The Left Coast Biased

Let's be honest. Break-ups are unpleasant. Relationships by nature don't end well; if things were that amicable between the two of you then things wouldn't have ended in the first place. This, however, is not the travesty that popular teen magazines and soap operas would make it out to be. Too many of us shy away from sensational experiences, even good ones, out of fear or a lack of imagination. To shelve a philosophical conversation for a later date, let me just assert that the experience of real, intense emotion is one of the most rare and valuable experiences granted to those of us on this mortal coil and should be treasured, regardless of the polarity of the experience. So with no further ado, here are some tips to help you maximize the emotional experience of your next break up, both for yourself and everyone around you:

Engage Emotionally in the Relationship

This is the first and scariest necessity for having an absolute screamer of a break-up. It is difficult to give yourself over emotionally to another person, but without you investing the trust and vulnerability into the relationship your partner will not give themselves over to it, which will result in a relationship that neither one of you really cares about. That means neither one of you will really be that upset when it ends. Here is some advice for taking steps to engage yourself emotionally in a relationship:

• Imagine a life filled with all of the things that you like about your partner. Picture yourself living that life and try to mentally equate that image to living with the other person.
• Share experiences with them that you have never had before and enjoy, because then that feeling of joy will forever be psychologically tied to that person (e.g. - your first kiss, first marriage, first monster truck rally...)
• Give them gifts that you really want to keep for yourself, as this will tie you emotionally to this item which will transfer to the person you gave it to ( e.g. - jewelry, poems that you wrote, or the Liverpool scarf that you bought the first time you went overseas)

Get it Right the First Time (in person)

Nothing is more annoying to your loved ones than having to hear all about your break-up with John Soandso for the eighth time this year. The First Time is a seminal experience that evokes sympathy and pity and in some cases retributive anger. Every time after that your cousin, sister, best friend, or rebound guy is going to be bored with the same story and annoyed at your stupidity for falling into the same story when everyone already knew how this one ends.

In a related note, cowboy up and do the deed in person. We live in a time when you can have entire relationships via IM, text, email, etc., in fact several websites make quite a lot of money based precisely upon that proposition, but if you really want to dig into the emotional landmark that is the break up, put yourself in a chair and say it to their face, even if it is the only time in the relationship when you actually meet face to face. If you can get her to scream at you amidst a crowded coffee shop that you were the worst thing that ever happened to her and she wishes that she had never met you, all the better, but more on that to come.

The guideline of getting it right the first time is the one that comes with the biggest caveat, which is this: if you are going to put everyone around you through the sequel of an already tired story then you better step up the quality, the way that Chronicles of Riddick seriously upped the ante on Pitch Black. The best way to do that is to have a relatively tame initial break up and then incorporate one or more of the following tips into the subsequent iterations. to be clear, though, our recommendation is still that you go for gold and get it all in the first time around. The counter argument to this theory is that if you can get the same person to lower all their considerable emotional defenses after crushing them a first time then the fallout is so much greater as to be worth the redundancies. I think we have made our position clear, but the final choice is up to you.

Involve as Many Other People as Possible

This is the Multiplication Theory of Emotional Distress, expounded in several famous maxims. C.S. Lewis put a positive spin on the theory when he claimed that a joy was not complete until you shared or explained it to someone else, as teenage girls around the world have since proved, ad nauseum. The negative corollary is that misery loves company.

The most straightforward means of accomplishing this, and the least rewarding is to simply bitch to all your friends incessantly for the four months immediately following the break up. A much more satisfying modus operandi is to actually force your loved ones into having an emotional stake of their own in the relationship. The most productive means of accomplishing this are as follows:

• Tightly intertwine your social circles so that in the aftermath you get to enjoy the debacle of sorting out which friends go with whom. I would suggest an arbitrary system of division, such as lining them up tallest to shortest and assigning them to alternate teams like when you would divide up teams for the elementerary tether ball tournaments.
  
