Author: Lizeth Castillo
“We need to talk.” How funny is it that four little words have the power to make your heart stop beating, your stomach turn upside down and your face lose all its color? For some-if not most-the remnants of breakups linger in our thoughts and haunt present and future relationships for months-even years-after they’ve happened. This leads me to ask, do we ever fully recover from breakups?
The general answer is that it really depends on the kind of breakup, and the kind of relationship. For those who date within Oxy, there’s always an extra attempt to make the breakup as pleasant as possible, mainly because you know you’ll run into your ex everywhere. In order to avoid awkwardness, we avoid bluntness, when in reality it’s the lack of honesty that creates problems in the long run. You tiptoe around the real reason that you no longer want this person breathing the same air as you and instead go with the ever-famous “It’s not you, it’s me” lecture-roughly translated into “I no longer want to see your face. Don’t call. Don’t text. Goodbye.” The person who receives this sucky speech is left with unresolved issues about why the relationship didn’t work. As a result, the friendship between the ex-couple is jaded.
That’s not to say that every post-breakup conversation should be about how much it bugged you when he or she clipped his or her toenails in bed. Generalities about why you decided to break up are most always the best way to go. The person gets closure and begins to try and see you as a friend for the second time. In my experience, couples that abruptly break up without discussing why and then jump right into being best friends again are the ex-couples who fight about personal issues at the dinner table. Although it is entertaining when the nasty comments about being bad in bed come out, this can be a tad bit awkward for the other diners.
The worst-case scenario of any breakup is that you can’t be friends at all and you spend the next couple of weeks denying embarrassing rumors. However, if all goes well, you can slowly attempt to rebuild the friendship that was present before any romantic endeavors. For many of the people I know, this is the case-and behind that friendly post-breakup attitude is the fact their breakup was more of a mutual decision as opposed to a bitter free-for-all brawl.
A close friend of mine who broke up with her boyfriend a while ago found that it’s better not only to talk through a sentimental breakup, but also to keep any post-breakup romantic advances under wraps. Although it’s true that only you can know when you’re ready to start dating again, that doesn’t mean your ex has to hear about it through a “friend of a friend of a friend” at the Cooler. He or she might not be ready to start dating again, and the prospect that you are will only make being friends that much harder. In these cases, discretion is advised.
The size of Oxy only adds to the complication of breakups, but with a little maturity and honesty, breakups can be clean and relatively painless.
Lizeth Castillo is a sophomore ECLS major. She can be reached at castillol@oxy.edu.
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