wounds while allowing me to still cherish my time together with her.

Anon.

I don’t think I will ever forget my worst break up. Back in the day I worked full-time to pay for college. I was dirt poor, but had huge dreams. However, the parents of the girl I was in a relationship with had even bigger dreams for their little princess. Unfortunately, I was crazy about this girl. She was very much out of my league, but very much into me. Her parents were millionaires and she was terribly shallow, but I didn’t see that. Now, while those two things do not always necessarily go hand in hand; in this case, they did.

A major contention with her parents was my motorcycle, and for this reason I guess they considered me a “bad boy”. Me? I was the guy who got picked on in high school and just wanted to make something of myself. We persevered though, declaring our undying love for one another; until one really bad day.

Her parents called me and asked me to come over and meet a few close friends of the family. Her parents hated me so, and  although my radar was going ballistic, I went. I tried to get in touch with my girl, but she couldn’t be reached. I got there and her parents ushered me in. There on the couch was my girlfriend with this blond guy with pecks, legs and arms like tree trunks. Turns out, her parents had been working that angle for a while. Needless to say, he had her out with him soon after that. She never even bothered to formally break it off with me. I was crushed over the relationship break up.

What ensued in the next two weeks was not pretty, and this is in no way intended to be taken as advice to anyone who has had a recent break up. I can only say what worked for me.

After the break up, in a nutshell, booze. I drowned myself in anything that wouldn’t drink me first. I didn’t go to school and was fired from my job. I wouldn’t shower, nor would I climb out of my boxers.

I became “King of the Crooners” by night and “King of the Losers” by day. My friends had finally seen enough. They started circling the wagons after one too many sad Karaoke songs. After three months I rejoined the living. Without them I may have never gotten over the break up.

Jared D, 41,  writer