by Michelle Tea
There are endless combinations of bad dynamics that should send you scurrying for the safety of singleness, but what they all have in common is making you feel like crap, not prioritized, unappreciated. If you have done your own emotional homework and gone to therapy and worked through all the ways your parents ruined you, then you are ready to be present and love another person, to be on their team and make them feel awesome. If your person is not returning the favor, kick them to the curb. Life is too short.
Now, how to break up with this fool? Quickly, and decisively. In person tends to be best, but so much relationship communication is conducted via gadgetry nowadays, I don’t think it’s the worst sin if your relationship resignation letter comes over the phone or computer. Other people disagree with this, and if you do choose to end the love affair with a text message, be prepared to field some self-righteous outrage. But I believe that a remote breakup often spares both people from those downward-spiraling, endless-processing conversations that so often accompany endings. Those conversations are useless. If you do do your breakup in person, try not to indulge them. My easiest kills were ones where I was pulling on my jean jacket and tossing my bag over my shoulder as I delivered the final words. Keep it brief (“It’s over.” “I can’t do this anymore.” “We’re breaking up.” “Fuck you.”) and get the hell out of there. Oh, it’s happening in your house? “I need you to leave.” Boom. But remember, breakup text messages are the Dear John letters of yesteryear. As nothing good has ever come out of an in-person breakup, I heartily endorse an electronic resignation.
Once the breakup is in effect, don’t try to be friends. Maybe that will happen organically later on, but right away it’s a pretty lousy idea. One or both of you are bound to be a bundle of raw nerves, lingering desire, seething resentment—emotional suicide bombers. Passive-aggressive commentary, if not outright scream fighting, is to be expected. Keep your distance. If you have a texting problem, delete your ex’s number from your phone. Make a pact with a close friend that you will text or call them before you text or call your ex. Texting can be painfully hard to resist—like, your ex has got to hear what you have to say, or you think you will feel so much better if you just get this one barbed comment off your chest, but really. You won’t feel that much better. It will not get you what you think you want, which might not be what you really want, anyway. Don’t reach out to your ex—not to hurt them and not to be friends. Get a breakover instead!
Hail the breakover, a breakup-inspired makeover. We have all sorts of falling-in-love rituals, weddings being the most extravagant. But what about coming-apart rituals? I guess getting totally shitfaced is a common contemporary breakup ritual, but I’m thinking of something a bit more positive. That last thing you need when you’re feeling rejected is booze bloat and a shame spiral.
Breakups make me feel old and haggard, all used up. Getting a new hairdo or a shot of Botox lifts me out of dumps. Even a mani-pedi and an eyebrow wax remind me to take care of myself—an outward manifestation of all the inner self-care breakups require of you, and a continuation of the declaration of self-love that you made when you dumped that fool. Oh, wait—that fool dumped you? As we say in 12-step, rejection is God’s protection! The Universe was looking out for you by taking away someone who was bringing you down. Give thanks by getting a facial. You are made in the Universe’s image, and she likes to see you looking your best! Plus, there is a real satisfaction in looking different the next time you run into your ex—You think you know me? You don’t know me. You never even got to see the best of me. Here’s a glimpse; eat your heart out, loser.
Breakovers are good for your self-esteem, and they pay respect to how a breakup leaves you changed. You’re never the same after a heartache. That doesn’t mean you’re degraded, or ruined—you’re smarter, sharper. You’re a little older. You’re going to see the world differently now, and the world should see you differently, too. Get a haircut, or dye your hair some wild shade. Buy a new outfit; thrift it if you must. Pierce your tongue. No—don’t do that. I did that after a breakup and it was a disaster. I bit it all the time by mistake, and it became infected. Get a tattoo (just don’t hit on your artist). Go on a health kick and detox from the bad vibes. Have a friend teach you how to master cat-eye eyeliner once and for all, and make it your new thing for a while. There is no end to how you can change up your appearance, and it’s always a great idea. It’s better you’re focused and obsessing on yourself than on whatever clueless bozo got the ax.