• Spend a lot of time with each respective family. This will ensure that every time that you show up at a family gathering, after the requisite integration about your current love life you will get the "You never should have let go of that one girl. What was her name? She was so nice" In addition to this, if the significant other's family happens to be a major player in any noteworthy field of work then you can ensure yourself reduced employment opportunities for the rest of your life.
• The hands down best method of maximizing the emotional trauma is to procreate, because then you get a permanent physical reminder of what a terrible decision dating this person in the first place was. The emotion fallout has the potential to reverberate for decades if the guy turns out to be a complete douche bag who would rather waste his life playing World of Warcraft than getting up off his pathetic ass to get a job and support his child, resulting in an abandonment where he doesn't even have the stones to run away from the problem, he just lounges about in impotent laziness waiting for a deity or his parents to take care of the problem (as he sees the child) for him. Needless to say this can also get complete strangers emotionally engaged in your break up as a bonus.

Move on as Quickly as Possible

Unlike the rest of these points, this one really works only if one of you follows it. If you both move on then it completely nullifies any possible trauma, kind of indicating that the initial relationship never really meant anything after all. I mean, just like every other aspect of life we can take our cue from Hollywood here. How much less interesting would Brad and Jennifer's break up be if they both would have immediately moved on to a ridiculously happy, popular and procreative (both physiologically and professionally) relationship? instead we get to deal with Jennifer's jealousy, inadequacy, and insecurities for the next 5 years. This is so very much more emotionally ripe than an immediate recovery on both ends.

For maximum emotional damage try to overlap the rebound relationship with the current relationship. This will heighten the feelings of worthlessness on their part and betrayal on yours. These feelings can be further amplified if the subsequent relationship is a mutual acquaintance, or better yet friend, of the both of you. Then the former future Mrs. Soandso can be reminded of her failure every time she sees the two of you at the frequent shared social engagements, and whenever another mutual friend mentions either one of you. If you really want to salt the wound, switch gender preferences altogether. "My girlfriend left me for another guy" - painful. "Because I am such an incompetent representation of the entire gender, my girlfriend has given up on men altogether" - debilitating.

Go for Glory

This is the final, and easily the most critical, of the tips we have for getting the most emotional mileage out of your break up. go for the movie scene quality moment. Look for a story, experience, anecdote, line, or moment that embodies all of the frustrations and excitements of the relationship and its ending. Rehearse this moment over and again so you can share it with ease. be sure that it is a moment that forces the conflict on the listener: make them confront their desire to cheer you on and despise you at the same time. The essence of any break up is the polarizing nature of the two viewpoints. Yours should be an example which allows the listener the opportunity to engage in both sides of the issue. this will enable you to continue telling the story and stretching and spreading the emotional distress of the break up for years and years. Here are some examples of types of moments to look for:

• The public disturbance: the bigger the better. Everyone can share in the monstrosity that is a person screaming obscenities in a Starbucks at the top of their lungs, and the more of your friends that are there for the moment, the more of a group experience the storytelling actually becomes.
• In a related note, the more physical, the better: if you can incite her to attack you, running screaming across the room in a Braveheart charge, threatening the kind of physical violence that can only be responded to by a side volley into the wall, a threat of immenent death and her arrest, then you have succesfully birthed a story of infinite retale value.
  
• The epic one liner. Scene: she stands crying in the rain, clinging to you, going on about how she knows it won't change anything but she just wants to hold on to every last moment she can have with you and you grab her, hold her at arm's length and say, "Shh. Stop it. You're embarassing yourself." And you turn and walk away without looking back. This is the kind of moment that lives on in retelling.

Addendum 1 (the Disclaimer): All the illustrations above are drawn from real life, solely for the purpose of entertaining, not for that of wounding the participants, with the exception of the jibe at the douche bag abandoning his child. You are a Captian of douche bags and deserve to be wounded, emotionally and physically, but if an obscure henchman-looking individual should accost you in an alley and beat you within an inch of your life in the near future, then I would like to state for the record that said individual is not known to me, nor did I procure the entirely illicit services of said individual, and niether do I condone such behavior. The poison oak sent to your hospital room? That was me.

Addendum 2: If, in the event that you are a coward, and you would like to have as painless of a break up as possible simply pursue the inverse of the steps listed above, though whether you could really call it a relationship if you did not engage emotionally, didn't introduce them to your family and friends, and come out without a single story of note is an entirely different story. You would have to take that up with my high school 'Girlfriend'.

Addendum 3: This post was brought to you by Coheed and Cambria, and by GENESIS, an excellent 2004 Merlot by Hogue Cellars out of Washington state.

Labels: personal, relationships