Londoners Magazine

The ending of a relationship is rarely pretty. Show me someone who says: “We can still be friends” and I’ll show you someone who’s still hoping to get laid when they fancy it.

For the dumped, the end of a relationship is a churning mass of horror: what’s wrong with me? Is it my new Annie Lennox cut? Was it because I told the cuntstubble joke to his mum? Hysteria: I’m never, ever going to smile/have sex again. And, eventually hatred: ha! I’d like him to find someone else who’ll put up with him blow-drying his (thinning) hair.

Although it’s tough when you can’t sleep for crying and are convinced you’re a love pariah, the most important thing to retain is your dignity. And that means no revenge acts. No, not even the selling his records one. Nor the telling everyone he has a small cock one. And especially not the sleeping with his friend one.

I’ve been dumped in some insensitive ways: via email, by finding my boyfriend kissing someone else and the night before my mum had major surgery. I’ve hatched some elaborate and deeply satisfying revenge plots, but I’ve never carried them through. Why? Because if I did, I would just have felt worse about myself.

Sure, I could have recorded over the only master tape of e-dump boy’s band with Let’s Get Ready to Rumble, but when he joined the company I worked for two years later I was glad I hadn’t. Especially when he took me out to dinner to apologise for behaving like an arse years before.

I could have spread the word about kissing boy’s bedroom quirks to all and sundry but I chose to keep schtum. I saw him unexpectedly on Monday night and we gave each other a little hug of greeting. He’s working in a warehouse now. And he’s got fat. Really fat.

As for surgery man, my best revenge on him is the knowledge that he’ll never have a girlfriend as good as me again, ever. Also I externalised my feelings in a rational and adult way by writing a little song about him. It’s called I’ll Like You Better When You’re Dead.