Melbourne's Spring 2007It goes without saying that there is no nice way to be dumped, but there are definitely some ways that causeless toe-curling anguish than others. A face to face conversation or a phone call if you’re dating a long-distance, seem to be the best way of a bad bunch. A hand-written letter would show some respect, but since eighties pop star and very unlikely heart-throb Phil Collins dumped his first wife by fax, standards of ending etiquette have been dropping dramatically. From Phil’s fax to the horror of email to Britney dumping K-Fed by sms.
Oh, how I wish my ex had had the old-fashioned decency to dump me by text message! You see, I George Junior. found out that I had been dumped via Facebook.
Honestly speaking, my love life has been kind of disaster especially after I finished my eleven years relationship with Scott. Since that, all my date turned out to be crap and started badly and it went downhill from there.
“I just don’t understand why you keep picking such awful men!” my good friend exclaimed in despair when I called him from a phone box in Bali at the bitter end of my brief William romance.
Back then I didn’t understand it either. It wasn’t as though I was always going for the same type. I dated actuaries, banker, Pilot, Accountant, Actor and lawyer. There were no obvious similarities in the worlds they inhabited or in the way they looked. But in the way things turned out? That was a different story. No matter how promisingly this started, after two months I was planning a “honeymoon” holiday and they were planning a speedy escape. Scratch any one of my princely ex-boyfriends and you would find an amphibian beneath.
So you probably won’t be surprised to hear that after the Bali incident, in which I blew four days holidays allowance and nearly a month’s wages on a flight to the mini-break that become a mini-break-up, my confidence suffered a bit of a knock.
“That’s it.” I said to my best friend, Dr. Peter. “I am giving up on men.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.” Dr. Peter said.
“Believe it, Peter. This time I am serious.”
The following day I went to Brendon’s fortieth birthday party at his flat.
It had to be fate. I had finally, after almost two years spent dating for Australian, announced I was giving up on my man hunt. At long last, I had decided to try taking the one piece of advice I always fond so hard to swallow: “Love will only come when you’re not looking for it.”
How many times has I heard that irritating maxim (usually from someone who had been every bit as desperate to pair up as me six months earlier)? And how many times had I protested that it simply wasn’t true? WELL, I had announced that I was no longer looking for love and just twenty-four-hours later I found myself in the kitchen at that fortieth birthday party, discussing the merits of the latest government budget with the most attractive man I had ever seen in my life!
OK, so I didn’t actually find him all that attractive at first..
Romantic that I was, I had always imagined that when love comes to me – when it was real, proper, true love – I would know the second I laid eyes on him. I had experienced so many thunderbolts that turned out to herald nothing but emotional drizzle that, surely, when real love walked into my life, the entire earth would shake with the magnitude of the moment. The heavens would open. Long-dead volcanoes would erupt. My personal choir of angels would stop filing their nails start singing the ‘Hallelujah” chorus with a guest solo from Elvis.
Oh, how I wish my ex had had the old-fashioned decency to dump me by text message! You see, I George Junior. found out that I had been dumped via Facebook.
Honestly speaking, my love life has been kind of disaster especially after I finished my eleven years relationship with Scott. Since that, all my date turned out to be crap and started badly and it went downhill from there.
“I just don’t understand why you keep picking such awful men!” my good friend exclaimed in despair when I called him from a phone box in Bali at the bitter end of my brief William romance.
Back then I didn’t understand it either. It wasn’t as though I was always going for the same type. I dated actuaries, banker, Pilot, Accountant, Actor and lawyer. There were no obvious similarities in the worlds they inhabited or in the way they looked. But in the way things turned out? That was a different story. No matter how promisingly this started, after two months I was planning a “honeymoon” holiday and they were planning a speedy escape. Scratch any one of my princely ex-boyfriends and you would find an amphibian beneath.
So you probably won’t be surprised to hear that after the Bali incident, in which I blew four days holidays allowance and nearly a month’s wages on a flight to the mini-break that become a mini-break-up, my confidence suffered a bit of a knock.
“That’s it.” I said to my best friend, Dr. Peter. “I am giving up on men.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.” Dr. Peter said.
