By the way, the two hour conversation was very civil & polite.
My reaction to the quickie question was less polite.
You forget the forum you’re in, pseudotriton ruber ruber. Please confine all insults and personal attacks to the Pit.
It would be rude of me to pass up this invitation. I found the second part to be most amusing: “You’re making fun of me when you do that.”
Translation: “When you see me, you crap yourself, giggling all the while. I don’t appreciate this sort of humor at my expense.”
Was her name Metamucil, and she thought you were making fun of her name?
It does give a new twist on the phrase “getting dumped”.
I have to stop, I’m cracking myself up.
Sorry. I thought I was in the same forum that allowed this post from Oy!:
"I know it’s not easy, but misogynistic drivel is not going to get you a new girlfriend very soon. Frankly, what I’ve read in these two threads indicates to me that you are extremely ready to disparage any woman who doesn’t do exactly what you want her to do. I suggest you learn to suck it up, and accept the fact that your interest is not always going to be the same degree or length of time as a given woman’s. Frankly, what you sound like here is sour grapes at best, and downright dislike of women at worst. Not very appealing.
I know you were broken up with fairly recently"
How she knew that I was broken up with fairly recently, I’ll never know, because that happened last, oh, about a year and a half ago. No, this was just a vicious personal attack by someone deliberately misreading a personal agenda into my OP, but if you want to issue a warning for criticizing that person’s lousy reading skills while allowing her to call me a misogynist and make inaccurate comments on my personal life, that’s just fine with me. It’s your forum, boss.
So, in other words, it’s not you, it’s me? 
Of course, the second part of that is “I can’t stand you.”
Actually, like I said, “It’s not you, it’s me” is the right idea, it’s just glib and superficial and is designed primarily to minimize your effort and time in the breakup. If you want to do the “iny,im” routine, you really need to sell it. Feel it, sincerely. There’s probably enough in the relationship that IS purely your fault, and you probably DO feel bad about commiting those mistakes, and you probably WOULD rather start over again clean with someone new and try to avoid making those particular mistakes again, that there’s probably some real substance there, if you’d get past the ego and the pride that prevents you from voicing it. Take some responsibility, and spread the pain around a little more, so you get to absorb your share, or at least some of it. “Basically, it’s because you suck” just doesn’t feel good.
I stopped using self-defecating humor after I was accused of not giving a shit. 
My favorite break-up lines:
“I love you, but not enough.”
Translation: I don’t love you.
“I don’t know if I can love ANYONE.”
Translation: I don’t love you.
What a sad day when there needs to be a “point” to fucking.
And I have to disagree to this one.
After all, if you’re REALLY dating someone, that implies that there is SOME kind of deeper relationship involved. And if that relationship existed, there HAS to be SOME explanation as to why it ENDED.
Of course it’s not easy to explain it. Of course there will be some kind of fault to be found, maybe on the side of the break-up-ee, maybe on the side of the break-up-er, probably on both sides. But any “quick and easy” explanation will, most probably, be an attempt to spare the break-up-er an in-depth investigation of the reasons.
And anyone who is on the break-up-ee side of the equation will be left with a search for the real reasons that prompted the breakup. Shouldn’t there be at least an attempt to find said explanation? Or should the break-up-er be spared any thought at all cost?
Why, what does it matter?
I think its designed to end debate. Maybe you’ve never had the opportunity to dump a girl where each of your explainations have opened up a debate:
“You don’t like Mexican food.”
“Well, you can still eat it, I’ll just have a chicken sandwich or something.”
“You smoke”
“I can stop, really I can. I didn’t know it was that important to you.”
“You have a dick the size of a baby dill”
“We can use a dildo, I’m just fine with that. Maybe there is surgery or something I can look into.”
“I don’t like your friends.”
“I’ll dump them all”
Really, the endless debate about why you are dumping someone is painful. And there is never a reason that is really satisfactory when one person is not ready for things to end yet. “I’m boinking your sister” brings “we can have a threesome.”
No, not at all. The other point I have to make to Eonwe would be that in this context, the person being broken up with has presumably asked for some sort of explanation. I maintain that a gllib, face-saving, blaming explanation doesnt cut it.
I think **Rubystreak ** has got it right: this boils down to “I don’t love you” much of the time. That wouldn’t be bad, but we’re desribing a situation where the dumper has professed to love the dumpee, or has strongly implied it, so the obvious question is “B-b-b-but we were getting along so well, except maybe for that meat cleaver incident, and I told my cousin you’d be at her wedding next month, and I threw out my skinny clothes to make room in the closet for your baseball card collection–what went wrong?”
“Well, I don’t love you.”
“Sure you do. Remember the night we drank that half-liter of bourbon and just before I puked I went down on you and you told me, and the twenty-seven cars parked all around us that you did? That’s what you said ‘Oh, God, I love you!’ and then I threw up? Remember that?”
“Well, yeah, but I didn’t know what I was saying. And I’ve still got some puke on my suede shoes.”
“I’ll lick it off, but tell me you meant it, please.”
