Bad Breakup

When you reach a certain age, it’s not so much a relationship as it is a limited liability professional corporation.

A friend of mine broke up with his girlfriend recently, although "girlfriend" isn't quite the right word. They are both organized and put-together young adults in their late thirties, with thriving careers, nice places to live, expensive gym memberships and Nespresso machines. 

In other words, they are well past the “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” stage of their lives. Those terms imply a kind of romantic youthfulness, two young people locking arms and facing the future together, jumping into the unknown with the kind of reckless optimism that only young love can sustain.

That kind of boyfriend-girlfriend stuff goes away when you’re old enough to have a house and a retirement plan and a certain amount of anxiety about using the office bathroom.

When you reach that age, it’s not so much a relationship as it is a limited liability professional corporation. And that, apparently, was a big part of the problem.

“In a lot of ways,” my friend explained when he told me about the breakup, “she was perfect. Smart, independent, fun to be around, a great conversationalist. But the condominium she owned was a real red flag.”

He explained that when they talked about moving in together, she refused to compromise. He told me that he had helpfully investigated comparable real estate values in her area, made some conservative projections, and over a romantic dinner had suggested that she sell her place and use a portion of the after-tax proceeds to buy a fifty-percent interest in a real estate trust he would create which would jointly own his current townhouse — which is larger, he says, and has a better financial upside — and that financial transaction would enable them to really be a committed, loving couple.

She wouldn’t do that, he told me, because under current market conditions she didn’t think she’d be able to recoup the money she’d put into the place — the kitchen was new, with a fancy range, and the master bathroom had a Japanese soaking tub — but he responded by saying that while this might be true, it had been a foolish move to invest that much money in a condo in a “marginal, not-quite-desirable” area, and it was unlikely she would ever get her money back anyway.

From what I gather, that conversation was the beginning of the end. (No surprise, right?)

To be fair, my friend and his ex are a lot less irritating than this anecdote suggests. My guess is, the breakup wasn’t really about property values or expensive remodels. What doomed this promising relationship was that both of them have been living alone too long. 

If you live alone, eventually you get weird. Maybe not bad weird, but taking a relationship to a more committed level means giving up a lot of ingrained habits and behaviors, and that’s a scary prospect for a lot of people. 

I have a friend who, when he’s finished drinking his morning coffee, takes the mug into the shower with him and washes it with a bit of the shampoo he uses on his hair. Hey, it’s hot water and soap, right? It’s a two-birds situation, right?  is what he says. But honestly, it’s insane behavior. 

Women tend to be more self-aware in my experience. I have a single female friend in her thirties who loves cats and television mystery shows from Britain, but she’s smart enough to know that these two tendencies, together, are problematic. “I may as well wear a sign that says Spinster,” she told me once. So she doesn’t own a cat and won’t subscribe to Britbox but she does collect her nearly-finished lunchtime salads in a large container in her refrigerator until there’s enough to put in the blender for what she calls a “smoothie” but what I call revolting.

Neither one of these people has a significant other in their lives, someone to look at them aghast when they do their weird stuff and say No! No! This is not normal! which is one of the chief reasons people get married and lock arms to face the future together. Love may be part of it, sure, but an even bigger part is to keep from going insane.

The post-breakup advice I gave my friend was to do whatever it took to win his ex-girlfriend back. Sell his townhouse, if he needs to. It’s a lot cheaper, in the long run, than being the weird old man in the neighborhood.