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.

I was in college, in my twenties, and in love. With Noel. She was amazing: smart, funny, confident, and someone else’s. Yep, she had a boyfriend. Still, we became friends, good friends. The kind of college friends who cuddle on the dorm bed as we watched television; obviously, it was becoming “something.”

We were getting closer, she was seeing me more, and her boyfriend, well almost never. Then, one day she said that they’d broken up, and soon we were a couple, and her (ex) boyfriend was now out of sight and our of mind.

Things were great for two years. It was October – I was set to graduate in May. She wasn’t graduating, yet. We had both gone away to college far from home, and upon graduation I intended to return from whence I came, and we had planned, those two long years, for her to follow me. But I quickly learned how fast things change, and how fast heartbreak can come.

One day she came by and told me that she wanted to share an apartment with a male friend of hers. She assured me they were “just friends.” I said, “no way,” that no girl friend of mine was going to live with some dude. That went over well. She left, angry. The next day she came over and said she was moving in with him anyway. She then suggested that we needed to take, wait for it… a break. Yep. She said it. I’ll spare you the details and we’ll just say – the onset and pain that comes when that broken hearted feeling blindsides you.

A couple weeks later I ran into a friend of hers; it happened to be a very attractive friend, one Noel had often expressed jealousy of. I asked her out – what better way to get over a broken heart than to put a new person between you and the old one?

Later that week, Noel stopped by my dorm to pick up some clothes she had left at my place. Knowing she was coming, I strategically hung a picture of me and my new flame where she couldn’t miss it. I saw her eyes flick to it, and watched her visibly flinch. Was that the shadow of jealousy, maybe even regret, that I saw pass her face? I like to think so. And while it still took me some time to get over the broken heart, replaying her flinch in my mind helped the heartache – a lot. Of course, time did the rest.

Sky, 38, teacher

Believe it or not, the girl I had the hardest time getting over was never even my girlfriend. Technically speaking. It was someone who, after just a couple dates, let me know that she wasn’t really interested in pursuing anything beyond friendship. But pursue friendship we did, over the course of several years and long-distances…

I put far more resources into that “friendship” than any romantic relationship I’d ever had. I was in love with my friend, and not being able to move it to another level was heartbreaking in itself and it was nearly killing me.

But the idea of ending our friendship — false as it may have been — and not spending time with her, killed me even more.

A long while down the road, I told her I loved her. But I did it by email, because I was a coward — in case you hadn’t already gathered that. I also threw in everything that I thought was wrong between us, in the hope of convincing her that my love was strong enough to make it all right. I was young and in love and not thinking straight, and I shouldn’t have done that.

She responded with one of the angriest emails I’ve ever read, and cut off all contact with me. They say you hurt the ones you love most, right? Maybe that proved we actually did have something, but it was gone. After all the connection we had built over all that time… I was very heartbroken and I knew that getting her out of my head and getting over her was going to be impossible.

I was so upset that for about four months, I had no appetite. The broken heart hurt my whole being… I would force myself to eat a tiny salad with lettuce, cottage cheese, and peach slice for lunch. I knew I needed to eat something, and that was all I could stand. At dinner I’d slowly get down about a fifth of whatever the cafeteria was serving, which wasn’t much.

I also went to a counselor about that time, just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, because it seemed crazy to be not be over a girl after that long, who I had never even “gotten serious” with. The counselor assured me I was going to be okay, and shortly after that I was.

The upside? At the end of those few months I’d lost twenty pounds! This was weight I could easily stand to lose. So for all the heartache and emotional pain, I came out in better health in the end. Sometimes it really is better to have loved and lost.

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

I should have known the end was coming. Now that I look back, the signs were there: my beloved Amy was about to leave me. It might have been quicker and cleaner if I had acknowledges those damn signs. Hell, maybe I could have even saved the relationship. I was too scared, I think. The first sign was when she invited her sister’s brother-in-law to join us when we went to see “The Break-Up” with Jennifer Aniston. Amy said he was on leave from the Marine Corps, visiting his brother and her sister and was eager to get away from their three little boys for an evening. I could see they were having a great time…Amy and the brother-in-law, I mean. I tried to ignore the way they talked and laughed at each other’s jokes.

Next, Amy started canceling dates or making up reasons she couldn’t see me. I even caught her in an outright lie one time when I ran into her at a restaurant with some of her friends after she had told me she was going to be out of town. I never said anything about it, though. Later, I found myself coping with my broken heart by listing in my mind all the things I should have said: “It’s over, Amy. I can’t be with someone who would lie to me.” I wonder if my wounded heart would have healed much faster if it had gone down that way.

