My wife has a first aid kit for numbing the sting of a friend's breakup: bottles of Riesling, jumbo packs of Skittles, and tabloid magazines. The tabloids serve a number of functions: they provide eye candy of single celebrity hunks, they show that even flawless stars have to deal with relationship problems, and their stories of unfaithful men provide fodder for a cathartic man-hating session.
We have an inherent need to hear about other people's problems as a way to make our own troubles seem less intimidating. This is why Robert Elder's website, ItWasOverWhen.com, went viral. Elder's started this website with the idea of users submitting their own brief stories about the exact moment they realized a relationship was doomed. The impetus to voice your own woes and read about others proved addictive. The site soon birthed a book: It Was Over When…: Tales of Romantic Dead Ends.
The relationship anecdotes, some short enough to be tweets, don't bother with unnecessary details: derogatory physical descriptions or the particulars of the inevitable breakup. All we get is a snapshot that summaries the entire relationship:
"My boyfriend said , 'I think clown makeup is really sexy… Seriously, babe, it's a major turn on.' He wasn't joking."
Some are laugh out loud funny: "He thought the
dinosaurs were a conspiracy."
Some seem too absurd to be true: "He told me that we couldn't move in together because he would feel guilty when he brought other girls home."
Some remind you of your brother: "He threw his legs over his shoulder and proudly lit a thunderous fart on fire."
Some are so tragic that you'll be glad that your ex wasn't that bad: "I was in the hospital miscarrying our child and he told me he would be there later."
The vast majority of entries are from women, just as I suspect the main audience for the website and book are female. Men are willing to overlook most any flaw if the woman is attractive enough. That and men are more willing to stay in a faulty relationship just because it's too much of a hassle to find a new one:
"My boyfriend of nine years told me he would never leave me because, 'As hard as this relationship is, it would be harder to start over with someone else.'"
While there are endless tales of what the other person did wrong, only a handful of submissions document the moment when the narrator made a relationship-ending mistake. These are mostly from the male perspective:
"Birds were chirping outside my window and she complained. I pulled out a pellet gun, and she flipped out. She said, 'For future reference it's always a bad idea to pull out a gun when you have a girl in your bed.'"
No one likes to admit that they did or said something stupid enough to end a relationship instantly, or maybe the type of person who has his apartment decorated with samurai swords doesn't realize how strange this may look to a date.
It's appropriate that Elder's introduces the book by explaining how his wife hates the concept. While skimming the various pages, you expect to come across a submission that reads:
"I found out that he was running a website dedicated to failed relationships."
To justify the fun of swapping dating disaster stories Elders also created a sister site, ItWasLoveWhen.com, which describes the moment users knew they were in love. But who wants to read about how much happier other people are than you?
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This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2011.