The second most amazing thing I did to help get over a painful breakup was to get contact lenses. After living my whole life with a strip of plastic cutting across my face—a.k.a. glasses—I could suddenly see myself! I became unrecognizable to people, even those who’d known me for ages but had gotten used to clocking my specs to identify me. It was so gratifying to have friends marvel, “You look so different!” because I was different. I wasn’t going to put up with the mad bullshit my latest relationship had put me through ever again. I was a new woman! And I was glad it showed. It was hard to learn how to yank apart my lids and poke myself in the eye like some Clockwork Orange torture scene, but I mastered it through practice. Plus, it really widened my eye shadow possibilities to no longer have a plastic contraption blocking the mirrors of my soul.
However life changing it was to shuck my glasses, the number one best most amazing thing I did to help get over a painful breakup was to go to Paris. I was lucky to have the spare dough for a plane ticket, but the experience was so thoroughly healing, I would encourage anyone to put it on a credit card or bum the funds off someone who loves you. Have a breakup party and ask everyone to make a contribution to your Paris Breakup Vacation Fund. Do whatever you need to do to get your ass out of whatever non-French country you happen to be in and into Paris. I suppose you could go somewhere else—to Mexico to snorkel with all the other fish in the sea; to Rome to lose yourself in history and catcalls; to Tibet to hunker down in a cave. But I really recommend Paris.
Why Paris? For starters, it’s beautiful, and its beauty is of a melancholy variety that jibes quite nicely with post-breakup downer energy. When I brought my own broken heart to Paris, doing a house swap with a French friend (Don’t have a French friend? Make one, quick! One should always have a French friend!), I spent my first non-jet-lagged day walking along the Seine in the rain. The weather sucked, which was great. It was overcast and pigeon-colored, like my heart. I took the elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower and saw exactly nothing through the thick cloud cover. It was a metaphor for my own sorry state—unable to see the loveliness of the larger world, what with all this sadness fogging my vision.
Travel is perfect for a broken heart, liberating and addictive. The exotic new surroundings can augment your angst and make it seem pretty, somehow. You are the mopey heroine of your own French film. It transforms your days from a frantic scheme to avoid bumping into your ex to a luxuriously lonely experience of solitude. Everything you do, from feeding yourself breakfast to grabbing a coffee, feels like a wonderful treat, because of the novelty. You couldn’t send a cutting text if you wanted to, because your cell phone is shut off. Yeah, do not get a travel plan—you are going off the grid. To truly immerse yourself in your heart and in the world, you can’t be fielding endless cell phone distractions. The temptation to shoot a shitty text to your ex will vanish, as will that lingering psychic tension you get from wondering if he’s ever going to text you. You can’t post sexy selfies by the Seine in hopes that it will make him regret everything he’s ever done. You can’t pull up a map and find your way from point A to point B. Get lost. That is what you are in Paris to do—to lose yourself to something bigger and more beautiful than your petty romantic scuffle, to become one with the city until its elegant mystique becomes part of your own spirit. To excavate your dreamy id from beneath the superego of social media. You won’t miss the piddly dopamine blips that a text message brings. Paris will take care of your dopamine.
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nbsp; Parisians are famous for their moodiness and their love affairs, and this is another reason why I believe it makes for an ideal breakation destination. No one will bat an eye if you walk weeping though its ancient streets. Has this heartbreak prompted you to take up smoking? Guess what? Everyone in Paris smokes. Enjoy yourself. Buy a pack of Gauloises, lean under a bridge to escape the drizzle, and hasten your own demise while pondering existentially the temporary nature of it all. This is what Paris is for.
It is also for love. Or if not love, love affairs. People make out all over the place in Paris—in the grocery store before the refrigerated shelves of yogurt, on the street before a metro station, on the speeding underground trains, on one of the ubiquitous carousels, before a crepe stand, by the Seine, in bars, on the paths that encircle Notre-Dame. You would get the impression that Parisians, in spite of their scowling appearance, are DTF, and you would be correct. Take the experience of a friend who came to stay with me for a week during my Parisian retreat. We’d found an English-speaking 12-step meeting helmed by a heavily tattooed French punk who took us out for food after.