The breakup happened on New Year’s Eve. I hate New Year’s Eve. I tried to remember what I had gotten her for Christmas that year. Maybe it was lame and that’s why she broke up with me. It took me about a month to remember. I had gotten her an aerobics tape. Well, that was not all I gave her. But I do think that tape might have been the straw that…you know. She said she wanted the tape. She even wrote it down. We had been watching a movie at my place and the tape was advertised on TV. She wrote it down and said it looked like a good one. When she left the note on my end table I figured it was a hint that I should buy it for her. So I bought it. I gave it to her in a little Christmas stocking with a picture of glittery red shoes from the Wizard of Oz on the front. I put the tape in the stocking along with a heart-shaped necklace with matching earrings I bought at J.C. Penney’s for $99.

I guess my friends got tired of watching me break down after the breakup. My sister gave me the name of a therapist and said I should call her. I did call, but not before I tried to heal my broken heart through a series of dates with girls I met through an on-line dating sight. I thought it helped when some pretty girl told me I was handsome and she could just not understand why Amy had broken up with me. It did make me feel better. There were even a couple girls I thought would turn out to be the one. But none lasted more than 3 or 4 dates.

I saw the therapist just three times and she was brutal. As soon as I sat down on her couch I started crying and she handed me a box of tissues. That was nice. I told her about Amy at our first visit and about the internet dates on the second visit. At our third session, which lasted just 54 minutes, I started out crying, like always. Then, that therapist turned on me.

“Look at you”, she said. “You are a mess. I am not surprised these dates don’t last. Anyone who would be attracted to you the way you are would certainly not be someone you would want to be with a year from now.”

She told me to stop trying to get some woman to fix me and start working to fix myself.

She was probably right. It took five and a half months for my broken heart to heal after that. I spent those months reconnecting with some friends who had shied away from me. I think all the crying and going over the tragedy of my breakup was too much for them. So I swore off talking about Amy or even allowing myself to think about her. I went to movies with Sam, fishing with Aaron, and even took my little nephews to Chuck E Cheese a couple times. When I was ready, I got on line again:

Ronnie Hopgood, looking for a serious relationship. Age: 33 Occupation: Lab Technician Interests: Old movies and new relationships.

Ronnie – 33, Technician

When I met Rebekah, through mutual friends, it was apparent that she stood out from the crowd. I had heard about her from so many of my guy friends long before I laid eyes on her. All of them had, in failed attempts, vied for her attention. Apparently she had a long term, long distance boyfriend that no one had laid eyes on. Once I saw her, I decided I was going to win her over.

Persistence seemed to win over Rebekah. I constantly flirted, complimented and simply paid quite a bit of attention to her. I figured that if her boyfriend was long distance, then she would be starving for a bit of quality attention. After about a month of hard work, and some slight cheating on her part, she and her boyfriend ended up breaking up. I could not have been more thrilled. And all my friends were slightly annoyed that I had some how pulled off what they had determined was impossible.

Our relationship never became official. There were many meals out together, evening’s downtown with friends and plenty of movie watching at my house but she never wanted anything too serious. Unfortunately for me, after putting all this effort into Rebekah, I had gotten hooked. She got scared and some how ended up back with the previous guy.

For a girl I never really had wanted to date in the first place, you would think I would have done a better job avoiding getting attached. It actually ended up being heartbreaking. I knew Rebekah was just getting out of a relationship with someone else and I knew that she was not looking for anything serious from me. Yet, I still became attached to her and I paid for it. The relationship heartbreak was the worst because my friends could not really sympathize after I had stolen her away.

Over the next few days and weeks, I assumed, after seeing that my hard work paid off in the beginning, that I could win her back. I thought our non-relationship had not actually experienced a break up. As heartbreaking as it sounds, I just acted like nothing had changed. I would text her multiple times a day, which she would respond to and I continued to go to parties and bars that I knew she would be at. I focused most of my time and effort on her. Eventually Rebekah told me all the attention was making her uncomfortable and it was smothering her. After a few months, I just let the situation go and actually went out of my way to avoid her, the only way I could get over her. Even today, it still hurts to run into her or to see her out with other guys.

Andrew Henderson, 28, Systems Engineer

I first met Erin about fifteen years ago through mutual friends. We’d always had a great platonic relationship, but then a few years ago an evening of beers and karaoke ended with our first kiss, and began our tumultuous romance.

We began our romantic relationship very intensely, moving in together within just a couple of months. Thanksgiving of that year, I asked Erin to marry me, and she joyfully agreed. We lived together in relative bliss for a while, planning our wedding and enjoying domesticity.

Unfortunately, after several months of this, things began to change. My mother became very ill, and I began to withdraw from Erin. Perhaps because of this, she fell back in to bad habits of drinking too much, which led to depression and increased frustration on my part. We tried going to couples’ counseling, but even with that we were becoming progressively more miserable. Basically we kept fighting and getting back together, back and forth.

