Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were a dynamic singing/peace-loving duo
I once made the mistake of exchanging CDs with a guy I was seeing. I loaned him Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” and he loaned me “Highway 61 Revisited.” It took some convincing, but eventually he saw the light — Highway 61 may have its historic significance, but Blonde on Blonde boasted the catchier tracks.
Before I knew it, we were serenading each other with “I Want You” and stomping along to “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” as we cooked dinner in his kitchen. While we saw each other, we shared many things, including a mutual distaste for the Red Sox and a mutual preference for elaborate home-cooking, but nothing was more “ours” than Bob Dylan.
At the time, it was great. Every time I’d start to belt out “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” I’d think of us and smile.
When a relationship ends, there’s always the post-traumatic exchange of goods. Things loaned and borrowed, things left behind at apartments or in cars — all things that have to be returned in an awkward and loaded hand-off. But let’s face it, ridding yourself of his Michigan sweatshirt and reclaiming your “Blonde on Blonde” from his CD rack is relatively easy. I’d even go so far as to call the act empowering. The problem is ridding yourself of the intangibles.
Back at home, I held my Dylan CD in my hand and looked at it with distaste. I knew I wouldn’t be able to listen to it anytime soon without flashbacks to our sing-alongs and cook-ins. Appropriately, I recalled a song Joan Baez wrote about her relationship with Bob Dylan in which she sings: “We both know what memories can bring/ They bring diamonds and rust.” I was having a hard time finding any diamonds amongst the items I’d reclaimed from his place and the memories that lingered from our months together. Worse of all, Bob Dylan was covered in rust for me and I was annoyed at my ex for stealing both my heart and my favorite musician.
A broken heart mends in time, but a broken CD… well, the only place for that is the trash.
Poor Sandra Bullock. Apparently, she received an apologetic letter from one of Jesse James’ mistresses via fax.
I didn’t know people had personal fax machines any more. Hadn’t the scanner and the PDF replaced them? Clearly, an “I’m Sorry” Hallmark card is passe. Perhaps, a fax retains more sincerity than an email or a facebook message.
The tabloid sites say that James met this Other Woman via MySpace. Remember those days when husbands used to meet stripper mistresses at strip clubs?
I know I’m not the first blogger to bring up the subject, but it’s amazing how technology has changed the way we meet people, date people, and break-up with people. We know we’re in an age of hyper communication. Thanks to our smartphones, we’re never out of touch. Gone are the days of landlines and dial-up modems only (yes, I’m old enough to remember late nights before wikipedia and craigslist). And gone are the days when our only means of meeting prospective significant others involved leaving our cozy apartments.
Let’s think about this…
If we want to find a date/one night stand/long term relationship we can log onto okcupid, match.com, eharmony, craigslist or myspace. We can find those “missed connections” from the subway platform or establish a flirtation through dating site aliases. Maybe we can coordinate a single’s night through a facebook group.
Then we meet someone and exchange email addresses, pins, skype names, or screenames. We go home and become friends on facebook and start following feeds on twitter or blogs on wordpress. We keep in touch/track movements through text messaging, bbming, gchat, AIM, and phone calls. Eventually, we announce that we’re “in a relationship” to the world through an avalanche of statuses.
And then we break up…
The breakup itself can happen through all the above forms of messaging. Apparently, the fax and the post-it note are also modern forms of communicating the end of the affair. In-person is always preferable, but thanks to technology, if that’s not convenient for you, a face-to-face termination can be initiated by video chat. In-person breakups are mandated only by rules of tact.
Then there’s the change of “relationship” status on the social networks followed by the defriend maneuver. Then we have to block his email address and delete him from our contact list.
There are so many things to keep track of… it starts to get a little overwhelming.
Especially for folks like me who, on top of her all the aforementioned “buddy lists,”still insist on keeping an actual hardcopy address book. A left-click on delete is, in the end, far less messy than whiteout.
Last night, my dearest male friend phoned me for a long overdue catchup. Once we moved through the requisite “the way we live now” summaries, the conversation turned to diamonds. Yes, those kinds of diamonds. Earlier in the week, one of his coworkers had “popped the question” and suddenly found himself a fiance to a fiancee. His coworker’s news set off an alarm — now firmly settled in Los Angeles, with his own longtime squeeze readying herself to join him and armed with a bonus to be put towards a mortgage on their first home, my Main Mellow Man’s own engagement had become eminent. Understandably, the boy had bling on the brain.
His phone call and the excessive number of bridal magazines accosting me at the Whole Food checkout counter this morning were glaring reminders that February is a month for declarations of love and promises of everlasting devotion.
those out of the blue ex emails are just another stab to the heart
Only a few days earlier, another dear friend called with some relationship news of her own. She had received an email from her ex-boyfriend. They hadn’t spoken since he had abruptly and badly broken up with her. It wasn’t a post-it note break up, but in many ways it was far worse. 5 months had passed and she was finally settling into the freedom of her new singleton status. The attempt to reestablish contact stormed her inbox without warning. It was a “mustard gas” email and she was ill-equipped for the attack.
The email sought absolution for his sins — he felt guilty for being so selfish. The email was apologetic — he was sorry, so sorry, for ending their 5-year romance without having voiced his concerns about their “problems.” The email sought her sympathy — the silence eradicated their entire relationship, and he didn’t want to do that, after all, some of those years had been good years. The email, with its saccharin sting, was the meanest thing he could have possibly done.
When she showed me the email, in an understandable fit of panic, I had this awful sense of deja vu. The story was all too familiar: terrible break-ups initiated by the guy. Several months of silence — usually demanded by the “injured” female. Then the email from the ex-boyfriend attempting to reestablish contact. The language is the same — from the apology to the request for some sort of response, even if negative. I’d seen it all before — in my own inbox and in the inboxes of too many of my girlfriends. Don’t these guys understand that no apology is going to let them off the hook? They don’t get to stop being the bad guy in the story of “us.” They gave up their right to absolution when they told us they didn’t love us anymore.
When a relationship ends, the power dynamic changes. In theory, while a couple is together there is no dominate “leader” — both parties exercise equal responsibilities. Of course, we know this isn’t true. There’s usually one person who makes more demands on the relationship than the other; one person who needs to have his/her way, who needs more support, etc. And more often than naught, it’s this lack of symbiosis that is the root cause of a breakup. So half of couple decides they want out. At the moment of the breakup, the initiator of the end is fully in control — after all, they got to close the book on the preceding months or years. Once things are over, however, the one left with the broken heart takes the reins. The person who ended the relationship has to respect that they no longer have a say the course of the relationship.
“As the initiator of my breakup, I certainly feel like that position comes with certain responsibilities,” a trusted, and shall I say enlightened, male friend told me. “Mainly, these are straightforward– following the principle of, if you’re gonna break someone’s heart, don’t do things to make your ex’s life even worse…There are things that only my ex really knows about me, or understands, but that doesn’t mean it’s ok for me to call and lean on her, no matter what kind of a spot I’m in… ‘please talk to me, I think about you all the time’ just isn’t allowed.”
When a relationship ends, there’s always the post-traumatic exchange of goods. Things loaned and borrowed, things left behind at apartments or in cars — all things that have to be returned in an awkward and loaded hand-off. But let’s face it, ridding yourself of his Michigan sweatshirt and reclaiming your “Blonde on Blonde” from his CD rack is relatively easy. I’d even go so far as to call the act empowering. The problem is ridding yourself of the intangibles.
They Told Me to Find a Rich Husband 