“Believe it, Peter. This time I am serious.”
The following day I went to Brendon’s fortieth birthday party at his flat.
It had to be fate. I had finally, after almost two years spent dating for Australian, announced I was giving up on my man hunt. At long last, I had decided to try taking the one piece of advice I always fond so hard to swallow: “Love will only come when you’re not looking for it.”
How many times has I heard that irritating maxim (usually from someone who had been every bit as desperate to pair up as me six months earlier)? And how many times had I protested that it simply wasn’t true? WELL, I had announced that I was no longer looking for love and just twenty-four-hours later I found myself in the kitchen at that fortieth birthday party, discussing the merits of the latest government budget with the most attractive man I had ever seen in my life!
OK, so I didn’t actually find him all that attractive at first..
Romantic that I was, I had always imagined that when love comes to me – when it was real, proper, true love – I would know the second I laid eyes on him. I had experienced so many thunderbolts that turned out to herald nothing but emotional drizzle that, surely, when real love walked into my life, the entire earth would shake with the magnitude of the moment. The heavens would open. Long-dead volcanoes would erupt. My personal choir of angels would stop filing their nails start singing the ‘Hallelujah” chorus with a guest solo from Elvis.
But it wasn’t like that at all.
When Karl – Karl Walder, the man who would turn my world upside down –walked into the kitchen at that party at Brendan birthday party, he barely registered on my radar. I was busy looking for a clean glass among the jumble of plastic cups and dirty mugs on the draining board. To attract my attention, Karl swilled out the wine glass he had been drinking from and handed it to me.
“It’s safe.” He said. “I don’t have anything contagious.”
I thanked him for the glass and helped myself to some wine from the bottle I had brought with me. Thought it was only nine in the evening. Brendan’s birthday party was already shaping up to be the kind of affair where you couldn’t be certain that the yellowish liquid in the bottle on the counter really was chardonnay. Glass refilled,
I was planning to head back into the sitting room, where Brendan and his boyfriend, James, had bagged a sofa, but as I was about to sashay out of the kitchen, and out of trouble, Karl attempted to strike up a conversation.
“How do you know Brendan?” he asked. Not a very original opening gambit, but better than “I bet you look good with no clothes on.” which was how William disaster had started.
“Brendan and I were at uni together,” I explained
When Karl – Karl Walder, the man who would turn my world upside down –walked into the kitchen at that party at Brendan birthday party, he barely registered on my radar. I was busy looking for a clean glass among the jumble of plastic cups and dirty mugs on the draining board. To attract my attention, Karl swilled out the wine glass he had been drinking from and handed it to me.
“It’s safe.” He said. “I don’t have anything contagious.”
I thanked him for the glass and helped myself to some wine from the bottle I had brought with me. Thought it was only nine in the evening. Brendan’s birthday party was already shaping up to be the kind of affair where you couldn’t be certain that the yellowish liquid in the bottle on the counter really was chardonnay. Glass refilled,
I was planning to head back into the sitting room, where Brendan and his boyfriend, James, had bagged a sofa, but as I was about to sashay out of the kitchen, and out of trouble, Karl attempted to strike up a conversation.
“How do you know Brendan?” he asked. Not a very original opening gambit, but better than “I bet you look good with no clothes on.” which was how William disaster had started.
“Brendan and I were at uni together,” I explained
“Oh, that’s great. Melbourne Uni, wasn’t it.”
I nodded.
“We work at the same office,” Said Karl.
Before I could say, “I am afraid I am on a man-break.” I found I had given him my mobile number and said that I would be very happy to have dinner with him the following week. On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday if the other days didn’t work for him. When he joked that he would rearrange the following evening’s tennis practice just for me. I was smitten.
I was doomed.
So much for my man-break. And so much for playing by ‘the rules’, which was something else I had promised I would do if I ever found myself in the unlikely position of going on a date again. Having broken half a dozen commandments from the terribly useful book by acting pathetically keen to see Karl once more, I continued my amateur strategy. That’s right. You’ve guessed it. I went to bed with Karl right after our first date. At my flat of course.
