Happy New Year! You've Been Dumped!


When the ball dropped in Times Square at the stroke of midnight, so did the axe on love relationships around the world.

Though two years ago an ex girlfriend chose December 7th (Pearl Harbor Day) to "drop the bomb" on me (more appropriately I suppose,) New Year's Eve remains the leader of National Get Dumped Day around the world. It's obvious why. People want to start the New Year fresh and unencumbered. My best friend is making it a bit of a tradition dumping a boyfriend on the last two New Year's Eve.

Not surprisingly, the first post I saw as I signed onto Facebook while drinking my morning coffee was a friend in Asia who just went from "in a relationship" to "single." And by the time I finished the sip another from France messaged me the same on chat. She couldn't decide between the two men in her life so instead dumped them both.

Ironically rather than sadness, I feel envious. Almost to the point where I feel like proposing to the cute waitress at lunch today just so I can break it off by evening's end due to us growing apart. Instead I decided to prune my phone contacts, deleting those failed or never were relationships who would at best be potential New Year's Eve partners to be dumped or who'd make me the dumpee (if that's a word?)

Break ups are always sad, but often quite necessary. Though I think it's unfortunate that it takes a change in the calendar year while dressed in formal wear to get or give the bad news, I do think that few relationships that ended on New Year's will be regretted.

I'm writing this on the morning of New Year's Eve and can only imagine how many other Facebook relationship statuses will change by week's end. In fairness, I should the second post on my wall was from another friend who got engaged. It's been the fodder of discourse for many commitment phobic relationships over the years. Want to know if they really love you? Post that you're in a relationship with them and watch the fireworks light up the sky more than it will over your city when the clock strikes twelve. In fact, Facebook should aggregate all of its relationship status changes for the day and call it the Love Index — just credit me when you do, Mark.

Article first published as Happy New Year!...Now Get Out. on Technorati.

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