I never creatively dumped anyone. I was dumped by a woman I loved very much, though, in a way that was sort of creative. I guess.
We were living together at the time. I got called away for the weekend on Sheriff’s Office business. I left Friday night and was expected to return Sunday evening. Things went unexpectedly quickly and I actually returned Sunday afternoon. I pulled in to the driveway just in time to see her carry an armload of her belongings out and put them in her car. She gaped at me with very much of a “What are you doing here?” expression. As it happened, it was the last of her stuff. Her final words to me were “You’ve never been anything but good to me.” I never saw her again and never spoke directly to her again.
It was creative, though, in that I’ve spent the ensuing years wondering why she left if I had been nothing but good to her.
Woody Allen? Is that you?
The dumping conversation was stupid and ordinary (“it’s not you, it’s me,” “let’s be friends,” yada yada), but the novel twist is that I knew it was coming a full day beforehand: I had noticed on her grocery store receipts the condoms she wasn’t using with me. Real classy.
Her: Doing anything next weekend?
Me: No, why?
Her: Would you like to go to a wedding?
Me: Sure. Who’s getting married?
Her: Me.
Yes I did go to the wedding. I’m strange that way.
Mine have all been pretty ordinary. My ex-husband said “I don’t love you anymore.” My response was, “What’s her name?” He INSISTED that there was no one else, it was just that his feelings for me weren’t the same anymore, blah blah blah. This was, of course, an enormous lie, as he was having an affair both with a co-worker and another long distance internet affair some woman in another part of the country. I spent some time on a “Divorce Busters” board after that, and as we all compared notes, everyone who had been told “There is no one else, my feelings have just changed” eventually found out that there WAS someone else, previous to the dumping. (My ex ended up marrying the co-worker (after the internet bimbo dumped HIM), but much to my relief, we never had children together so I never have to speak to him ever again. And I moved to another town, so I never run into him, either.)
Hmm… Let’s see. There was Phil. Phil was a grade A jerk. I’d gone through some pretty shitty stuff and wasn’t exactly emotionally stable. So, my parents sent me on holiday to the States, with family, to recover. Phil was pissed off because “I’d gone to the States without him”. Phil stopped answering my emails. When I asked him why, he said he “couldn’t be bothered”. When I got back to University, he came round to “talk”. He casually mentioned that he’d be TAing my lab session, and then told me he didn’t feel a “spark” anymore, and we should call things a day.
However, the fun one was the last ex, A. Here and here is all the fun I’ve had with him.
Mine is almost as good. One of my first girlfriends dumped me for beer.
Longer version: In college, I was in a fraternity, albeit a dry one. She decided that she needed to spend more of college drunk, thus joined a sorority. Having a boyfriend in a dry fraternity was incompatible with her stated goal, so to the curb I went. Not that I minded anymore; she’d gotten pretty bitchy.
Learning how close she came to failing out sophomore year was definitely satisfying.
Not a dumping per se, I suppose, but…
It was a Sunday afternoon February 2000. My ex’s favorite restaurant was TGI Friday’s, so we went there for lunch. Engaged in the typical smalltalk of an affianced couple who’d known each other a few years by then. Had a pleasant server who took our order and, seeing that we were totally into each other, left us alone.
We’d been there about half an hour when my ex informed me without warning that she’d been sleeping with her training office (she was in training for law enforcement) for a few weeks to that point. But she didn’t love him; she wanted to stay with me and couldn’t take keeping it to herself anymore.
I’m not given to displays of emotion. When I’m angry, I get very quiet. I’m very careful about what I say even when I’m happy; when I’m angry, I rarely speak to avoid the problem of saying something I might regret, and when I do speak, it’s something I’ve throught through carefully. Since I was completely unprepared for this and I didn’t trust myself to speak, I said nothing. When the server brought our meals, he sensed I was mad about something, so he asked me if everything was all right.
“Fine, thanks,” I said through clenched teeth. I was also white-knuckling the edge of the table, which I noticed at exactly that moment.
The server must have been sure that whatever was bothering me was something he’d done. He checked on us a few times, noticed I hadn’t touched my lunch (my ex just picked at hers), asked if things were to our liking. Every time he asked I told him we were fine, and the last time I asked him please to just leave us alone, I’d signal to him if we needed anything else.
The manager stopped by a little while later, very concerned about the quality of our meal and the service. Were we getting our drinks timely refilled? Was the food served at a good temperature? And so on. And again I said everything was fine, please leave us alone until I signalled we needed something.
All this time my ex had been talking about this guy she’d slept with several times, why she’d done it, how she loved me and didn’t want to lose me. She’d decided to tell me this in a public place because she thought it would be easier on me. (I never have figured out her reasoning on that one.)
Finally I was done. I hadn’t eaten anything, didn’t want to be in public anymore. I signalled to the server (by that time, we were his only table; he was standing around waiting for me to call him over) and asked for the check. He left and returned a minute later: “There’s no check today, please accept our apologies for any trouble you had with your dining experience today.”
What a nice gesture, I thought. They didn’t believe me when I told them my iced silence wasn’t a restaurant/food/service problem, and at least I didn’t have to pay for that lunch.
We drove home in silence. We talked about things in abstract terms later that day, and the next day I told my ex our engagement was off. We needed to live apart. We continued to see each other every now and then over the next year, mostly when either or both of us wanted to get laid.