Foreword

When the girl (boy) you thought you’d spend your life with leaves you, know you can survive this. Pour the whiskey down the drain, keep your stovetop spotless, and delete her number from your phone. Move your best friend up to her speed dial spot and call just to say hi. Cultivate your friendships before your breakups so you are not alone. You are becoming more like yourself than you’ve ever been. Trust in your own deepest experience. Trust in your own evolutions.
Sinclair Sexsmith
  
   Sometimes breakups can be like a slow train coming, and there you are tied to the track.  Sometimes they’re quick and clean.  Sometimes they’re self-initiated and have the amazing feeling of liberation.  I’ve experienced several types of breakups but when the axe falls, I’m left feeling a bit like an amputee - like a limb (or at least a fingernail) is gone, and part of my mind still thinks it’s there. 
    I’m not sure why people come together.  This question puzzles me as I am attempting to survive a breakup after a twelve-year relationship.  I’ve been going around asking trusted friends and work mates, “Why do people get into relationships?” The answers range from “Because we’re desperate,” to “Because we really want to fall in love with ourselves,” to “Because we’re all just trying to avoid being lonely,” to the Platonic, “Because we’re searching for our other half  - someone to complete us.”  The latter answer just about makes me gag.  The answer that most baffles me is, “Because we both need something.”  I’ve never thought of love relationships as being solely needs-based - it seems so callous -  but I keep going back to that answer and wondering if it's the most plausible one.  Could it simply be that we each need something, and when the need is no longer there, the relationship stops “fitting?” As W.H. Auden said, “Almost all of our relationships begin, and most of them continue, as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.” Yikes! 
    Pop psychologists claim that we get into primary relationships to work out dramas from our childhood.  While it’s true that I notice some uncanny similarities between the dynamics of my parent’s relationship and that of my past relationship, if I venture into former relationships, I see no pattern. I don’t date the same type of man over and over, in fact I’ve had relationships with women and each relationship has been unique. The only common denominator is that I was in it.
    What I do know is that I have just survived the longest breakup in my personal history.  My ex and I lived together for nine months after he made the decision to leave – a perverse pregnancy of sorts. Like most pregnancies, in the last trimester I just wanted him out – out of my space, out of the house.
    We had been friends since we were fourteen.  We lost our virginity to each other.  We had two children together and he helped me raise my son from a previous marriage.  We had been together twelve years as well as one year in high school.  Maybe the long good-bye was necessary, but in the end we both needed to move on. 
    When my ex told me he was leaving, it had been a rough few months.  That March, my father died after refusing food - a conscious attempt to leave his aged body.  A few days before his death, I had turned forty - a non-event under the circumstances. Two months later, Ex-man said,”I’m leaving.”  The combo-platter of loss and grief was a bit overwhelming.  I did a reality check of my personal situation – I was forty, I had three kids to support, I paid the bills by waitressing, I was a student, and I had no home of my own.  My balance sheet did not look great.  So I did what any healthy neurotic person would do.  I adopted a coping mechanism:  365 marbles.