dumping in private - her place or yours?

It will be hard for both of you to fully believe that you're not doing the same thing now. You are kind of arguing, you probably don't mean it, you will have sex, and then things will continue. Breaking up in private is informal - going someplace to do it is formal. Formalizing things increases the chance that it will stick.

There is another aspect of dumping someone in private - which again is that it's private. This means that if it's going to get ugly, there are absolutely no external circumstances to keep it from exploring the full range of ugliness. You, or she, will have no motivation to keep yourself from screaming vitriolic accusations from certain pus-filled parts of your soul that ordinarily should be kept in the dark - because as long as this is taking place in private, your soul kind of believes that the breakup is taking place in the dark. In a private place that no one really knows about. This can get weird. It can get irrational. It can also get dangerous.

Your soon-to-be ex-girlfriend, for example, will usually be socially inhibited from picking up a table lamp with a marble base and hurling it at your upper lip, if you are in a public place. The same sorts of social inhibitions will not necessarily apply in her home. This can make a difference when it comes to the number of stitches you require later. Similarly, you will often be socially inhibited from picking up a table that seats four, overturning it violently onto her foot and breaking several bones, if you are surrounded by witnesses. You will not necessarily feel susceptible to the same restraint if things go badly and you feel compelled to prove in dramatic fashion how emotionally wounded you were by the relationship you are now unsuccessfully trying to get out of by overturning tables.

The bottom line is that if you try to dump someone in a private place, it feels to your subconscious like you are actually still in it. It's just in the nature of relationships that there are certain private moments inherent in them. What you are trying to do by dumping, is actually create a non-relationship in which there are absolutely no private moments, or pretty close to no private moments. Dumping in private works counter to the entire meaning of what you are attempting to do.

This is why, paradoxically, you will often be tempted to do your dumping work in private. It is almost as though your subconscious is trying to erase the relationship by pretending it never happened. It says to itself, well the bulk of the important shit, the sex and the arguing, took place in private. But it turns out that was all a big mistake. So what we'll do, is we'll privately try to end it, and then it will be like it was a never a public fact at all. It will almost be like it never happened! Your subconscious can get very excited by this possibility. You will feel particularly inclined this way if there are certain private aspects that you kind of regret, or if its embarrassing to you that you ever went out with this person in the first place, or if it turns out you feel like a damn fool for maybe having gotten more emotionally involved in it than now seems was wise. Embarrassing relationships often try to sneak their way toward private endings.

This makes sense but it also often backfires. The breakup process gets dragged out, and has to be repeated a number of times before anyone believes it. It also gets way more tiring as private emotions feel perfectly free to parade themselves and make a big to-do out of being part of the dumping process. The more private things are, the more tiring, intimate, and physiologically taxing it all gets. If you dump in a public place, the only parts of you that feel really free to get involved are the public ones, and this tends to be less stressful. Oh yeah, sure, inevitably certain private emotions are going to notice something of interest happening during a public break-up, and they will try to surge forth and express their opinion, but they will be restrained by the public ones, who will try to ensure that you quietly hiss as you go over certain sore spots, rather than bellow and scream and throw things. Not throwing things saves calories!

Dumping in a private place is appropriate for a few situations.

Situation #1: It was a long-lasting intimate relationship and you just want to drag things out so that you can get used to the idea of what you're doing. Private conversations are ideal for this because you can have them over and over again before anything really noticeable happens. Go for it.

Situation #2: You are not afraid of ugliness, emotion, and violence - maybe you even like them. Some people like these things a lot - and there would just be no fun in dumping someone if at some point somebody didn't go to the closet, pull out all the other person's clothes and heave them into the muddy street. Or if hair-pulling didn't get involved. Or if screaming things that have the neighbors very nervously wishing they weren't too chickenshit to call the police didn't happen. If you want to really let it rip and ignore all the sensible dumping advice given earlier - then your house or hers is really the way to go. It's also ideal if you're alcoholic and do this kind of shit all the time.

Situation #3: It was a brief, casual relationship that nobody really gave a damn about anyway. If it was a desultory relationship that no one really got all that excited about anyway, you can pretty much dump safely in your home or theirs. Open the door for them, say 'hey glad you came over. I've realized this thing between us isn't really working out and I wanted to give you back your vacuum cleaner.' If they don't really care, you can hand them over their stuff, help them out to the car with it, say hypocritically, 'keep in touch', go back inside and watch TV. Or you can go over to their place with their stuff, say 'hey I brought back all your stuff coz I realized hey, it's not working out with us, you know, so...here are your CDs, your underwear, toothbrush...' And so on. In this case, you're not really going through a full-fledged dumping encounter anyway...because nobody was really under the illusion that you were doing anything other than passing the time til something better happened. Privacy, emotions, violence - all those things don't apply if you never got close enough to the dumpee to generate them.

If one of those three situations don't apply to you - you will often save yourself time and headache down the road by choosing a different option.

Special Notes for Dumping Someone Who Lives In The Same Place You Do:

All the same considerations about privacy, emotions, violence, psychology, and so on still apply only more so. If you are going to privately dump someone you live with - you are either going to have to drag it out - or you are going to have to have the private dumping conversations while you are packing up your shit and moving out. It has to be a done deal. You have to have a place to go to and you have to be ready to go there. Don't even bother trying to get them to move out. It's hard. You can't threaten to move out, you have to be able to do so. If you are threatening, you aren't dumping, you are negotiating. If you aren't moving out, but instead are trying to get the landlord to remove their name from the lease, you aren't dumping, you are plunging into the depths of potential ligitation hell and ongoing dramatic turmoil. You have to move out yourself, and you have to already be doing it at the time of the conversation. You can have preliminary warm-up conversations so that the person is prepared enough and doesn't try to bar the door, but you have to have taken the concrete steps to get out - or you won't get out. Handy rule of thumb for cohabitation and/or marriage breakups - the dumpee keeps the house. This is just the way it works. Be prepared for it. If you want the house that bad, you're going to have to find another way to deal with your problems. If you are the dumper - you forfeit the living space.

Final trivial consideration: In a way it's kind of shitty to do dumping in any private place you use for other things - like living there. Because bad or semi-bad dumping memories often decide to cling to the place where dumping occurred. It's a drag to have dumping memories wafting around your apartment, it clogs up the atmosphere. And it's not really nice to force the poor girl to have dumping memories stuck to her place either. It's just not...well, courteous. Even if you hate someone, forcing a miasma of your bad vibes onto their home is just uncool. This is why it is important, even if you are dead set on keeping things private, to choose a place you will later feel totally free to despise if you choose.

Of course, if you are going to choose the horrifically inadvisable private dumping by fatal gunshot method - then you need to choose a private place where the body can be dumped as well as a place where you won't be tempted to return to the scene of the crime. This will not work, by the way, you will be tempted, your bad private dumping by fatal gunshot memories will lure you like a temptress, you'll go back, the police will catch you, and you will become the Scott Petersen of your local community. Don't bring a gun to any dumping situation - even if you really like guns. And hope and pray that she doesn't either.

On that dramatic note, we'll move on to our next option - dumping by telephone, email, fax, instant message or any other cowardly non-face-to-face technology the innovative electronics industry can provide us. We're all tempted to take this route - should we?

prettyfedup.com

the pretty fucked up website

The Not 100% Complete FAQs for the Pretty Fucked Up Person in a Pretty Fucked Up World

Dumping in the home - a good idea or a fatal mistake?