I’m a 28-year-old professional, and my relationship of five years recently ended. The breakup was friendly, mature, heart breaking and complicated. His family was my family. We had shared assets to divvy up, an apartment to set a timeline on moving out of, and long-formed habits to break like talking to each other every day, turning to each other for comfort and telling each other everything—no easy feat when you’re both in pain and there’s a lot you’d like to tell your best friend. No, there weren’t any lawyers involved (thank god and no offense), but what I went through (what I’m still going through about a month later) is, in a lot of ways, more akin to a divorce than the more casual sounding, just-get-over-it-already, can-we-talk-about-something-else-now, please-don’t-cry-at-the-bar term “breakup.”
So really, you’d think that people could just be nice. And supportive. Or at the very least not assholes. Apparently, they cannot. Herein, the most f*cked up things people said to me during my breakup [so far], and what they could’ve said instead….