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Text messaging is often the fastest way to communicate with friends and acquaintances, but it’s not always the best one. Especially when it comes to texting with guys. Here at Crushable we aim to help you sift through all the subtext and emerge relatively unscathed – with a little help from our friend Amanda Ernst.
For the past couple weeks, I have been talking about being dumped by text. And, after learning that many of you had been dumped (or dumped someone) by text message I posed this question: would you rather be dumped via text or just never speak to your guy again? But as your comments made clear, neither choice is ideal (thanks, Erin S). Breakups are hard, no matter the circumstances, and when it comes to using digital communication or cutting off all communication as a means to end a relationship, feelings are bound to be hurt.
So, this got me thinking. What is the ideal breakup situation? For a breakup to be ideal, both parties must lose interest simultaneously and be feeling the exact same way. Neither should feel that they wasted time, or was wronged, and both people must part ways on good terms. Although this hardly ever actually happens, a situation described by commenter Erin S comes close:
“There are some relationships that after a few dates, [communication] goes quiet.”
If you stop hearing from a guy after a few dates and you are generally unaffected or, even better, relieved, then this is the ideal breakup. No further explanation is required by either party, and life can go on without a bitter, drawn out breakup. However, the key to this is the “after a few dates” part. Certainly, after you are with a guy for a number of weeks, months or years (or, like Erin, a year or so) you expect — and deserve — more than a text or an email or even a phone call. And vice versa, if you were breaking up with a longer term boyfriend.
I have experienced “the fade-away.” I dated a guy for over a year who, after a big fight, stopped returning my texts, phone calls and emails for a week. Even though this happened after a big blowout, it still caught me off guard (we had sort of made up after our fight, after all) and it hurt my feelings that more than a year of dating meant so little to him. Eventually I demanded he meet me face to face to tell me why he had decided to so abruptly end things. He sat stony faced, drinking a beer, while I sobbed quietly in the middle of a dark bar near my apartment. But it was important, for closure’s sake, for me to meet with him in person and hear his point of view. Months later, we spoke again and he apologized for his actions. Turns out, he was just really bad at confrontation and thought avoidance was the answer. We all know it’s not. And most of the time, those guys that do this to us who do truly care about us come back and apologize in some way. Or, at least that has been my experience. Give him a few years. He’ll come out of nowhere and say “I’m sorry,” and although it will be too little too late, it will make you feel a little better.
We’ve been talking a lot about being dumped by text. What about doing the dumping? Have you ever sent a breakup text to a guy? Or have you ever just stopped talking to someone in lieu of sending a breakup text? Leave your experiences in the comments below and you might see them featured in an upcoming installment of Textual Healing.
