Before you get over it, you have to get it over with. The breakup, that is.
With today’s exit strategies, it’s all over a bit too quickly for some people’s tastes–a little less like “Casablanca” and more like “How to lose a guy (or girl) in 10 seconds.”
Thank e-mail and its kiss-off cousins–voice mail, even text messaging (because it’s often cheaper than a cell-phone call)–for the instant-dumping epidemic. These innovations may make it possible to be in touch constantly, but they make it just as easy to vanish facelessly and sometimes voicelessly.
Take it from Jennifer Traut, 21, a senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has seen a trilogy of high-tack partings–thankfully, not the worst of them firsthand.
Part 1: Traut and a few friends joined an exchange group that spent 10 months in France last year. The students would go to the computer lab in Versailles to get warm words from home. One day, a friend burst into tears after opening a message.
” `This is going to hurt’–that was the title,” Traut said. “Her boyfriend of two years broke up with her over e-mail.”
Part 2: Back in Illinois this year, another of Traut’s friends got engaged just before Thanksgiving. One day in December, the friend came home to a phone message from her fiance.
“He knew she was at work and he called and broke up with her voice mail,” Traut said. “He just said, `We’re too different’–the whole breakup routine.”
Part 3: Here’s where Traut’s personal experience comes in: She met a guy at a party in Champaign in the fall. He lived in Kankakee, where he attended community college, but the distance didn’t seem to dampen his enthusiasm. He called three times the same night after they met, and came to visit her twice during the next few weeks.
Then, silence.
And, then, a text message. He apologized for being MIA–“a bunch of tests,” he said. She text-messaged back, they chatted once more with no parting words other than a typical goodbye. But then all lines of communication were closed.
The text message, it seems, was code for “I am using the least common denominator to let you know I exist, but not in your world anymore.”
Or, code for coward, some might say.
“The beauty of the 21st Century is there are so many ingenious, high-tech ways to look as if you’re relating to someone when you’d really rather not,” said Laurie Frankel, 37, author of “It’s Not Me, It’s YOU! A Modern Girl’s Guide to Breaking Up” (Sourcebooks, $14.95).
Confront the problem
She and others argue for a return to face-time farewells. Or at least a real-time phone conversation. On a land line, not a cell phone–punctuated by the environmental noise that Frankel considers a little too symbolic of a person on the go.
In Frankel’s hierarchy of needless insensitivity (which she sent by e-mail, fittingly), e-mailing your parting words to a work address is high up the pyramid. Like a cell call, it has the element of sucker-punch surprise.
E-mailing to a home address mitigates the incivility somewhat, Frankel said. “Hitting delete provides the intended with a morsel of satisfaction.”
At the top of her breakup crime chart? Instant messaging. It’s appropriate only “if you’re completely pre-human and running on nothing but a brain stem and Red Bull,” she said.
The college factor
Often, there are extenuating circumstances for the unceremonious departures. That was true of Traut’s testimonials, which featured geographic distance in two of the cases. College mentality coursed through all of them–which seems to be the culprit behind some of the greatest dating indignities.
Arianne Nardo, 24, who lives in Lakeview now, tells of an acquaintance of hers at the University of Iowa who had been dating a young woman for a few weeks or months and began to tire of the entanglement. He e-mailed her a “This isn’t working out” message, cold and blunt.
The woman apparently didn’t have a computer in her dorm room, however, so she checked her e-mail at his place regularly.
“I still have no idea how he just sat there studying his chemistry notes while she read this message in his presence and subsequently threw a tantrum, with his dorm mate there to witness the whole sorry scene,” Nardo said.
But trust us: The e-mail breakup has spread far beyond the university universe. It’s the most commonly recurring theme in our unscientific poll of high-tech breakup tactics among singles.
Britton Payne, 32, author of the book “Dumped” (Bloomsbury, $9.95), with a Valentine’s Day publication date, can attest to that. He said he’s dating someone happily now. But before that, he was dumped three times in a row by e-mail with nearly identical messages.
A painful trend
“In all three cases, we had been dating a couple times, had our first kiss and I didn’t hear from her for about a week. Then I got e-mail, saying I’m a great guy, she’s not over her ex, so why don’t we just stay friends. The first time I thought, that’s OK. Second time, I was like, that’s funny, what a crazy coincidence. The third time it happens, it’s not funny anymore. . . . I wondered at the time if I had stepped into some new trend.”
