Breaking up is hard. Talk about an understatement. The lucky ones are those who come to a mutual disdain. When you both feel like you've squeezed the last drop of positivity from it, then you can part ways amicably. But more often than not that isn't the case. Back in the good old days, before I was in the cast, I was just a member of the audience watching "The Break Up Show." I used to tell people that the toughest role was the one who fell out of love last.
When you're the initiator of a breakup you get to fall out of love first. You have time on your side to sort things out. I've been in that role before. I woke up one day and realized I wasn't happy. I tried to jump start it, thinking maybe it was just a temporary feeling, but after a while it became clear that the love was gone. The next few days/weeks involved me trying to figure out how to breakup without crushing her. That's why I still maintain that saying, "I love you, but I'm not in love with you" is genuine. Some people go to great lengths to not crush the other person.
But even with that extreme consideration for the other person's feelings, you still get the luxury of falling out of love first. The honorable thing that I've learned over time is to let them know right away. That way you get the chance to try and repair it together or at the very least, you're both going through it at the same time. Because if you don't, then you condemn the other person to go through it alone.
I like to think of love as a form of energy that begins in your heart and flows through you to the other person. As long as they're there to receive it, everything is great. In a "merciful" breakup, both people start shutting their love flow down around the same time. I call it 'merciful' and not 'peaceful' because there's usually a lot of arguing or disagreements going on between the two. But in that other kind of breakup, the kind where you don't see it coming, that second person has their love running at maximum capacity and is all of a sudden expected to just shut it down. You have a better chance of getting a 30 car train to stop on a dime, than to get someone to gracefully accept that you're not in love anymore.
And in a lot of cases it isn't that you don't love them anymore. It's that you've done something that goes against your professed love or you've just chosen a direction that doesn't involve them. Regardless of what it is, once that person hears, "I don't love you," "I cheated," "I got someone else pregnant" or "I took a job in another country. See you later." --Once that comes up, you pretty much assume that the other person isn't receiving any more of what you're shipping out. In the meantime, what the hell do you do with all of this love you have flowing through you?
Love is a nurturing type of energy. It's like food. But, just like food, it can spoil if not consumed. You now have all of this excess energy building up inside and it's starting to go rancid. Some people run out and find someone else to give it to. Rebound, I guess you'd call it. Other people go nuts. They start bargaining, begging and just acting crazy, because they don't know how to release it. But eventually it all spoils and you just become angry. It's okay, anger precedes acceptance, but you really gotta be careful how you allow that anger to manifest.
In the Curious Case of Me, I've found that I can deal with most things if I can understand the motivation behind them. If not, then I need an analogy or something to help me process it. Sadly, in most breakups, the other person is usually short on explanations that you find sufficient. Most of us need an encyclopedia of explanations that cannot be refuted, and god help the other person if they don't have one ready.
Being me, I tried to come up with my own, not to explain it but to cope with it and understand the emotions going through me. At first, I saw it like this: My love was dead and the object of my love is the one who killed it. She is both victim and assailant. I grieved yet despised at the same time. But that just leads to a duality that's not sustainable. Anger and sadness can't coexist for long before one wins (usually anger). So I came up with a different one. And this one works a little better:
Instead of grieving the loss of the person, grieve the loss of the relationship as though it were a person. Don't try to focus on all of the negatives in an attempt to make the breakup more palatable. Instead, remember all of the good times, and try to make peace with whatever thing caused its abrupt end. You can't change it and you can't pretend it didn't happen. What you can do is move forward and try to make something good with whatever you gained from it.
It's funny, all of this came to me while watching the music video for Puff Daddy's "I'll Be Missing You." It kinda makes me wanna dress in all black and dance in the rain. Maybe I could even dress my daughter in all white and we go climb up a hill. Two questions stop me from doing that:
1) Can Puffy do any dances besides spinning around in a circle?
2) I still don't understand how/why he crashed the motorcycle in the beginning of the video. I know he slammed on the brakes, but why?
[youtube=http://youtu.be/mM0-ZU8njdo]
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