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Breakup burns: Insults can last a lifetime

I don’t remember if I have ever said really mean things during a breakup. I’m usually so manic, frantic and hysterical that I become like a wind-up toy who was just let loose on the floor. I crash eventually, and then reality sinks in.
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Them’s fightin’ words. Mish rounds up the ultimate in relationship mic drops.

 

I don’t remember if I have ever said really mean things during a breakup.

I’m usually so manic, frantic and hysterical that I become like a wind-up toy who was just let loose on the floor. I crash eventually, and then reality sinks in.

One thing I do know is that I have wanted to say some really nasty, deep, cutting things and yet stopped myself.

Why? Because once you say something you can’t take it back. That shit is out there. You let it into the ether, and it floated through someone’s ears and now they know that thing you think… forever.

No matter how mad I am, I’m not going to say the worst thing about that person that they already know and hate about themselves. It’s just too cruel. Self-loathing is hard enough. I’d rather just let that meat marinate once I’ve exited the scene.

I was once sent a book by Jamye Waxman called How To Break-Up With Anyone: Letting Go of Friends, Family and Everyone In-Between. This Waxman chick is very zen. She’s got more zen in her left pinky nail’s cuticle than I have in my entire body. I wish I could stick a straw in her ear and suck out some of her zen for myself.

Although her advice seemed wildly unrealistic in the heat of the moment, it isn’t stupid advice. Sometimes you need to hear things explained in the most rudimentary way possible to really get it.

Why do we get so shitty when someone tells us they don’t want us around anymore? I asked a bunch of people what was the meanest thing they said or had said to them during a breakup.

Pretty sure none of this would be approved by Waxman:
 

“A guy once told me that he couldn't be with me because he wanted children and didn’t want to dilute his Adonis genes with my pudge body.”


“A friend of mine got dumped because she wasn’t ‘good breeding stock’.”


“I actually hate your band.”


“I hope you fucking marry your mom.”


“I just want to live a Morrissey lifestyle.”


“You have an ugly vagina.”


“But I let you win all those Scrabble games.”


“I’m too good for you, and I always have been. I know it and so does everyone else. They say it all the time.”


“I had moved countries for my ex and remember, during the end of our relationship, saying real cold like, ‘You’re the second biggest mistake I’ve ever made. My biggest mistake was breaking up with my last boyfriend.’”


“This girl I once dated screamed at me because she thought I was fucking another girl. (I wasn’t.) She tried to burn me with, ‘Don’t you feel like a loser being a broke 30-year-old man driving around playing shows in basements?’ To which I replied, ‘You’re a 30-year-old broke waitress with two roommates and you’re not in a band, so what’s your excuse?’ She then started crying and that’s why we broke up. Years later she was drunk texting me about how some dude she was dating was an asshole and how he cheated on her. ‘I sucked his dick every day,’ she texted. ‘Why would he cheat on me?’ I just wrote back, ‘Because you suck at sucking.’ That was the last time I heard from her.”