It refers to a practice that Billboard magazine and similar publications use on their Top 100, et al, lists - a single or record that is moving quickly up the charts is refered to as “number x, with a bullet.”
Wow. For my money, this is the winner thus far. I don’t
mean any disrespect to any of the other breakups, which may
have been more painful or not, but with this one, you have
to wonder what the hell the breaker was thinking.
I knew I loved these message boards for something! Thanks, Joseph, I had no idea.
#1 Sixteen years old. Day before Christmas. Found out I was pregnant. Scared to death. Boyfriend acts supportive but strangely unworried. Spend the holiday with my parents. Boyfriend gets more and more evasive over the phone. Fast forward to New Year’s Eve 1992. I sit at home waiting for him to pick me up. He never shows. Ever again. I hear later he went to a party (the one I was waiting to be picked up for) with another friend of mine. They are now dating.
#2 Start seeing a guy in 1993 not long after this. We have a superficial physical relationship. I love him but do not tell him. He tells me after a while that he is starting to fall in love with me. I tell him not to let his you-know-what make decisions for him and break off the relationship to start damage control early. I stay bitter for a year or so.
So many more.
I got a phone call on the night of a scheduled date. This was the weekend after I’d helped her move into a new apartment, singlehandedly. We’d been in the throes of discussing marriage plans - I was ring shopping, in fact.
No clue as to why she left. The call itself wasn’t that bad as breakups go - a ‘I need time’ instead of the ‘you suck’ kind, and I got the impression we would remain friends, but I never heard from her again.
Somehow, I remain positive about life, but I’m not sure how after ungraceful little maneuvers like that. I’ve yet to retain a former girlfriend as a friend, through no discernable fault of my own. I’m not sure how others swing this.
Why does that sentence make me feel real old all of a sudden?
I’ve only been through one painful break up. All the others were handled in an adult manner. I am surprised to see how rare this seems.
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My ex-wife asks for a divorce on our 1st anniversary.
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My ex-wife asked for the divorce upon my return from 3-months in an Alaska cannery so that I could earn enough money that I would not have to work and go to school. Meaning I would be at home more.
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My ex-wife asked for the divorce because she had somebody better in mind. But she wouldn’t admit this, she just said there was no reason in particular.
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That somebody better she had in mind was my best friend/man.
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He moved in with her two weeks after she found a new place (though they weren’t official until after the divorce was final.
The bigger the stakes, the bigger the heartbreak.
The first great love in my life told me when she broke it off that she had only dated me to get another guy jealous.
Great love #2 decided that absence did not make the heart grow fonder.
I drove 800 miles to visit great love #3 only to have her decide that she eally didn’t feel that way about me.
All of which pales against my first wife, who denied there was anyone else (there was) denied that she had planned it (she had) and years later admitted that she had only married me in the first place to get away from her parents.
I’ve got a couple of ouchies.
JDH - (engaged, almost 2 years) He was in the army, doing the long distance thing from Germany when he got sent to the middle east for Desert Storm. The last letter I got from him was all happy about coming home to me when it was over, and the fact that he’d be able get out earlier than he’d planned. Seven weeks later he comes home and calls me from his mom’s house. He says that he doesn’t think I’ll want to see him, I ask why, he says “Because I have a wife now.”
EJ - We lived in Los Angeles, and had spent the weekend at one of his dorky SCA things in San Diego. As we get into the car to drive home on Sunday afternoon he tells me that he doesn’t think he ever really loved me and we should break up. We then got stuck in traffic and had to spend 5 hours in the car together before he could drop me off at home.
DS - He was my boss. Big whirlwind thing, the first couple of months were this giant sales pitch to get married and move to Massachusetts with him. I finally agreed and within a couple of weeks we were house-hunting in Salem. We ended up staying in California, and I guess he decided that the fantasy was better than the reality. He dumped me out of the blue OVER THE PHONE on a Wednesday night, even though he only lived 10 minutes away, and knew that we’d see each other at work in the morning.
I was dumped multiple times by the same guy, but I just didn’t get it for, like, a year.
17, pregnant, talked into keeping the baby by boyfriend with promises of marriage. Then he left for basic training without telling me. (Dump #1) I found out he was back in town on leave three months later because I ran into a friend of his a few blocks from his house. So I marched my eight-months-pregnant self down to his house and confronted him…and accepted his phony, tearful apologies, surely intended to get me off his doorstep. He later called and said he wasn’t ready for this and had doubts as to the baby’s paternity, so would I kindly leave him alone. (Dump #2) Then I had the baby. I called him, and called him, and called him…no response. Two weeks later he calls (collect from Haiti) to find out if the baby looked like him (he’s a ringer, incidentally). Acts excited, says he’ll tell his mother. I called his mother a month later to see if she wants to meet the baby. She says fine. Go to her house and she has no idea the baby was her son’s, hadn’t heard a word about it. (Dump #3, by proxy). He apologizes after threats of litigation, promises to send cash and to see the baby when he can. Never sends money, and when I call (pathetically), he informs me that he’s in great shape, chicks dig his huge penis, and requests that I stop telling his roommates that his child’s mother is calling. (Dumps #4 - #8) Come Labor Day weekend several months later, find out he’s in town for three days (one day before he arrives). I finally get through to him at 10 p.m. the night before his morning departure. WTF? He says he was busy the whole weekend with family parties. (Dump #9). Finally, I just called and said, “This is my last call. We don’t need you. We don’t want you. We can do better than this.” and hung up. And for once, I believed it. Oddly, this made me very attractive to him. He still calls once in a while.
The flip side of this is that I initiated a very painful breakup on someone last year. I didn’t intend to - I told him the truth, quite simply, that I was sick of his possessiveness, jealousy, and most importantly, his ignoring my son - but it wound up being very drawn-out and awful. Drunken visits, suicide threats, late-night calls, the whole deal. I had to get his family involved.
It sucks being on either side, I think, if you care at all about a person. But I guess some people just like to inflict pain on others, as evidenced in all of these anecdotes. But hey! this has been sorta cathartic. Thanks!