“Why don’t you go to French meetings?” I asked our new friend.
“They are so annoying,” he said in his smoking-hot French accent. “It is all—but why am I an alcoholic? Why? Why? Who cares why you are alcoholic? Shut up!” The punk had no patience for his countrymen’s existential angst, but I was charmed by it. Why had my relationship gone south? Why had I stayed in it so long when it had made me so unhappy? And if it had made me so unhappy, why was I so bummed out that it was over? Such questions were welcomed by Paris. Paris was wondering the same thing.
My friend left us to debate this as she went downstairs to use the bathroom, and along the way crossed paths with a different smoking-hot young gentleman (there are many in Paris). They quickly cruised one another, and the Gallic gentleman swooped in for a kiss. My friend was shocked, and kissed him back. When he attempted to lead her into the bathroom to continue their amour, she said no, and he backed off. That was that. She returned to the table shaken, though not unpleasantly so. She then went on to have a torrid affair with the tattooed French punk, whose heart she broke by not allowing him to whisk her away to his beach home in Normandy.
France’s relationship with feminists and feminism is strange and interesting. On the one hand, Simone de Beauvoir is a national treasure. On the other, a French friend routinely endures having her rump grabbed by her boss like some 1960s American nightmare. They have a different relationship with casual sex and love affairs, viewing situations that in America would be inappropriate as simply human. While I am far too American (and American feminist) to live with an acceptance of extramarital affairs and workplace groping, the ease with which sexual encounters can be fallen into in French culture is a bit of a fantasy. I had expected to spend my time in Paris alone and sulking, but when my French friend informed her countrywomen that a lonely American was staying at her apartment, invitations to parties began rolling in. Well, to me they were parties—to the Parisians they were just, you know, life. This is how you live, gathering at one another’s homes each night with loaves of bread and hunks of cheese, with bottles of wine and packs of cigarettes. This group was younger than I was by at least a decade, but I never felt like a grody old-lady interloper. In France, as in much of Europe, older women are still recognized as human, oftentimes sexy humans. I did not drink the wine but I smoked their cigarettes as if I had the lungs of an eighteen-year-old, with a “when in Rome” attitude. Indeed, the French seemed not even to recognize their vice as such. When, concerned about my smoking, I said, “I’m going to have to get a facial when I return to America!” I was met with a series of glares.
“Do you think we have ugly faces from smoking?” my new French friends demanded. No! Of course not! But they were French. Things were different for them.
I began a little affair with one boy, only to recognize him as perhaps the wrong boy and then switch my affair to another, who was the right boy. Of course, he was in a relationship already, but being French, his girlfriend gave us the green light to indulge in a petite tryst on my visit—she was conducting quite a few trysts of her own. This conjured in me such gratitude and admiration for the pretty French fille that I got somewhat of a crush on her as well. I imagined I was Anaïs Nin, in love with both Henry and June. Such things can only happen in Paris, of course, and there was a moment I thought about living there for a spell, being their trois. She was a young model and intellectual, going to the Sorbonne and taking sexy pictures on the side. She spoke perfect English and we engaged in all sorts of conversations. He was older, though still younger than I was, and worked some sort of bureaucratic job that gave him existential conflict. He spoke very poor English and I spoke no French at all, so our communications were blissfully physical.
On New Year’s Eve I threw a party at the house I was staying at, and all my new French friends spent the night. The pretty French fille claimed her boyfriend for herself, which I thought fair, and I gave them my bed for the evening. I slept on a little mattress in a crawlspace above the kitchen. It was like a tree house inside the attic apartment, and through the window across the room I could spot the cold, pale dome of the Sacré Cœur cathedral against the dark sky, glowing like the moon. I fell asleep and had a terrible dream. In it I had something to say to my ex. He had treated me so badly, and I was going to tell him what I thought about it once and for all. The pain I felt was rushing and urgent; the need to deliver this message was agonizing. I rushed through the streets of San Francisco, looking everywhere. I burst into his house and found him in bed with his new girlfriend, cowering beneath the covers. In the dream I felt a leaden disappointment settle over me. I was so carefree in Paris, I thought. But now I am home, and I have to feel this again. And then I woke up.