In retrospect, what I did next was unthinkable. One night in July, Erin made dinner as usual and we watched some television. Before we retired, I asked her if she wanted to go see a movie the next day. She replied that she would love to, looking happy and hopeful. We set off the next afternoon, and I informed her I had to stop at her mother’s house to pick something up. This wasn’t unusual — we went over there all the time. When we arrived at her mother’s house, we both went inside, and Erin went to use the bathroom while I ostensibly looked something up in the phone book.

When she came out, I told her it was over, that she couldn’t come back to the house, and I didn’t want to talk about it. I drove away as she stood in the doorway, stunned and frozen. Looking back at that now I can only imagine how heartbroken she was… At the time though I was totally numb to it.

After that day, the only times I saw or spoke to Erin were when she called about her things and came to pick them up. I refused to talk to her otherwise; refused to ever discuss what had happened between us.

Once the dust settled I realized what I had done. It took me a long time to move on and get over her after that, and really I don’t know why I committed such a cowardly act. I regret it to this day. For the longest time I blamed my actions on the effects of my mother’s failing health or Erin’s drinking and depression, but truthfully, I think was just scared and I chose to take it out on her by breaking up. I hope someday she’ll find a way to forgive me.

Mark R. – 34, graphic designer

Although I have dated occasionally in the past, I was never involved in a serious relationship until my early thirties. Those five months with a beautiful, sophisticated woman were the best months of my life. I was able to experience love, tenderness and a new outlook on life. I never knew I could be so happy. I used to be the type of guy that would have a permanent scowl on his face and keep to myself all the time. But with her, I felt joy and couldn’t stop smiling. Why she chose me to be her man, I will never know. Unfortunately, she soon realized she could do much better than me and kicked me to the curb.

I will always remember the day when she texted me, letting me know she didn’t feel the same way about me anymore and realized she wants to be with a man with a better future than myself. You see, she is a college graduate with a good career and lots of intelligence. I, on the other hand, drive trucks for a living. I sat there, looking at my phone in complete disbelief. How could anyone be so careless as to break up over a text message? My heart was officially broken, as was my phone as I threw it across the room.

I didn’t think I could go on living after my girlfriend left me. It’s like I had everything I ever wanted in a girlfriend when we were together. Not only was she incredibly gorgeous, but she also inspired me to be a better man. When I think of the good times we have together, my heart feels like it’s going to burst at the seams. The pain is unbearable and cannot imagine how life can be sunny once again.

I heard only time heals wounds of the heart and I hope this is so, because everything I’ve done to try and get over her hasn’t worked. I miss the way she cuddled with me when she wanted comfort or the soft kisses she gave me that were so amazing. I miss going on dates with her and the world seeing I was with a beautiful woman. Life will never be the same as those few months, but I’m grateful for the opportunity I was given and pray that God will grant me just one more opportunity to find love.

Richard M – 32, Truck Driver

There’s nothing quite as painful as getting dumped by your girlfriend right before Christmas. Having your heart ripped out and shoved in your face in front of all of your best buddies is about as bad as it gets, especially when you have already bought the girl an expensive ring with thoughts of MAYBE proposing on Christmas Eve.

It all started with a call from my brother. “Hey Jack!” he said. “What’s going on between you and Michelle these days?” There was an odd edge to his voice.

“Well, you know, same as always,” I said, not quite ready to tell him I might be about to propose.

“Any problems or anything?” he asked.

“No, things are great. Better than great. Why?”

There was a long pause. “I have some bad news, Bro. I just saw Michelle with Jim Treadwell, they’re at a party at Anna’s Steakhouse.”

The fear that had started to grip me eased.

“No worries, little brother, she told me she was going to that Christmas party for her office. She asked me if I wanted to come, but you know how I hate those things.”

“Well,” my brother said, “you should have gone with her. They were dancing and kissing and everybody saw them.”

My heart dropped out of my chest and into my shoes. I remember that feeling of heartbreak flushing through my whole body. I felt sick, angry and betrayed. I jumped into my car and rushed to the restaurant. I caught up with them in the parking lot. Jim had his arm around Michelle, and their heads were bent toward one another, laughing and teasing.

“Michelle!” I yelled, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. My brother and several of our friends had drifted out of the steakhouse to watch the scene. I was expecting that she would be surprised, embarrassed, nervous. Instead, she just laughed at me and pulled Jim closer to her without even speaking a word.

I wanted to follow, to ask her what was going on, what had changed, but with everyone looking at me, I just stood there and let her go.

We never spoke again. I tried calling many times, but she never returned my calls. I still can’t understand how I read the situation so poorly, to think that I was on the brink of proposing at the same time she was dumping me. I returned the ring and spent the money on tequila.

Jack F- 28, construction manager.