Our physical connection was a revelation. And it pretty much sealed my fate. If you had told me that someone who had the watery eyes of a basset hound in a face like a mouldy potato would kiss like you imagine Brad Pitt once kissed Angelina, I would never have believed it possible. But it was wonderful. My whole body fizzed with excitement from the moment he laid his hand on mine and my new-found peace in celibacy was short-lived indeed. At the touch of Karl’s lips I crumbled like a chocaholic locked in a room containing nothing but a box of melting kitkats. I couldn’t take my hands off the man. I cough his nasty cold as a result.
Two weeks passed. Became a month and a month becomes three months. And I felt as though I was finally, truly living the dream.
Cut to: two weeks after we had short break in Fiji.
It was an ordinary Wednesday morning in the office. Back then I was working at the Alfred Hospital. It sounds more exciting than it was. I’d been with this hospital pretty much ever since I left Auckland City, back when I though what am I going to do with the rest of my life back in Melbourne.
In fact that morning I should have been working on research for my new finding and for my presentation the following Monday. As soon as I was sure no one in my office, I risked logging on to my networking account, facebook first and that was when it happened.
The first thing I notices was that Karl’s facebook status, which he hadn’t updated in months (how could he find time now) was showing something new. And somewhat cryptic. It said “Karl Walder is making some tough decisions.”
Tough decisions about what? I wondered. I went through the possibilities. He had mentioned a few weeks earlier that he had been head-hunted by another accountancy company. Was he thinking of leaving the firm he had been with for so many years to take another job? I thought he’d decided against it.
Or perhaps he was being facetious? When he said ‘tough decisions’, was he talking about the decisions he had to make regarding the new carpet he wanted for his flat?
The previous weekend he had got into quite a bad mood as he examined various different swatches in search of the elusive carpet that would fit in with the chic, pale ultimate-bachelor furnishing scheme he wanted and yet not show too much dirt.
I was just about to leave a massage on his wall saying “Go for the oatmeal berber from John Lewis.” When the live news feed on my profile page refreshed itself with some very strange and unwelcome news indeed.
It said : Karl Walder is no longer listed as “in a relationship”.
This devastating titbit was accompanied by a graphic of a tiny red heart in two pieces.
You can imagine my reaction. I spat coffee on my keyboard. Karl Walder is no longer in a relationship? What the hell did that mean? I quickly sent him a message via the site “What’s with the relationship update?” And then I sent him a text for good measure, “Just saw your facebook page. No longer in a relationship? Very funny. Ha ha ha ha.”
It had to be a slip of the mouse or, at worse, a very bad joke, but Karl responded to neither request for an explanation. I called his mobile. He didn’t pick up. I put that down to the fact that since he’d moved to an office on the other side of the building and the mobile reception was patchy there, but when I called his direct line, he didn’t pick that up either.
It began to down on me that Karl might be in serious. I ran through all the possible reasons why Karl might be in a bad mood with me. Was he still upset about the small disagreement we’d had a couple of nights before, when I’d asked him if he wanted to go halves on renting a country cottage with Brendan and James over the Christmas holidays and he said he hadn’t thoughts that far ahead?
Or maybe he was angry because I’d questioned why he was spending so much time at the gym when I loved him just the way he was: slightly soft around the edges. In retrospect, I could see it was a mistake to have used those words.
All those little things suddenly seemed like perfectly good reasons to start a passive-aggressive fight by changing your relationship stratus on stupid facebook, but things were about to get worse.
The ultimate humiliation was right upon me. When I logged back into facebook, to sent Karl a message asking if he could elaborate on what I might have done wrong. I discovered that Karl’s profile was no longer on my friends list. I had been defriended.
I had been dumped through facebook.
I nodded.
“We work at the same office,” Said Karl.
Before I could say, “I am afraid I am on a man-break.” I found I had given him my mobile number and said that I would be very happy to have dinner with him the following week. On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday if the other days didn’t work for him. When he joked that he would rearrange the following evening’s tennis practice just for me. I was smitten.
I was doomed.