When I did, I was so relieved to be not in San Francisco, but in a Parisian attic crawl space. I could hear one of my new friends puttering around the tiny galley kitchen, making espresso in the giant Italian espresso maker. I lay on the thin mattress and considered my dream. I acknowledged how obsessed with my ex I had been, a fact made starker by how little I’d thought of him since being swept away by Paris. Paris had made the world bigger for me, and my ex had become smaller. Even though I knew in San Francisco I would resume my routines—which would include running into my ex at events and recovery meetings—I felt that Paris had gotten under my skin, had perhaps caused me to change, to shift into a new direction. What was my ex next to Paris? What was his girlfriend next to the Seine? No one was anything in the face of the dark river and the ancient bridges that spanned it. I took my New Year’s dream as a gift, reminding me of how I didn’t need to be anymore. And when I returned home I did run into my ex, and it annoyed me, but that annoyance didn’t take up residence in my heart. There wasn’t any room, with so much of Paris in there.
So, go to Paris. If you can’t do that, go somewhere. Take a road trip, a train trip, a bus trip if you must. Find a place that reminds you that the world is so much bigger than your heart and whoever broke it this time around. Go hang out by the ocean and trip out on its mammoth ancientness. Offer it your heartache—it’s big enough to hold it, to dilute it with all that salt and water, melt it away to nothing. Salt purifies. Take a dunk if you can stand it. You’re alive. That relationship was but one chapter in your long, long story, one little scene in your epic.
7.
Too Cool for School
Can we go back to talking about money? I’m sort of obsessed with it. Money, and class—who has money, who doesn’t, and what it means for all of us. On a recent road trip I was doing my regular road trip duties as the person who doesn’t drive. In the past, such tasks once included paging through cumbersome road atlases, squinting at the skinny colored lines that crisscrossed the page, poking it with my finger and saying, “I think we’re here.” Now that GPS exists, my job has become much more enjoyable—reading out loud to keep the driver en
tertained. On this road trip, I had the Sunday New York Times on my lap and was reading aloud a long piece that tracked three girls from working-poor families as they tried to go to college. It was a depressing article; they mostly failed. No one in their families had gone to college, so no one understood how to help them jump through the hoops and suss out the loopholes that could bring them financial aid and overall success. Their parents were bewildered and felt inept. Their boyfriends, coming from the same backgrounds, just wanted them to stick around and get married. In spite of all this, the girls managed to go to college for a single year, something that looks like a failure but is its own triumph. At the end of that year the lack of support and the feeling of alienation at school, compounded by the unforgiving financial situation, were too much, and each one called it quits. These were Latino girls figuring this out in Texas, 2012. As a New England white girl who tried to figure it out back in 1989, I related to their story completely.
As I approached my would-be college years increasingly confused about how a person goes about continuing her education, a phrase my mother often sounded was “There’s gotta be room in the world for the ditchdigger.” As a lifelong broke person—her father had dropped out of school to join the war and later worked as a machinist, while her mom had operated a cash register at a department store—my mother had cultivated a sort of defensive pride about her membership in what was once the working class and is now too often the working poor. Frequently this pride veered into bitterness—“Money goes to money,” she’d say, meaning that people who start out with money are generally pretty good at sucking up more of it. She was scornful of wealthy people, an attitude I eagerly adopted and then attributed to my punk rock ethos—Eat the rich! Die Yuppie scum! I, too, had decided that anyone with more money than we had (i.e. most people) was somehow immoral. And if you believe that people with money suck, it can put you off wanting to accumulate some, even if your lack of dollars is making your life hard.