E-mail seems to be a particularly popular dumping ground if the Internet figured prominently in the relationship’s infancy. And it often does these days. Many now give their e-mail addresses as the initial point of contact instead of phone numbers for safety, and some may end tempestuous relationships the same way for the same reason.
Others meet online. According to Jupiter Communications, in 2002 more than 16 million people–6.1 million women and 10.2 million men–used online personals and dating sites, such as Yahoo! Personals, Match.com, Planetout.com and Lavalife.
A couple of years ago, for instance, Roscoe Village resident Pam Shapiro, 35, had gone out several times with a man she met through an Internet dating service, and they had a date for dinner and a concert at Martyrs on a Friday night. He was to pick her up around 8.
Last-minute fade
“I decided to check my e-mail because I was ready early–Friday evenings after work are not a big e-mail-checking time for me. He dumped me right there on the e-mail, writing something like, `I know this is a lame way to do this, blah, blah, blah . . . we’ve had trouble finding time to see each other and I met someone else, blah, blah, blah . . . I think you’re great and feel really bad, blah, blah, blah.’ Needless to say, I was quite irritated. . . . What if I never checked?”
That outrage aside, Lynn Harris, 34, author and Dating Dictionary columnist for Glamour magazine, draws a distinction between breaking up and simply declining a date, early on, via e-mail.
“You can decline a third date on e-mail. Totally. Gracefully. It’s not just saving your butt but saving them face,” said Harris, who will relaunch her Breakup Girl Web site (breakupgirl.net), offering counsel to the jilted, in the next few months. “If you determine that e-mailing them saves them time, not you time, then it would be acceptable.”
Quick and blunt
That is exactly why Patrick Sammarco, 35, resorted to e-mail recently to nip romance in the bud. A woman he’d gone out with a few times had suggested several times that they get together on that Saturday night.
Finally, she sent him an e-mail saying she needed to know whether it was a date. So he felt compelled to reply promptly:
“I told her not only was I not free, but I was dating other people and didn’t want to waste her time because I didn’t see it being long term and thought she’d appreciate knowing sooner rather than later.”
She responded with surprise that he told her this over the Internet. He saw her at their health club a couple of days later and sought her out to explain further and apologize for the medium.
“My sense of urgency was not to waste her weekend,” Sammarco said.
A pioneer
He hastens to add that he has the dubious distinction of being among the first batch of cyberdumpees. A decade or so ago, a woman about 10 years his senior dumped him by e-mail–he’d only just begun using it regularly–after about four months.
“I laughed out loud. I thought, this is awesome. I don’t have a phone call, I don’t have a message, I don’t have a meeting for lunch. It’s all right here in seven or eight paragraphs. This is great–it’s pathetic–but it’s great!”
Overall, he still considers e-mail an evil for such deeds.
“It should be face to face,” he maintains. “But then phone became acceptable, and now Internet is acceptable. Ten years from now some new technology will come out.”
Other tech-based shortcuts, after all, existed long before the Internet, cell phones and voice mail became household words.
Consider the cassette tape.
It was 1983, recalls Flavia Myers, then in high school in Downers Grove.
A good friend of hers from Wheaton–we’ll call him Eddy, because that was his name–wanted to break up with the girl he was dating. He went by her house to pick her up.
“When she got in his car, he put the song `Time for Me to Fly’ on, and said it should explain how he felt,” said Myers, who now lives in El Paso, Ill.
“That was that.”
Breaking up in the movies
Q offers a mini-salute to a few movies that feature being kicked to the curb. Pass the Kleenex.
Gone With the Wind (1939)
Clark Gable dumps Vivien Leigh with this succinct dig: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
The Way We Were (1973)
For Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, politics gets in the way.
Say Anything. . . (1989)
John Cusack bemoans his failed relationship with Ione Skye: “I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen.”
Jerry Maguire (1996)
Kelly Preston flattens Tom Cruise after he breaks off their engagement due to his enlightenment on work ethics.
Kissing Jessica Stein (2001)
Jennifer Westfeldt as Jessica (right) is dumped by her “Ms. Right,” Heather Juergensen as Helen. We’re not lovers, Helen tells Jessica, we’re roommates.
— By Judy Hevrdejs
