Dear Breakup Girl,

I am totally confused by my ex-boyfriend. I dated this guy for only a couple months, but fell head over heels for him almost immediately! He and I had everything in common, or so it seemed.

One of the greatest things about him was that every day when he got home from work, the first thing he would do was call me. I could practically set my watch- half an hour after he was scheduled to finish,he’d call me. It didn’t matter if it was 5pm or 11pm (he worked anywhere from 40-80 hours a week between two jobs).

He was also very affectionate, telling me how much he cared about me, etc. The only problem was, he would occasionally say things like “Some day I’ll meet a really great girl and get married.” Now, I’m a college student, and a realist, and I know that guys aren’t looking to marry someone they date at age 20. Even so, it bothered me to here him say that. It made me feel like I was just an amusement before the feature presentation or something.

Well, I went away on vacation for a week, and spoke with him on the phone a couple times while I was gone. The night that I got back we spent the whole evening snuggling and watching South Park episodes. Then, the next day, we went to his cabin and while we were sitting around, he made another one of his “Someday…” comments. I was so frustrated that I said “I don’t even know why I bother with this. I should just go meet someone else.” Well, I immediately regretted it and apologized, but he started in on this whole “As long as we know this relationship isn’t going anywhere, its fine for both of us right?” I said that under normal circumstances it might work out, but I told him that I hated knowing that as soon as he met someone even slightly more interesting than me he’d toss me out like yesterday’s underwear.

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Heavy stuff from June 22, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

Well, me and my girlfriend have been going out for 11 months and tommorow it would be a year. I have been to a shrink about 1 month and stopped because I felt fine, but I wasn’t the problem I had to go to a shrink for — it’s my biological dad (I never knew him and he died by gunshots because he stole drugs from a gang member), but before all this I tried to meet him. Plus when I was about 12 my stepdad cheated on my mom and I looked at my stepdad as a real father (he also had a child with this other woman). Well I was wondering me and my ex-girlfriend got in a lot of fights and the reason we broke up is because of us fighting. Well I always snapped on her for the stupidest reasons so it was my fault mostly, but when I went to the shrink this never happened I never snapped or anything. So she said she needed time to sort things out so is it over or is there a chance and if there is another chance how can I stop snapping at her? Thanks.

— Chris

Dear Chris,

Okay, everyone, since we’ve been on the topic of melo/drama recently, how many of you have just put your situation in perspective?

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MSN.com, Match.com, HappenMagazine.com: they’re in a healthy and satisfying 3-way relationship. Meaning that you can find MSN/Match.com’s “Ask Lynn” columns –penned by BG’s alter ego — over at Happen now as well.

This week Lynn responds to a woman aptly named Lost. She’s a woman that’s going places, stuck in a relationship that’s going nowhere:

We have fought constantly … and every time we fight we break up. He decides that he can’t handle what’s going on and tries to blame me. He is going to be 30 and yet can’t seem to get a grip on what he wants in life. I do not think that he appreciates me.

After dating for five years how can she break away? Read Lynn’s advice at Happen, then share your own stories below!

Age: 9.

City: Detroit, MI

Activities: Standing in a department store trying on school uniforms. Being adjusted in said uniform by my mother. Witnessing my first public fight as another mother yells at her son.

Quotations: From yelling mother – “Pants don’t fit you. You’re too fat. You should stop eating. Why can’t you be more like the other kids? My life is hard enough without having to come home and deal with your sorry %*@!

Status: I watch furtively, and then hide behind my mother. A silent thank you to the powers that be. My mother says something to the woman about being in public and embarrassing her child. The woman scoffs.

In the New York Times’ I Need to Vent. Hello, Facebook, Skyler Hurt, 22, friend and bridesmaid to a feuding couple, likewise, intervened:

“Hey, you guys know we can still see this right …?”

Apparently, couples DO know their fights are being observed, and like the mother yelling in the store, they don’t care. In fact, as the Times article notes, some of them welcome the chance to publicly air their grievances for friends and family to see.

