How To Be My Ex-Boyfriend

Be a lovable asshole. Have your insensitivity be mostly brought on by your profound inability to lie about anything. Tell me the truth when a dress makes my body look kind of lumpy. Don’t be afraid to reject me when you’re too tired. Don’t hesitate to tell me to take a shower. Say all of these things with a certain level of obliviousness that makes it difficult for me to actually get mad at you. There’s no venom in your voice. It’s treated with a casual matter-of-factness. You’re just tElLiNg iT lIkE iT Is! I never wished I could date a liar until I met you.

Be 30% cuter than me. Have the inequity in our attractiveness hover over us like a cloud of doom, bringing all of my insecurities to the surface. Get hit on by beautiful women wherever we go and have it made clear that I’m not seen as a threat. The audacity of these women—to treat me like I’m totally invisible! I never felt ugly until I was with someone so beautiful. I never thought of the different values of attractiveness until I was with a permanent comparison. Despite seeing other women flirt with you though, you never made me feel anything less than beautiful. This makes it hard to get angry and punish you for simply being a babe who’s universally desirable.

Be the one who loves less. It’s clear from the beginning that this will be the dynamic of our relationship; these are the roles we’re destined to play. It will always be me trying to extract things from you that you’re ultimately incapable of giving me. You resist and then occasionally give in which will foster hope for a period of time but eventually we’ll be right back where we started. It’s unclear as to why you can’t love me. Even after all this time, I’m left with a lot of unanswered questions. It’s not like you’re a cold person. As much as I want to, I can’t paint you as a villain. That would make everything so much easier and offer me a solid explanation as to why things didn’t work out, but the reality is that you aren’t a cold man. There are frosty bits to your personality but as a whole you exude warmth. Warmth that wasn’t enough to keep me warm.

Be a coward. Fail to break up with me. Instead, push me away so badly that you’ve given me no choice but to do it myself. Rude. If you fall out of love with me, you can at least have the decency to be the one to break it off. Do you know how hard it is to break up with someone you still love because you’ve been backed into a corner? You made me clean up your mess and I still resent you for it.

Be someone who’s hard to let go of. For the brief moments we’ve interacted after the break up, I’ve felt myself being brought back to life and it’s pathetic. I didn’t cry for a year but when I ran into you on the street, it was the first thing I did. I went home and sobbed in bed like a sad cliche. For a second, I thought all my insides were dead, but you proved that they’re still working. They still work but only for someone like you—which means that they’re positively useless.

Try to erase me. Unfollow me on Twitter, hide my feed on Facebook. Try to forget I ever existed. I wish it was that easy for me but I guess some people are just easier to erase than others.