A second chance on November 30, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

First off, I love this place I come back every single week to check it out…you do a fantastic job with advice..and this would be your cue to come in :).

About two years ago, this guy, we’ll call him Adam, and I were together. We were together for about 9 months. We had our ups and downs like any other couple but we managed to get through them and survive as a couple. I guess that can’t last forever though.

To make a long story short, he cheated on me. It was a very messy break up, name calling, bad mouthing, etc, on both our parts (I know, I know, sounds like something little kids do but..well, I did say it was messy). As we went along our ways, things cooled down. About 3 months after we had broken up, his friend, whom we’ll call Jay, called me up because Adam was crying because he wanted to talk to me. He got on the phone and told me how much he loved me still and how he messed up terribly and he was sorry..he wanted to get back together. At this point, I still had feelings for him and I really had to fight myself not to just jump back into a relationship with him. I knew that the feelings were still to raw in my mind and heart so I told him it would be best for us both if we took more time apart to really thing about things.

Well, it’s been nearly two years..we still talk and are good friends..lately I’ve been feeling as though I’d like to try things out again. We’ve talked about why we broke up freely (something we could never really do while we were together with problems we had) which leads me to believe that we’ve both matured while we’ve been apart. That time apart has taught me how to be mature about a break up (I’ll never go back to the name calling and bad mouthing after a break up again; it caused too many hurt feelings), how to be happy by myself (I’ve had time to practice) and realize that I don’t NEED him now, as I often felt then, but would LIKE to have him back in my life on another level. He’s been hinting that he would also like to try things out again and has told me that he’d never cheat again because of the mess it caused. My question is, should I give things a shot? Is it true, once a cheater, always a cheater? The trust has been repaired so I was thinking that it’d be possible for us to give things another go.

— Time after Time

Dear Time,

You’ve done all the right things; you’ve said all the right things — to each other and to me. If I had a Get Back Together List (hmmm…), you’d be at the top this week.

Love,
Breakup Girl

We all know that Facebook offers up-to-the-minute tracking of your (and everyone’s) relationship status. But could Facebook actually predict your breakup (and etc.) before it happens? It’s not psychic; nor, as science goes, is it rocket: remember, Facebook knows how and with whom you spend (or don’t spend) your virtual time. As the blog AllFacebook reports:

It’s an inside half-truth that many friends of Mark Zuckerberg have told me over the years: Facebook knows when a relationship is about to end. My response was to always ask more questions as it actually sounded like a legitimate possibility. In David Kirkpatrick’s soon to be released book, “The Facebook Effect“, Kirkpatrick confirms that relationship patterns were something that Mark Zuckerberg often toyed with.

In the book, Kirkpatrick writes:

As the service’s engineers built more and more tools that could uncover such insights, Zuckerberg sometimes amused himself by conducting experiments. For instance, he concluded that by examining friend relationships and communications patterns he could determine with about 33 percent accuracy who a user was going to be in a relationship with a week from now. To deduce this he studied who was looking which profiles, who your friends were friends with, and who was newly single, among other indicators.

Are you busy chatting with another girl instead of your girlfriend? Are you being tagged in a lot of photos with the same person? Facebook has a lot of information about who you are viewing regularly (or lusting over) as well as what your communication patterns are. While the company is not actively charting most users’ communication patterns for determining the future of your relationship, they are actively monitoring your behavior on the site to determine what should be displayed in the feed.

Of course, 33 percent, while impressive, is not scary accurate. And there’s a wide margin of error. Depending on how you use Facebook, for example, your lovah’s profile might be the one you look at least, given that you, you know, see them. (In fact, at least one expert says partners shouldn’t be “friends” in the first place. (“It’s a terrible idea for spouses to be Facebook friends with each other,” says Ian Kerner, Ph.D., co-author, with Heidi Raykeil, of [best self-help title EVER!] Love in the Time of Colic: The New Parents’ Guide to Getting It On Again. “Relationships are already filled with enough banality. I want to preserve what little mystery there is, which means I don’t need to see my wife’s latest check-in with her third-grade pals on her Superwall.”)

That said — though BG eschews unexamined anti-FB or “technology is eeevil” pile-on — we do know that, given its endless started-out-innocent opps for flirting and reconnecting with the one(s) who got away, Facebook can also = Homewreck. So it’s not like Facebook would need to uncrumple the receipts on your dresser to know what’s up.

And so, AllFacebook wonders, could there be an app for this?

Could you imagine using the site and then receiving a notification that the system has automatically determined that your relationship could be on thin ice? While it may provide useful to know, it would be extremely creepy to find out. For now, I wouldn’t expect to see any “relationship strength tool” integrated into the site, but it’s definitely interesting to know that it’s potentially something Facebook could project. Would you want to know how strong your relationship is based on your own Facebook behavior?

But here’s the real question:

Don’t you probably already know how strong it is without Facebook telling you?

Too much information on February 23, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

I was in a relationship for almost a year and it finally ended last week. It has had ups and downs, breakups and reunions so many times that I cannot remember the numbers. I love him very much, but he cannot live with my past (which really isn’t shady at all!). When he was asking me some very personal and unnecessary questions, I lied to him for fear of losing him. The truth came out. For five months, we have been trying to work through this, him accepting my past (three other men) and the fact that I lied to him; I’ve been trying to move on from his insults. Last week, he told me he couldn’t stop thinking about my “mistakes” and he wanted to see other people. I should be happy to be free from the arguments, but I’m not. I love and only want to be with him. I go to a very small school, so his presence and any girl he takes home are always near. I don’t want to sit in or go out anymore on weekends. How can I go out and deal with the fact he’s with other girls, ones who are in the place where I want to be? Breakup Girl, I obviously can’t change the past, but my future seems in peril! I wish he would accept the past and that I love him. Instead, he’s thrown me away like yesterday’s garbage! HELP!

— Discarded and Depressed

(more…)

Reruns from February 2, 1998…

Laura writes: I’m 36, divorced (for over five years), and have been seeing a great guy for four months. But last week, a guy I fell head over heels for a year ago came back into my life (after having moved away for a year). I really like the guy I’m seeing, but have never felt that “magic” with him — as so wonderfully talked about in “Sleepless In Seattle” in the attic scene with the old wedding dress. I did feel “magic” with Mr. Return.

My plan of action is to spend time with Mr. Return on a non-sexual, nothing but friends basis to see if there is, truly something there. I want to be fair to the guy I’m dating, as well as to my soul — after all, I so want to find my destiny, and believe that abiding love has that “magic.” Do you have any other ideas? Do I sound like I’m totally barking up the wrong tree? Your advice is most welcome.

Lois Lane writes: I’ve been married for seven years (not happily) and about a year ago I met up with my ex-boyfriend from high school. It was like we never broke up. My husband can provide for me with material things but not emotionally. On the other hand my ex is there for me emotionally, but not for material things. Should I divorce my husband or should I stay for the sake of the kids? I’m so sad!

(more…)