So much for my man-break. And so much for playing by ‘the rules’, which was something else I had promised I would do if I ever found myself in the unlikely position of going on a date again. Having broken half a dozen commandments from the terribly useful book by acting pathetically keen to see Karl once more, I continued my amateur strategy. That’s right. You’ve guessed it. I went to bed with Karl right after our first date. At my flat of course.
Our physical connection was a revelation. And it pretty much sealed my fate. If you had told me that someone who had the watery eyes of a basset hound in a face like a mouldy potato would kiss like you imagine Brad Pitt once kissed Angelina, I would never have believed it possible. But it was wonderful. My whole body fizzed with excitement from the moment he laid his hand on mine and my new-found peace in celibacy was short-lived indeed. At the touch of Karl’s lips I crumbled like a chocaholic locked in a room containing nothing but a box of melting kitkats. I couldn’t take my hands off the man. I cough his nasty cold as a result.
Two weeks passed. Became a month and a month becomes three months. And I felt as though I was finally, truly living the dream.
Cut to: two weeks after we had short break in Fiji.
It was an ordinary Wednesday morning in the office. Back then I was working at the Alfred Hospital. It sounds more exciting than it was. I’d been with this hospital pretty much ever since I left Auckland City, back when I though what am I going to do with the rest of my life back in Melbourne.
In fact that morning I should have been working on research for my new finding and for my presentation the following Monday. As soon as I was sure no one in my office, I risked logging on to my networking account, facebook first and that was when it happened.
The first thing I notices was that Karl’s facebook status, which he hadn’t updated in months (how could he find time now) was showing something new. And somewhat cryptic. It said “Karl Walder is making some tough decisions.”
Tough decisions about what? I wondered. I went through the possibilities. He had mentioned a few weeks earlier that he had been head-hunted by another accountancy company. Was he thinking of leaving the firm he had been with for so many years to take another job? I thought he’d decided against it.
Or perhaps he was being facetious? When he said ‘tough decisions’, was he talking about the decisions he had to make regarding the new carpet he wanted for his flat?
The previous weekend he had got into quite a bad mood as he examined various different swatches in search of the elusive carpet that would fit in with the chic, pale ultimate-bachelor furnishing scheme he wanted and yet not show too much dirt.
I was just about to leave a massage on his wall saying “Go for the oatmeal berber from John Lewis.” When the live news feed on my profile page refreshed itself with some very strange and unwelcome news indeed.
It said : Karl Walder is no longer listed as “in a relationship”.
This devastating titbit was accompanied by a graphic of a tiny red heart in two pieces.
You can imagine my reaction. I spat coffee on my keyboard. Karl Walder is no longer in a relationship? What the hell did that mean? I quickly sent him a message via the site “What’s with the relationship update?” And then I sent him a text for good measure, “Just saw your facebook page. No longer in a relationship? Very funny. Ha ha ha ha.”
It had to be a slip of the mouse or, at worse, a very bad joke, but Karl responded to neither request for an explanation. I called his mobile. He didn’t pick up. I put that down to the fact that since he’d moved to an office on the other side of the building and the mobile reception was patchy there, but when I called his direct line, he didn’t pick that up either.
It began to down on me that Karl might be in serious. I ran through all the possible reasons why Karl might be in a bad mood with me. Was he still upset about the small disagreement we’d had a couple of nights before, when I’d asked him if he wanted to go halves on renting a country cottage with Brendan and James over the Christmas holidays and he said he hadn’t thoughts that far ahead?
Or maybe he was angry because I’d questioned why he was spending so much time at the gym when I loved him just the way he was: slightly soft around the edges. In retrospect, I could see it was a mistake to have used those words.
All those little things suddenly seemed like perfectly good reasons to start a passive-aggressive fight by changing your relationship stratus on stupid facebook, but things were about to get worse.
The ultimate humiliation was right upon me. When I logged back into facebook, to sent Karl a message asking if he could elaborate on what I might have done wrong. I discovered that Karl’s profile was no longer on my friends list. I had been defriended.
I had been dumped through facebook.
Till, then, did anyone had the same experience being dumped via facebook, and could you please share it with me! Tell me how you deal with it!!!!
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