Don't Be the Worst: How to Be a Good Ex-Boyfriend

So you broke up. Big deal. Stop whining about it in public. And follow these simple rules for handling your ex

BY JULIEANNE SMOLINSKI GQ Mag

Not long ago, while I was traveling on business, I decided to take the opportunity to have one of Those Dinners with an ex-boyfriend who lived in town.

At this point, he had politely and maddeningly declined to speak to me for almost twice as long as we'd dated. But, as I'm one of those people who takes pride in being a Great Ex, this was the creepy hand-shaped birthmark on the otherwise unblemished cheek of my dating history. Also, because men find it super-attractive, I like to live everyday like I'm in a different straight-to-DVD romantic comedy. Remarkably, my ex agreed to my High 

Fidelity 2: The Kingdom of the Crystal Solipsism, and we met up.

Everything was going reasonably well. We were in a dark bar where The Shining was somewhat portentously projected on the wall, slurping martinis with two hands like cereal milk. Until round three or four, when he looked at me and said, "So, Fat Lincoln, huh?”  Busted.

Before I explain, I should point out that I was:
a) very hurt that this guy was silent treatment-ing me in the six intervening years since our breakup
b) writing about relationships for a living 
c) an immature and cringe-inducingly awful human being.

"Fat Lincoln" was part of an elaborate running joke in my writing, in which I made up new, horrible nicknames for the Ex Boyfriend Who Hurt My Feelings, and how he'd gained a few pounds and grown a scary beard. Basically I was like Sawyer from Lost if he wasn't a charming Southern con man, but more like a horrible ogre nightmare biotch.

If I ever thought for once that my ex-boyfriend was reading my work, I would never have referred to him as 

"Fat Lincoln," "ZZ Torpid," "Dom de la Williamsburg," "Andre the Giant Asshole," or "Hipster Orson Welles."

The point is: I'd behaved badly, and I didn't deserve Fat Lincoln's post-relationship friendship, which is something that takes a lot of work.And, while I spent years calling him names and resenting him for not wanting to be my best friend (What is wrong with me?), he got really into yoga, landed his dream job, and started sleeping with attractive, lunatic actresses. The yolk is on me, so to speak.

A bad breakup can turn even the most Jimmy Stewart-ian of us into bitter, slobbering monster people, but the world keeps getting flatter, and it's harder than ever not to tell everybody JUST HOW YOU FEEL with a late night status update of a Liz Phair YouTube video that perfectly sums up your feelings about that stupid whore, Leslie. 

COME BACK LESLIE!

In the old days, you had to settle for word of mouth. Or, you know, recording a cassette answering machine greeting that casually references how crazy hard your abs have gotten. Now, you can post that "Art of Losing” poem on your Tumblr with one hand, upload a Facebook photo of you and your sexy new haircut with the other, and make a ukulele cover of "Falling Down" with the other. (In this scenario you are ambidextrous and usingtabbed browsing and are a starfish.)

And I think you gents may have it worse than we do when it comes to expectations post-breakup behavior. It's a gender parity issue and I'm not encouraging it, but it's one of the few instances in which being the "hysterical” sex works in our favor.

We're encouraged to get a little crazy—to vent to our friends over shots, watch dumb British ensemble films, and mainline lo mein. We goad each other into moping—the phrase "mourning period" gets thrown around a lot—and having a good cry. I'm guilty of finding the sight of a sad guy a little physically repulsive.

If I walked in on my friend Andy clutching a forty and silently mouthing along to Beach House, I'd knock his laptop off the table and shout, "Ugh! Go camping!" If I were sitting at my favorite brunch spot (Hooters) and Iheard some girl telling a table full of her friends about how she just dumped a guy because his balls looked like "weird golden raisins," I'd think to my self, Oh no! Not raisin balls! Been there, girlfriend. And then I'd send over a round of scones.

But if I overheard a guy telling a table full of men, "The crazy bitch tried to feed my baby a heroin balloon and take him to Colombia," I'd get right out of my booth like, "The crazy WHAT tried to steal your baby and feed it heroin?”

 Then I'd take a huge snort of an HGH-spritzed handkerchief and demand that he address the goddess within his ex-girlfriend, and the goddess within all of us. SXNNNERRXXXXXXTTTT!

It's not fair, it's not egalitarian, and it's not very sisterly of me to admit. I guess keep paying me 89 cents to your dollar and take away my traveling pants.

The truth is, I think that men and women should try to modify the way we act in the days, weeks, and years following our breakups. True, there are some exes you shouldn't stay friends with: your sundry sociopaths, abusers or, yes, that one ex of yours who eats 

Klonopin like he's Brad Pitt in a Brad Pitt movie where Brad Pitt says to the director, "Hey, what if in this movie, my character has a thing where he's always eating Klonopin?"

Remember that initially you dated that person because you really liked them. Even if she ended up breaking yourheart, you liked her enough to ruin whatever potential friendship you could have had if you didn't mash your genitals together. I realized, while hanging out with Yoga Lincoln, that I have been part of the scorched earth policy of exes.

Sure, it took six years for me to stop being a monster asshole, but that's because the Z factor in these instances is time. Being angry forever is unhealthy, and the trick is waiting until all the crap dust has settled from the swirly manure cloud of breakup angst.

It's possible that it can take you any number of years to get over being sad or super-pissed, but let those be years in

which you get out your feelings in the privacy of your own home. As therapeutic as it feels to bad-mouth somebody who hurt you, it's ultimately the most unproductive of feelings.

Do what you need to. Cry. Scream. Break a vase. And look, maybe you'll never be friends with your ex, because it takes two people to call a truce. You can only control what you do, but if you choose to be the one who's not a dick, you'll feel much better about it. 

There's a Buddhist saying about how holding on to hot coals only burns your hand, and I firmly believe that people who think, I could write an epithet-filled email or I could frisbee golf this out rarelydie of one of those anger tumors.

I'm not saying you have to be friends. I'm just saying chill out and be open to the possibility that maybe in six years, you'll both be in a different place. A better, more mature one, where you also maybe get to have emotion-neutral sex.   Namaste.