Of Boats and Breakups

When it comes to breaking up/being left behind by someone you love, the initial reaction is to think that it sucks because it hurts. I, however, have come to the conclusion that, in the long run, that is not the fact. In truth, it sucks because you've failed, and that brings along all the baggage of failure.

Let's look at it from the perspective of several years ago. You broke up with someone, it sucked, you hurt, you moved on. Today, you can't honestly say it hurts (if it does, you need to get her back whatever the cost; she's the one! (ladies, I can't even imagine you having these kinds of feelings; boys aren't that special)). Today, you can't say that you feel the same way you feel when it first happened. So is it even a bad thing to break up? After all, you learn something each time it happens. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? Well, yes. Are breakups a good thing? Well, no.

The problem with breakups, like any other failure, is not the pain, misery, dejection, remorse, what-have-you of failure, but the fact that you have to reset the experiment. You need to find someone else and start all over! What's worse, is the more promising a social experiment like dating (the hypothesis being that she is the girl for you) the more resources are poured into the experiment. Now, I'm not talking money here, so all you raging feminists can put a sock in it right god damn now. I'm talking about less tangible resources. Time (we've only got so long on this planet), ideas (perhaps this is a personal thing, but once you use a good idea on a girl that idea is spent forever), songs (like ideas, one per customer. "Everything I Do" was such a good one...), love (though a renewable resource, a resource that shouldn't be wasted nonetheless), and, one of the more obscure and less thought of resources, brownie points.

Yes, brownie points. I have a collective 6, if not more, years of generating brownie points and I've traded them in for nothing! I'm always saving up for that boat! So after a breakup, where do those brownie points go? They're lost forever! They're non-transferable! Your ex isn't going to tell your current girlfriend that you're awesome because you're not dating anymore! It carries no value! Shit, if I got to keep all my brownie points, I could have had a turtle by now!

And before you say that I could buy a turtle now because I'm single and I can do what I want, that's not the point! The point is that it's part of the continued experiment. When the effects of Alex on Girl are very well known and things become stable, you have to use brownie points to introduce something new (because the effects of introducing something that she wants are negligible. She gets something new. She's happy about it for a bit). If I was in the same relationship, I could be testing Alex+Turtle on Girl. Can you imagine the ramifications of that equalling win?

Seriously, God's gotta throw me another bone (no pun intended) or I'm going to end up an arsonist.