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

Getting over a relationship is never easy. After twenty-three years and a handful of semi-serious relationships with women, I’ve learned that ending the relationship never really gets easier. People might tell you it does, but odds are they are probably in some pretty serious denial. My most recent adventure in breaking up was with my live-in girl friend of one year, Alyssa.

Alyssa and I met in college. I had been giving the single life a try for a good while (probably about a year or two), and Alyssa actually had a boyfriend. We met through mutual friends, and the only thing that I ever gathered about her boyfriend is that he was quite the possessive/aggressive type. I remember having to see her out in the hallway crying on the phone with him – he’d always get pissed off about something new each day and take it out on her.

Now I’ve always been one for the damsel in distress type, so I naturally took my hand at courting her as best as I could. For whatever reason, my nerdy charm worked, and we started going out on dates and spending a lot of time together. Sounds like the beginning of happily ever after, right? Well, perhaps it would be if it weren’t for one thing: Alyssa never broke up with her ex. While I was happy at first, us seeing each other while she was still with someone instilled a sense of distrust in me that eventually ended to us ending the relationship a year later.

Alyssa and I lived together for a year, and the first four or five months were pretty damn good. We had fun, went out to eat every night, and were making love every night and waking up to each other the next morning.

Despite our exhilarating relationship, that distrust started to rear it’s ugly head. I started becoming the very same possessive boyfriend her ex was – only because I know that she had cheated on him with me. Quite frankly, I became irrational and aggressive, and in turn, she became irrational and aggressive.

The relationship was over and when it settled in that it was gone it hit me. Real hard. For a while, I tried to run from my problems – so much so that I ended up moving out of state.

She was the girl for me. I knew it the second she came into the car wash where I was working, the second our eyes locked in front of the M&M machine after I asked her, “Care for a quarter?”

True story.

We had our first date that night, our first kiss the next, and two weeks later she practically had her wedding dress picked out. So that was why my breath got knocked clear out of me when she called that night.

“Brock, it’s not working.”

I gulped. “You mean, like, you need some space?”

“No, you dork.” I couldn’t believe she was calling me a dork. That was so dated. “I mean that my relationship with you is ended. Done. We’re breaking up.”

“I’m not breaking up, you’re breaking up,” was all I could manage. Dumb, yeah. I know.

I spent the next weeks getting over our relationship. For one thing, I never saw the relationship ending, so I was unprepared. I felt like a Marine who’s been sent into enemy territory with no preparation, no briefing – no map, even. I had no experience in getting over a relationship breakup. I made all the wrong moves.

Like for instance, walking in on her client meeting. It was Valentine’s Day. Yeah, she had the gall to break up with me right before Valentine’s. I’m not the most romantic guy in the world, but I know chicks dig this stuff. I had no way of knowing that this particular day, she had an important rep from her company’s biggest supplier in her office, and they were trying to close another rep from a huge firm. So when I pushed into the room, all I saw was her through the bouquet in my arms.

Now, in the movies, the scenes always go something like this. Girl looks up, girl looks shocked, girl melts, girl runs out of meeting with guy, lips lock, roll credits. Not this time. Lauren said, “Can you excuse me a moment, gentlemen?” She pushed me out and in the hall, she propelled me toward the outdoors. “Do you have no respect for my time?”

“It’s Valentines.”

“I told you I was ending the relationship,” she said. “Don’t come around here with that stuff.”

“Don’t you owe me some kind of explanation?”

“Not really.”

It was still hard on me, breaking up and all. But I learned from the experience that the movies are lies. Getting over a relationship is hard, but staying in a broken one is impossible.

That night I got a phone call. My heart jumped when I saw the number. “Baby!” I answered, ecstatic. I knew those flowers would work.

“Brock!” She was in tears. “You lost me the client, you -” The rest is unprintable.

Brock Tonelli, Age 28, House Painter, Handyman

There are very few sure things in life, very few rules that go uncontested through our daily routines. It seems that when these truths make themselves evident, they make our ears bleed, our teeth crack and our chest numb. This particular relationship, I learned, broke one of those rules. When your best friend breaks up with a girl, do not, I repeat, do NOT date her.

Especially if he began living with you two weeks ago.

As far as painful relationship go, this caused me pain the second I started dating this girl. Sharing a room with the aforementioned friend caused me emotional stress even when she was miles away. It’s a bit hard to be discreet when the person causing you pain outside of your relationship sees where you sleep. This led to some of the most memorable and quirky moments of my dating career.

We somehow lasted the better part of six months. The best part about it was the fact that she didn’t drive and her mother refused company. This gave us two options: go out every time we see each other (which, for a college student, was financially crippling), or hang out at my place where my friend would be. Welcome to hell.

