[betenoire]

I have dumped lots of people.

I've dumped the woman who would get drunk and almost get hit by a car / puke all over the place / pass out in public / wander off and worry me every time we hung out.
I've dumped the woman who would pretend to be a confidante and then the second my back was turned tell everybody who would listen her own exaggerated version of how I was feeling and why.
I've dumped the woman who only liked me when I was talking about how cool she was, but who would turn into a crazed 7 headed monster at the lightest criticism.
I've dumped the man who would call nightly to whine about his life - and never once asked me how my day was.
I've dumped the woman who was so obsessed with her own weight that she became obsessed with everybody else's bodies as well and would lecture me about every thing I ate.

When I was 20-ish and I broke up with Jesus (raised religious, changed my mind) I ended up having to break up with nearly every one of my friends, because they were SO intent on winning my soul back that it became the only thing we could ever talk about. I decided if the most important thing about me was whether or not I was going to get into heaven that those weren't friendships that I needed, either.

Hell, I've even had a recent mutual-dumping. (Wherein the person did something shitty to me and when I found out about it they didn't like my reaction - so we simply stopped talking.)

After ever person I've dumped I absolutely have gone through a stage of sorrow/mourning. But that passes. And the temporary feeling of loss was exactly that - temporary. All of the exasperation, anxiety, and hurt feelings I experienced every time I interacted with these people would have been permanent if I hadn't turned them loose. So sure, in the short-term it sucks - but in the long term it's just aces.

I was once dumped by the man I considered my best friend. There was this complicated (and bad idea situation) where we were dating another set of bestfriends. The girl he was dating (who was also the bestie of the boy I was dating) and I didn't get along. She used to say things like "oh that is such a pretty dress! I would want to borrow it but it would be way too big for me!" (Nevermind that she was wearing a 14 at the time and I was wearing a 16 - so WAY TOO BIG FOR ME my ass). She would just in general make tiny sideways jabs at me all day long and it got to the point where I was so paranoid and so perpetually insulted that I would bend over backward and behave like a kicked puppy trying to get her to like me.

One day that became too much and I snapped. I wrote a long and very public tirade on Livejournal (of all places) about what assholes the three of them were and how I was going to break up with my boyfriend immediately and I would also avoid my friend until he and that girl he was dating broke up. I created a "filter" on LJ so that I could post that without the three of them seeing it - then forgot to post the entry with the filter attached. So they all saw it. Me and the boy (who I was crazy about, but I was also only 25 and back then it was easy for me to become crazy about people) broke up - which was for the best.

My friend also never spoke to me again. Even though he and that girl broke up a month later, we never made amends. I deserved that. It was crappy of me to gossip about him on LJ. It was crappy of me to never once try to talk to him about what was going on, instead opting to just hold onto it until I blew up all over the internets. And chances are I had been acting like a nutbag for months before that happened, because I was so tense and worked up over the situation. I probably wasn't all that great to be around at that juncture either.