I went out with this guy for a few days, then all of a sudden, he breaks up with me for this slut who just dumped her boyfriend. These two aren’t even going out and the worst part is that he told my best friend that I hated her and she didn’t talk to me for three days. I want to know, how I can get revenge while remaining anonymous?
— Miss Pissed
Dear Miss Pissed,
When Careers Day rolls around, don’t bother visiting the CIA booth. Given that it would come right on the heels of the incident(s) you describe, there is no covert operation you could run that wouldn’t have your fingers all over it. Plus, Breakup Girl is not at all convinced that these folks are worth it. That was a lame-ass, pointless move on his part — and frankly, it was even lamer for your so-called best friend to believe him without checking with you first. Revenge — especially given the elaborate effort it would take you to avoid suspicion — is so not worth it here. Your mission, and you should choose to accept it: quit calling other girls “sluts.” That doesn’t help.
Even though I’m wildly happy in my nine-month (and counting) relationship, I’d like to take revenge on the rat who preceeded the Man of My Dreams. We met on a work trip, did the Deed a couple of times, and he asked me not to tell our mutual friends. This was all fine ’til I had to listen to another of our mutual friends (10 years younger than me, blond, long legs, 20 years younger than him) tell me that she and he had been together since a few months ago and he’d asked her to keep quiet. Needless to say, I spilled the beans and we had a good girl-power afternoon comparing notes. Then he denied to her that he and I had ever been more than friends and they both froze me out. I’m probably better off without them but that kind of behavior cries out for teaching a lesson, don’t you think?
— Baffled
Dear Baffled,
With all due respect, I am going to say the same thing to you that Breakup Mom says to Breakup Dog when she (Dog) tries to eat a rotting squirrel:
Filed under: Celebrities,media — posted by Breakup Girl @ 10:31 am
Remember when breaking up with someone over the phone was scandalous? (What, you couldn’t be bothered to jump in your horseless carriage and look your ex-to-be in the eye?) Now, Jezebel flags the inevitable: not just breakups, but full-on divorces, celebrity* and civilian**, announced — for the first time, to the divorce-ee — via Twitter. Mercifully concise, I guess, but #tacky! “Please,” writes Sadie Stein, “don’t let this become a thing.”
Hear, hear. Though actually, for legal purposes, tweeting’s too concise. Quoth a lawyer at Divorce Saloon: “To say that you ‘twittered’ your intentions to divorce your spouse to your followers on Twitter and that that is somehow enough ‘notice’ of a pending divorce action? That that would be tantamount to ‘personal service’ as required by statute? I don’t think the day will ever come.”
All of that said, while I’m all for every discussion about maintaining civility in the bluish glow of technology, I want to say this for the record: our little beeping and blooping machines have brought far more friends, lovers, and allies together than they have torn asunder. Tweet on!
—-
* “In the past few months, Kelsey Grammer, Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy and Eva Longoria all replaced the time-tested PR statement with a tweet. Maybe they feel like their fans deserve to hear it from them.”
** “Apparently one guy did this…without consulting the wife he was divorcing, writing ‘My wife has left me, I wasn’t good enough, isn’t that a shame’ before she’d had a chance to tell her friends or family.”
Filed under: media — posted by Breakup Girl @ 2:15 pm
Behold:
The above, posted by Gwen at TheSocietyPages.org (and spotted/snapped by one Rachel K. in Toronto), should leave little doubt about how the ringless (and evidently friendless) masses are supposed to feel about themselves. But I’d venture to say it sucks to be the mastermind of an ad campaign that, in addition to being hell on the eyes, makes no sense. So if you buy a ring you’ll meet someone? That seems forward. It also seems capitalistically unwise to be harsh on the unmarried, who might, with another ad on another day, have been encouraged (though there are other reasons I don’t love this gambit) to purchase some sort of splurgy, sparkly single bling.
Anyway, back to Gwen: “…I’d say that what sucks isn’t being “alone,†it’s being told constantly that you must be sad and miserable since you aren’t coupled up.” Rah.
More on the ad, others like it, and “singlism” in general from Bella DePaulo here.
Via BoingBoing and Wired.com (click here for full backstory): a deeply creepy, Triplets-of-Belleville-in-hell 1970s U.S. Navy sex-educational video, slash, “great holiday gift for your sexually reckless and technologically backward friends.”