This relationship broke another “life rule”: Don’t date people you work with. If you disagree with me then you either haven’t done it or you’ve worked at such establishments as Hooters or the Playboy Mansion. While I worked nights, she worked days. We worked, at most, two hours a shift together. Two hours of tiptoeing with everybody knowing something was going on, but not quite what. Not a very good idea as you might guess. Not a good idea while we were together, even worse when I was trying to get over the relationship afterwards.

With the girl leaving for school at the end of the summer, this train wreck of a relationship ended. Goodbye to the picking up and driving home. Goodbye to the awkward hangouts at my house. Most importantly, goodbye to the uncanny ability she had to make me smile no matter what mood I was in.

When the relationship actually ended, it didn’t hit me until a few days after. Not until my daily routine was interrupted by constant reminders of my ex girlfriend’s absence… And while large amounts of alcohol seemed to help, the truth is it didn’t… My feelings for her never quite left, and the emptiness never really left.

They were, at best, replaced. It’s been two years since things ended, and every time I see her we slip into the old routines. And my friend just won’t let it go…

Phillip, 24 – Student

I met Chloe in Atlanta my senior year of high school and immediately fell in love. We dated for about 5 months before I left for an out of state college in the fall. Living in South Carolina was incredibly difficult and I spent every possible minute talking to her on the phone, online, or by text messages.

I drove home every weekend to see her, but she soon expressed interest in coming to visit me at school.

Her car was in terrible condition and I constantly worried that she would break down along the 100 mile trip. I bought her a Honda Accord and surprised her with it on her next trip and I thought things couldn’t be any better.

One Thursday evening, I got a call from the Atlanta Police Department asking me if I had a towing company preference for my Honda Accord.

I immediately began to panic and asked what was wrong. I was informed that my car had been involved in a single car accident, was totaled, and there was drinking involved.

I quickly told the officer that I didn’t care about any of that and just wanted to know if Chloe was hurt. I will never forget the response,

“Sir, a young man named Josh was driving the vehicle and he has been placed under arrest.”

You might be wondering who Josh is, and so was I.

Josh and Chloe had been dating each other since the day I left for college, and apparently they were even said to be engaged.

When I called Chloe, obviously fairly irate, she asked if it was going to be a problem. She then asked if I was planning to fix her car or not.

Needless to say, the relationship ended and I was left with a very sudden and painful break up. I wasn’t without my revenge, however, and Josh did not have permission to drive my car that was registered in my name.

The prosecutor decided to make an example out of him and charged him with grand theft auto in addition to the drunk driving charges.

He pleaded guilty to a lesser crime and was stuck with unlawful use of a vehicle and the DUI on his record.

Coming home to that empty apartment was more than I could face in the beginning. I remember the crazy afternoon when I found her message written on pink notepaper stuck to the fridge. I guess it wasn’t as bad as being dumped in a text message like my friend Ray, but the fact that I didn’t see it coming was a complete shock.

“Dear Jack,” Tina’s message read, “I’m sorry to leave you this way, but I’m sure you must know that things just aren’t working out.”

NO, I did NOT know that things weren’t working out!

Her message continued, “Please forgive me for not having the courage to say goodbye to your face. If I had to look you in the eyes and say it, I don’t think I could leave.”

And that’s supposed to make me feel better about the fact that I’ve just been dumped?

The rest of the message was the typical stuff about how was her and not me, yeah right.

I had a lot of trouble trying to get over her because, unlike your typical ex-girlfriend, Tina continued to hang out in the same clubs that we used to frequent as a couple. She was the one who walked out, so why should I have to change my whole social routine just to avoid her? I decided not to try to avoid her, and I figured that seeing her with other men might even help me in getting closure and mentally ending the relationship. You guessed it, I was wrong!

I suppose the hardest part was that Tina seemed to not only have moved on, but it appeared she had already forgotten that I ever existed. We had lived together for eight months! How could she be enjoying herself so completely mere minutes after walking out the door? I felt humiliated.

Until one evening when I was sitting at the bar, staring at Tina and hiding from her at the same time while she was in a corner booth laughing with some guy. The bartender was passing me my drink when a slender hand reached out and took it from him. I turned to see the most beautiful woman in the world sipping my drink.

I guess she had been reading the expression on my face as I was watching my ex because she called me out… “Looks like you haven’t gotten over her… Even though she’s clearly moved on.” the angel said, nodding toward Tina.

“Oh, um…” I turned to her. “I don’t even know that girl, I was just trying to watch the game on the screen behind her.”

My name is Jack Faver, I’m 28 years old and I am a construction manager.