[ed. How does stuff get so complicated.]
“Brett was there,” I Gchatted my friend Holly after running into a man who’d broken my heart six months earlier. “We actually had a nice chat. He was a mess though. Like, unshowered, smelled weird, was carrying an iPad in the waistband of his pants because he had nowhere to put it.” She asked me what I’d been wearing. Lipstick and heels, I replied. I’d been waiting for my new boyfriend, who picked me up and briefly met Brett.
“Oh my God,” Holly replied. “That is the ultimate ex encounter? He’s nice but looks like a mess. You look awesome and are with a new guy. You won.”
“Winning the breakup” may be a petty concept, but everyone who exits relationships regularly (or maybe just exited one very memorably) knows exactly what it means. The winner is the ex whose career skyrockets after the split; whose new wife is a supermodel; who looks better; who dates better; who has bouncier hair. It’s getting over your ex before she gets over you and leading a demonstratively successful life without her — but doing so in ways that at least look casual, just for yourself, definitely not just to rub it in her face, because you’re so over her, remember? And therein lies the Catch-22 of winning the breakup: To care about winning, you are forced to care about not caring about someone. Asked about her weekend plans, my 26-year-old friend Sam once replied, “I’m assembling a team of hotties to torture my ex on Instagram.”
Dating actively is to be in a perpetual state of breakup. (Even in a best-case scenario, you are spared the breakup only once.) I’m 30, but already I feel like I’ve surpassed my lifetime limit for breakups — starting at age 18, hooking up in the dorms, I was already cohabitating with my significant others. In the past decade and change, I’ve had multiple multiyear relationships, which among my peers is a typical track record. For a time, social theorists believed my generation’s defining romantic feature was the hookup. But as hooking up rapidly expanded into a series of miniature marriages — and miniature divorces made more confounding by social-media omnipresence and cell-phone butt dials — I’ve come to think millennial romances are defined not by their casual beginnings but their disastrous ends. We aren’t the hookup generation; we’re the breakup generation. Today I find myself entering each subsequent relationship already anticipating its end — but is breakup dread a sign that the relationship is doomed, or does the dread actually cause the doom?
Inevitably, no two people ever can desire a breakup exactly equally. Which means at least one person comes out of it feeling like a loser — and as any résumé-padding overachiever knows, where there are losers there are also winners.
by Maureen O'Connor, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Photo: Islandpaps/Splash News
“Brett was there,” I Gchatted my friend Holly after running into a man who’d broken my heart six months earlier. “We actually had a nice chat. He was a mess though. Like, unshowered, smelled weird, was carrying an iPad in the waistband of his pants because he had nowhere to put it.” She asked me what I’d been wearing. Lipstick and heels, I replied. I’d been waiting for my new boyfriend, who picked me up and briefly met Brett.
“Oh my God,” Holly replied. “That is the ultimate ex encounter? He’s nice but looks like a mess. You look awesome and are with a new guy. You won.” “Winning the breakup” may be a petty concept, but everyone who exits relationships regularly (or maybe just exited one very memorably) knows exactly what it means. The winner is the ex whose career skyrockets after the split; whose new wife is a supermodel; who looks better; who dates better; who has bouncier hair. It’s getting over your ex before she gets over you and leading a demonstratively successful life without her — but doing so in ways that at least look casual, just for yourself, definitely not just to rub it in her face, because you’re so over her, remember? And therein lies the Catch-22 of winning the breakup: To care about winning, you are forced to care about not caring about someone. Asked about her weekend plans, my 26-year-old friend Sam once replied, “I’m assembling a team of hotties to torture my ex on Instagram.”
Dating actively is to be in a perpetual state of breakup. (Even in a best-case scenario, you are spared the breakup only once.) I’m 30, but already I feel like I’ve surpassed my lifetime limit for breakups — starting at age 18, hooking up in the dorms, I was already cohabitating with my significant others. In the past decade and change, I’ve had multiple multiyear relationships, which among my peers is a typical track record. For a time, social theorists believed my generation’s defining romantic feature was the hookup. But as hooking up rapidly expanded into a series of miniature marriages — and miniature divorces made more confounding by social-media omnipresence and cell-phone butt dials — I’ve come to think millennial romances are defined not by their casual beginnings but their disastrous ends. We aren’t the hookup generation; we’re the breakup generation. Today I find myself entering each subsequent relationship already anticipating its end — but is breakup dread a sign that the relationship is doomed, or does the dread actually cause the doom?
Inevitably, no two people ever can desire a breakup exactly equally. Which means at least one person comes out of it feeling like a loser — and as any résumé-padding overachiever knows, where there are losers there are also winners.
by Maureen O'Connor, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Photo: Islandpaps/Splash News
