How To Be Dumped: Part One: Grossness

I'm not sure if it was the monster moon this past weekend,or the upcoming holidays, but a number of my friends have recently found themselves single again. And while I believe I clearly demonstrate on this blog that I am terrible when it comes to relationships, my friends are still coming to me for advice.


Maybe they don’t read the blog.

The last time I was dumped, I offered a very simplified road map to how I get over a guy. My plan – like another plan that you may have heard of – has five stages/steps: Grossness, Cleansing, Celebrating, Recovering, and then, finally, Moving on. Though, I only really talk about the first four in my old post.

The first stage, in my opinion, is the most important. The gross stage.

This means different things for different people, but basically is boils down to this is the time you get to be a self-indulgent brat. If you want to drink and smoke while wrapped in an afghan your nana knit you watching marathons of “Say Yes to the Dress,” do it. If you want to eat your way through the entire Ben and Jerry’s catalog, I'll get you a spoon and elastic waistband pants. If you need to go out and purchase one of everything in your size, I will only warn you to keep the tags on as there is a good chance you will want to return some of it at a point in the near future. If you want to do all of the above while crying and screaming “what is wrong with me?” I’m not gonna say no.

Why? Because you are hurt. Being dumped sucks and you have all sorts of questions and doubts and you can’t text or call (or rather you shouldn’t text or call) your ex and demand answers, and you can only hear from your friends so many times that he’s an idiot. So you need to self-soothe. You have all these emotions and feelings and you need to get them out. So why not get the majority of them out all at once. No, you won’t get rid of them all, but a couple of days not showering, eating nothing but chocolate covered carbs, and watching Lifetime television for women (or Spike TV is Jason Statham running around killing people is more your speed) should deplete you of most of your self-loathing.

Think of it this way – remember that episode of Who’s the Boss (or was it Roseann? Growing Pains? Some sitcom I watched growing up) where Sam was caught with cigarettes and Tony Danza made her smoke the whole pack and she got sick and never smoked again. That is what this period is – doing something that is really bad for you until you make yourself sick – when you look in the mirror and see a bloated, gray, oily version of yourself staring back.

It will be like the kick in Inception. It will snap you right back to reality. Then, after possibly throwing up, you will ask yourself what the hell you are doing. You will scream at yourself for letting it get this bad and then remind yourself no guy is worth this, you are better than this, and it is his loss – you know, all the stuff you already knew but needed to go a very dark place to remember.

Then you take the longest, hottest shower of your life, maybe pop out for a pedicure and prepare yourself for stage two – Cleansing.

The second most important thing to remember about this phase is that is just a phase: give yourself a time limit in the bell jar. You don’t want to get stuck here. For many reasons, the most obvious being your friends will only indulge you for so long.

The first most important thing to remember about this phase is that now is not the time to do anything permanent. Save any tattoos, surgeries, or resignation letters for stages four and five.