The Splits

Telling break-up stories is fun, if you're into pretending your real tears are comically fake while firing off a round of completely on-the-nose self-deprecating jokes. 

Fortunately for all of you, I am totally into that. Unfortunately, I have only one truly interesting break-up story. (But I promise you, it's pretty good.)

So I was in high school and I caught my first boyfriend, quickly realizing how uncomfortable it is to date someone who wears the same pair of sweatpants every day, performs impromptu rain dances if it looks cloudy enough outside and places one of his worn, sweaty socks on his hand to speak through him. Hey, I never said I made smart decisions. 

We broke up in one of those fantastically dramatic teenager kind of ways, and I will forever thank him for letting me scratch that off my bucket list. See, we got into a fight - and, trust me, he was at fault for this fight - and instead of talking it through, I drove off and ignored all his calls. By "I drove off," I mean that I ran over his foot in the process.

I listened to his voice mail, where he said with resignation, "I guess this means we're breaking up." (He was crying on his messages, which gave me a huge ego boost.) I called him back before deciding to call it quits for real, and he said something so incredibly rude and insensitive that it transcended insensitivity and somehow became hilarious. 

"I can't believe I'm breaking up with you," I told him. 

He paused. "Well," he said. "Technically, I broke up with you."

And that, my friends, is how I broke up with a boy who habitually wore a surgeon's mask to avoid contracting any sickness. Sorry, I think I got that wrong. Let me try it again.

And that, my friends, is how a boy who habitually wore a surgeon's mask to avoid contracting any sickness broke up with me.   

(If you're reading this, ex-boyfriend-who-I-will-not-name-because-I-am-classy, you should know this is all in good fun and I'm sure you've grown out of your sock puppet habit by now.)