Michael Vincent Miller, psychologist and author of the book “Intimate Terrorism: The Crisis of Love in an Age of Disillusion” notes:

Today, popular representations of marriage tend toward “two very self-protective egos at war with one another,”…“each wanting vindication and to be right by showing that the other is wrong.”

The thing is, isn’t marriage about two individuals coming together as a couple? By using Facebook and other social media to gain “support” for their respective “sides” in an argument or disagreement, it feels more like they are keeping separate counsel and setting up camps to do battle. Additionally, when you ask your friends and family to constantly choose sides and what they see most is your Facebook status rather than your faces at the dinner table, that support each person is looking for individually can quickly turn into disapproval for the couple as a whole. [Plus: “Tacky!” — BG]

Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia would agree.

“People tend to do better in their marriage when friends and family are supportive,” Mr. Wilcox said. “When that support dries up, that can be a really big problem.”

Additionally, in an era rife with passive aggressive forms of communication, from sites that allow you to anonymously tell your friends and family what you really think to others that allow you to virtually “slap” someone, one has to wonder exactly where we’re going. Are we really evolving as thinking and feeling human beings or is technology slowly unraveling us? Have we become a society where we are more comfortable interfacing virtually with our partners rather than speaking with them when they are sitting in front of us? Just as importantly, will couples venting their frustrations with each other in the new public spaces, as parents, do the same to their children? Will anyone say anything?

The accompanying photo was particularly powerful as one of the couples sits together on the couch, their faces aglow, not with love, but lit from the screens of their laptops. While the Victorian ideals of marriage are thankfully passé, the openness that modern couples should be striving for is openness with each other, not the World Wide Web.

MSN.com, Match.com, HappenMagazine.com: they’re in a healthy and satisfying 3-way relationship. Meaning that you can find MSN/Match.com’s “Ask Lynn” columns –penned by BG’s alter ego — over at Happen now as well.

This week Lynn advises Felix Fairytale, who’s trying to reconcile the storybook ending he imagined for himself with the reality that his princess and he fight. They’ve broken up and gotten back together three times.

I bought into the “fairy-tale hype,” I guess you could say — that if you’re meant to be, there won’t be any friction between the two of you. I didn’t realize that just because we fight, it doesn’t mean the relationship has to end.

Read the letter and Lynn’s advice over at Happen, then come back here to comment on Felix’s fear of conflict and how you deal with disagreements in your own relationships.

An image stuck in my head since last week: Cardinals vs. Brewers, bottom of the fifth, Cards down 7-1. Evidently frustrated Cards catcher Yadier Molina throws a verbal hissy about the ump’s latest call. Right quick, the two start jawing at one another nose-to-nose, like they do in movies about baseball or commercials for chewing gum.

Molina gets ejected, natch, at which point Cards manager Tony LaRussa saunters over to take Molina’s place up the ump’s nostrils. While Molina makes a big show of tossing his catcher’s gear at the umpire’s feet, LaRussa is likewise ousted from the game.

I cringe to admit that the scene reminded me of some knock-down-drag-outs I’ve had with exes. I’m sure at some point, I’ve tried to pull off some histrionic bit like Molina’s aggro-sarcastic gear-shedding. And yet? I’m oddly jealous of him and LaRussa.

Why? Because Molina and LaRussa will get to keep their well-paying jobs as professional sports guys. Even though what they did was counterproductive to the task at hand (you know, winning a baseball game) nobody on their team is going to hold a grudge, as even guys who play baseball for a living recognize that it is, after all, just a baseball game, just a bad flare-up in a season that’s 120 games or so long.

Being in a relationship, by contrast, pays zero dollars, can take an awful lot of work — and, at those unfortunate times when you do work yourself up into a bat-hurling moment, there’s no third-party commissioner to assign you a measly wrist-slap of a fine before everybody just moves on.

Can anyone tie that all up into a nice love/baseball metaphor for me? I’ll be over here with the Cracker Jack.