Coping With Breakup: Breaking Up With Your Boyfriend

Breaking up with your boyfriend makes sense if he has become a brute, an alcoholic, a fanatic, a namby-pamby; unhygienic, quarrelsome, threatening, boring, an addict, a psychotic, possessive, HIV positive, a member of an underground rock band,a follower of Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh, a tyrant, a serial killer, a nutcase, a doodoo bag, a goofus. You have seen the signs, but how do you get out? How do you break up with your boyfriend?

Coping With Breakup: First Steps

Now before you start fantasizing about your ax-wielding ex blasting through your bedroom window, sing a few bars of Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover. Lighten up. Think back to your childhood. Think of how creative you were as a child, when the world was magical, and all things were possible. No less an authority than Ray Bradbury has said that this was a period in your life that supported your creativity. Moreover, one should never give up the images that fueled this creativity. Let me tell you the story.

Ray Bradbury often spoke at The Santa Barbara Writer's Conference. He always told a story about a childhood experience that shaped his life as a writer. He was fond of collecting comic books on Buck Rogers. Because he had a great collection of these magazines, many boys were envious of his collection and pressured Ray to give up his collection. The told him that he should destroy his collection. After all, they said, the A Bomb was going to destroy everything anyway. Under pressure from his peers, Bradbury burned all his comic books.

Coping With Breakup: Bradbury Style

Immediately, Ray Bradbury regretted his decision to destroy his comic books. He was depressed for a long time. He really believed that the Buck Rogers stories predicted the future of science and space travel. He began his collection again and this time he promised himself that he would never buckle under from peer pressure. Bradbury claimed that his comic books kept him in touch with the creative power within him. He maintained that all his works of science fiction sprang from this childhood experience.

In my case, my mother, a competent seamstress, made me costumes of Batman, Spider Man, Rocket Man, Captain Marvell. I invented games with my costumes. I would entice a friend of mine to dress up as the villain and after he was harassing the girls, I would swoop down on the miscreant and either chase him away or capture him. The girls shouted with glee.

You see, I learned something from each superhero. From Spider Man I learned to climb trees and abandoned barns. One barn collapsed under me and I rode it down, but my Spiderman identity took care of me. I leaped off before the barn disintegrated, hitting the ground. From Captain Marvell, I leaned discretion. I also learned to share my power with Billy Batson, my alternate identity.

Coping With Breakup: Use Your Childhood Passions

And now, whenever I get stuck in writing, or any kind of problem solving, I recall this childhood experiences and something opens for me. I see things in a new light.

I suggest, therefore, that you dress in your favorite costume, that you swoop down on your boyfriend and mesmerize him. Enable him to see that you both are young and that the world is filled with possibilities. Dance with him. And let him go. This is how you make it happen when you are breaking up with your boyfriend.