The Breakup Breakdown

Truth be told, I'm kind of a sucky boyfriend. Try as I might, I'm terrible at relationships, and the other party usually realizes this sometime around month four of the romance. From there it's a downward spiral of passive aggression and button-pushing, until neither of us can take it anymore, and the entire thing implodes in on itself.

For me, the weeks following the dissolution of a relationship are what I call The Breakup Breakdown. A bastardization of the Kübler-Ross model, it consists of seven phases, and I'd like to share them with you now.

Phase One: Flat-out Denial

For one reason or another, I'm usually the one to get dumped. I tend to cling to dying relationships like a coyote gnawing on a rotting rabbit carcass, mostly because I can never find the right time to breach the subject of ending it all, so I just carry on with the crumbling affair, dying a little bit inside with each passing day. When I finally get eighty-sixed, it usually doesn't hit me at first, and on more than one occasion I didn't even register that I was being dumped at all.

Sometimes it takes hours before the weight of the situation sinks in, and that's when I transition to phase two.

Phase Two: Bargaining

Once I realize that I have yet again destroyed a good thing, I become frantically obsessed with fixing the situation. I become a recluse, concocting wild plans to remedy my damaged relationship. Reenact the boom box scene from Say Anything...? No, too easy. Cut off my ear and send it to my ex? Bitch, please. That's been done to death. As the fantasies grow more and more outlandish in my head, I begin to lose my mind altogether, and I start having conversations with inanimate objects in my apartment.

Several days in, I begin to realize things aren't going to get better, and I slip into the darkest phase of The Breakup Breakdown.

Phase Three: Depression

For the next week, I hole up in my bedroom watching 90's comedies streaming on Netflix, refusing to eat or bathe or even talk to anybody. I lose track of time, and the days blur into each other.

Following a breakup in 2007, I returned home from college for Christmas vacation, and spent weeks in the basement watching old home movies, trying to figure out where it all went wrong. I stopped shaving. I couldn't bring myself to eat, save for nursing tubes of Go-Gurt, and my weight plummeted. In passing, my mom told me I looked like "Jesus with a meth addiction." I suppose that was her way of telling me she was worried about me.

The depression phase can last anywhere from a couple days to 24 years a few weeks, but it isn't the worst phase by far. No, the worst is yet to come.

Phase Four: The Jennifer Aniston Juncture

At some point, my sorrow gives way to anger, and I start to rewrite the whole relationship in my head to make myself the victim. At this point I've almost entirely lost my grip on reality. I start imagining my life as a movie where I'm a jilted martyr, and everyone in the audience is sobbing because I've been treated so poorly and unfairly. It's during this period I act the most erratically.

Case in point: years ago, an ex called me following a messy breakup, and asked if they could come by and pick up the stuff they'd left at my place. I said sure, and when they arrived I threw it all out the window at them.

I swear it happened in slow motion, like in a Toni Braxton music video. Luckily, this stage doesn't last long, and once it's over, I start taking steps to recovery. Before long I begin to gain some clarity, and one thing becomes perfectly obvious: I am fucking hungry as hell.

Stage Five: Eat Everything In Sight

I always lose my appetite in the weeks following a traumatizing event, so when I finally start to feel better, the first thing I realize is that I can clearly see my ribcage and all my extra small t-shirts fit like muumuus. Like a human vacuum cleaner, I inhale every scrap of food I can find.

From there, I transition to stage six of my recovery process.

Phase Six: No, Seriously, Eat Fucking EVERYTHING

Perhaps it's because I'm engorged on snack cakes and riding a food-induced wave of euphoria, but before long something clicks and I almost instantly recover from my weeks of grief and anxiety. I do a complete 180, and emerge from my cocoon of despair as a chubby, happy butterfly.

Phase Seven: Acceptance and Closure

Colors become brighter, the air smells sweeter, and the forest animals join me for a musical number about baking pies or something.

I don't know how my coping process relates to other people's, but the weeks following a split can be dark and dismal for me. I try to approach each breakup as a learning process, and I like to think I don't make the same mistakes more than once. I come out of the woods, take a deep breath, and remind myself that there are other fish in the sea, more relationships to screw up, more breakups to deal with, more lessons to learn. And possibly, hopefully, I'm closer to being the kind of person I want to be, and perhaps the next relationship will be the one that sticks.