Filed under: Advice — posted by Breakup Girl @ 9:53 am
MSN.com, Match.com, HappenMagazine.com: they’re in a healthy and satisfying 3-way relationship. This Ask Lynn column is being promoted at Match on Yahoo this week…
This week we have the flipside of last week’s letter: Brian is dating a woman he met online and hasn’t taken his profile down — and now he’s being accused of cheating with another online dater…
Although I never asked Rita for a date or even for her phone number, I did talk with her about life, my personality and what I want in a relationship, etc. Now I find out that both of them are friends — and that I’m in the doghouse.
So, is he cheating? Should his girlfriend be concerned? Check out the full letter and advice, then add your two cents below!
Filed under: Advice — posted by Breakup Girl @ 10:01 am
From Mesopotamia to Melrose, from Judah Maccabee to Judge Judy, the drive for revenge has been a primary force in human/Nielsen history. It is safe to say — though Breakup Girl’s college professors might have demanded some elaboration — that since the dawn of civilization, all wars (with the possible exception of the Cola Wars) have been fought on the basis of “No one does that to me and gets away with it!” or, put another way, “Nyah nyah!”
So, when you write to Breakup Girl and ask, “Hammurabi dumped me via tablet! How can I get revenge?” you are indeed participating in the grand course of earth-moving, life-changing, history-making human events.
Then again, you’ll notice that said course has not always been so grand. War is, like, bad. (When Breakup Girl wears her favorite Corcoran paratrooper boots, she is beingironic. Also see Double Standards.) And revenge is often, like, tacky. So BG is not going to Pentagon Paper any instructions for Oreo-ing cars or endorse any urban legends of vengeance like that one with the photos of the bride and the best man. This is not the Malcolm Ex (“by any means necessary”) school of revenge. If you want to do something truly dirty, hire Norm MacDonald, who, evidently, is not bitter. ) And that is why, when you ask the how-to-get Revenge question, my likely response is,”Well, actually, you can’t. Nyah nyah.”
Wait, come back. I’m going to explain. And I promise that the reward — if not the revenge — will be sweet.
Remember Sweaty Steve, he of the socially-crippling clammy-palmed hyperhidrosis? I’ve got a fantastic update for you, plus an equally fantastic shout-out we just received from a former super-perspirator. I offer both here with two caveats: (1) (spoiler!) finding a partner does not in itself equal success or happiness; in these cases, however, it was something these fellas both wanted and thought they could never have, and (2) as Wendy Shanker describes so eloquently in Are You My Guru?, while medical conditions may have psychological or psychosomatic components, that does not mean that all afflictions can be healed with some nice long walks and a change of attitude.
OK? First, from a fella named K., this spectacular portrait of HOPErhidrosis:
“I suffered the cranial version of this condition for about six years and let it turn me into an asexual recluse for most of my twenties, even leaving two jobs due to my supervisor’s apprehension over what impression it might give the people I interacted with (understandable, as I was a phlebotomist at the time and was told patients simply would not be comfortable having someone with sweat pouring down his face drawing their blood). Just about every decision I made in those years was influenced by the sweating more than any other factor. And I never found any correlation between the heavy sweating attacks and my activity level, temperature, liquid intake, etc. The only regular trigger was, the more social exposure, more sweat, but beyond that it would happen in any random setting, even walking alone on a cold night.
Whether withdrawal of consent is what actually happened here is impossible to tell, so I’m not suggesting that Assange is a rapist or that these charges are 100% definitely on-point; I have no idea. But neither do the commentators who are saying that Assange did nothing more than have sex without a condom. And it’s important to counter the “haha sex by surprise those crazy Swedes†media narrative with the fact that actually, non-consensual sex is assault and should be recognized as such by law. Consenting to one kind of sexual act doesn’t mean that you consent to anything else your partner wants to do; if it’s agreed that the only kind of sex we’re having is with a condom, then it does remove an element of consent to have sex without a condom with only one partner’s knowledge. To use another example, if you and your partner agree that you can penetrate her, it doesn’t necessarily follow that she has the green light to penetrate you whenever and however.
I’m not particularly interested in debating What Assange Did or Whether Assange Is A Rapist, and I’d appreciate it if we could steer clear of that in the comments section. Rather, I’m interested in pushing back on the primary media narrative about this case, which is that women lie and exaggerate about rape, and will call even the littlest thing — a broken condom! — rape if they’re permitted to under a too-liberal feminist legal system. In fact, there are lots of good reasons to support consent-based sexual assault laws, and to recognize that consent goes far beyond “yes you can put that in here now.†It’s a shame that the shoddy, sensationalist reporting on this case have muddied those waters.
e-mail to a friend in need
• A Very Breakup Girl Christmas! Party tips, gift ideas, and more!
, while medical conditions may have psychological or psychosomatic components, that does not mean that all afflictions can be healed with some nice long walks and a change of attitude.