“Sorry, I was just, uh, trying to find the appropriate thing to say under the circumstances, and ‘I love you’ just sounded right to me, but I really didn’t, not even at that tender moment.”
"Not even on the beach at Kapiolani?’
etc.
Well, my point is that it’s not literally endless. The dumpee is always going to walk out the door at the end and never come back. But because it’s painful to accept one’s share of the relationship going bad, people tell themselves, “Well, the discussion would have been endless, and I was done with the bitch anyway, and she would have been unsatistfied whether I just walked out on her right away or stayed there for months and months without sleep discussing the topic over and over again, so I just said, ‘You’re homely and fat and you smell.’ Fuck it, she can chew that over–I’m done.” It’s self-serving to say it would have been endless. It would have taken a while, and probably been less than fully satisfying, but it doesn’t last forever, and this was someone you cared for once upon a time.
Sorry–“the dump**er ** is always going to walk out the door…”
It matters because people who are dumped usually aren’t ready to end the relationship and, in their minds, they will have to “finish” the breakup. And they will, in many cases, have to make up reasons for the breakup.
And in the last paragraph you actually make my point for me. A breakup of a meaningful relationship SHOULDN’T be “easy”.
I’m not saying that the breakup shouldn’t happen; I’m saying that the end of a truly meaningful relationship should have a meaningful background. There will be, of course, situations where the breakup won’t and/or can’t be understood by the break-up-ee, and in those cases you will end up having to explain for a long, long time where you are coming from. But, ultimately, explaining the “real” reason for a breakup will reflect your self-respect. You will, at least, not have shrugged off something meaningful in your life with some shallow clichés.
Best breakup reason ever:
From my personal experience, a college girlfriend broke up with me because her (Lutheran) minister told her she shouldn’t be dating a Catholic. :mad: And I was |this| close to tricking her into eating the death cookie!
Honey, the only thing he got was another girlfriend that he took to a party with my friends on New Year’s Eve while I sat around pregnant and scared and waited for him to show up. That’s when I clued in that he really wasn’t coming back. Real winner, he was. It’s been a long time. I can laugh about it now.
Except that, at least in my experience, no reason is good enough.
Anecdote time:
One time I broke up with a girl I’d been seeing for about two years. It just ‘wasn’t there’ any more between us, in my opinion. I just started to realise gradually that because of who I was two years after the beginning of the relationship, and who she was, and how we were together, that the relationship just wasn’t fulfilling my needs. This boiled down in my mind to “I just don’t love her any more, not in the same way I used to mean.”
So, I basically told her the above. It was pretty tough for me as well… we both cried; it was a bad scene.
But, she kept asking me ‘why?’ What exactly? Point to the event, the thing, the behavior. I had nothing to point to. I could sit and nit pick the specific things she did that I didn’t like that much, but really none of those things were the ‘reasons.’ Any of the small things that kind of bugged me would have been fine (and had been fine), if I loved her. If I could base my love of a person strictly on a definable list of things about her, (“well, she likes Tolkien, Springsteen, being out doors, bizarre movies, good beer, and is clean and likes to have sex. I guess I love her!”), then it would make sense if my love specifically hinged upon definable characteristics.
But it doesn’t. I could probably find thousands of people who’d fit whatever list of ‘lovable’ traits I could come up with. I wouldn’t love them all.
Unless someone does something against what ever kind of boundaries you’ve set for the relationship, there is no “fault.” If I had been in love with someone, and then wasn’t any more, unless she did awful things I wouldn’t ‘blame’ her for the end of the relationship any more than I’d expect to be ‘blamed.’
I really don’t think we can hold anybody responsible for the feeling of love. No one is obligated to love another person, and very rarely can we control those feelings.
All true. No one is saying you’re obliged to go on loving her for one second past the point you want to. But if she’s in pain, you’ve got make yourself go through as much of it as you can bear, and as she wants you to, with her.
You’ve had weeks to prepare for this disruption in your life. She’s had minutes. You think “I’m done already” but you’ve been preparing for this for a while–she’s totally sandbagged.
It’s cruel for you to say, “Oh, get over it already, move on with your pathetic life, girl.”
She’s in pain? Be kind to her. It’s painful for you to experience? Too bad. Tough it out. Help her ,as best you can, begin to make the transition from being in love to not being in love.
ABSOLUTELY!
I’m not saying, at all, that you have contracted an obligation to help him/her/it through the breakthrough. It’s absolutely impossible to truly convey the meaning of the breakup to the other person, as seen from your side (see Descartes).
However, a “cliché” is NOT an effort to show what you think/feel!
It’s a hand-gesture, trying to dismiss your love, however temporary it may have been. It’s trying to simply dismiss something that, a couple of minutes/hours/days may have truly mattered to you. It’s changing the future for someone who may be absolutely unprepared for that change.
The only thing I’m arguing for is this: Make an effort to communicate your reasons! Maybe you’ll fail to convince the other person, maybe they’ll feel even MORE pain for your honesty, but at least YOU’LL HAVE TRIED TO DO RIGHT BY THEM AND YOURSELF!