Helping the Heartbroken and Asking for Things
by A Lady
It seems lately I’ve had a rash of friends getting divorced or separated or broken up with after years and years in a relationship. Other than making mix tapes and talking and holding hands and taking sad phone calls, what is the best way to comfort a broken-hearted friend? Do I tell them if they’re being crazy? Is it OK NOT to engage in shit talking the ex? What about if I’m friends with both parties? Right now I’m approaching it mostly as I would if someone was grieving any loss, but do you have any general advice to help me comfort all my broken-hearted friends?
First off, yay. Yay to you for helping and thinking about how to help. Yay to you for not asking how to change or fix your friends, how to make them not divorce and dissolve and slobber on you, but just on how to best dab off the sobby slobber and prop them back up.
That was the happy part. Now on to the wretched part: splitting up. Have you had the misery of scanning a shared apartment immediately post-breakup? Then you will know it’s basically a nuclear blast site. These THINGS seem improbably intact: That chair is there, that coffee is still half-drank (drunk? drinkerd?), but they’re different, not our chair, or our cup, not animated by the spirit of the shared project of building a two-person life. Ugh, and that’s just the STUFF. These friends of yours are not just sad, not just missing someone (even if they were the up-breakers! Even if they were unhappy for years!); they’ve split with who they thought they were as much as they’ve split with their partner. They’re quite literally retelling their whole life stories so this THING somehow makes sense.
What you can do is help edit and refine those stories so that they arc toward change for the better. Based on definitely a lot of science, I think there are really two phases where your intervention is helpful. First, there’s the immediately post-breakup delirium. You know this, it alternates between “everything’s fine! I’m gonna be a better me and go get that yoga teaching certification I just decided I always wanted,” and animal shrieks of pain coming from under a dingy bathrobe in some semi-public space. At this point, all you can do is provide love and distraction, and if you really want to do God’s work, a couch to sleep on. Movies, alternating tea and whiskey, the stuff it sounds like you have down. I’m divided on rebounds at this point; they can happen, there are dingy-bathrobe-lovers out there and you don’t need to STOP them, but I also don’t think you need to fling pretty goofballs at your friend just yet. You don’t even really need to engage at this point, just kind of abide. If we’re talking six weeks of hysterical sobbing over six weeks of sporadic hookups, you’re allowed and encouraged to do the Moonstruck slap/”snap out of it!” but if this was a Real Thing, just don’t comment on the crazy. Maybe, maybe, at the most, if it seems appropriate, tell them they won’t always feel as bad as they do now. Time is magic, but it’s hard to remember/realize that when you’re measuring that time breath by ragged breath.
Oh, but later on! When we all have to be grownups, when the wave of destruction begins to roll back out to sea and we start building an Even Better sand castle! That’s the tricky stuff, and what I gather you’re really asking about. How do you help there? Do they not know there are OTHER WAVES? Are you ever like, “dude, fuck sand castles, let’s go get soft-serv?” And then what if their ex is at the soft-serv counter? Fuck, I hate this fucking beach.
General breakdown: No, don’t shit-talk exes, even the true juiceboxes. “S/he wasn’t what you needed,” or “I’m glad you’re moving on” is as far as that needs to go. Not because you’re a good person, or above that stuff in the least, but because, like we discussed, your friend is rewriting the whole story of her life, and what kind of stupid downer chapter is “and then I was with an irredeemable asshole for 10 years, the end”? Your friends chose this person for some reason, and they learned SOMETHING, (hey, “I hate being lonely more than I hate juiceboxes!” is a lesson, too), they changed somehow, though in supportive-friend-speak we always call it “grew.” Let them bitch, sure, but when you’re holding the talking stick, focus on “you’ve come out of this so much stronger/with your own business/knowing so much more about your needs/with SO MUCH ALIMONY.” It might be bullshit, but also it’s not, really.
This is also when you intervene in bad-crazy: the revenge fantasies, the repeated drunk dials. “Girl, you have your own life to live, don’t even bother” usually works. Or just taking her phone. If you think you’ll drunk-give the phone back for drunk-dialing if your friend drunk-asks, give it to the bartender! If he thinks the story is cute, introduce him to your friend! This is the only time I will countenance sleeping with bartenders, rebound-ahoy, full speed ahead, we never speak of this again.
If you know both parties? First, the obvious: Dance with thems that brought ya. If you knew one of them first, prioritize him/her unless you are somehow MUCH closer with the other. I just realized that as-qualified, those sentences mean nothing other than roll with the person you are better friends with, duh. If you came to know these clownshoes as a couple, and are equally close with them both, I say follow the general scope of my infallible advice for both, though you probably don’t want to be the main rebound-facilitator or head couch-giver (or couch head-giver, lololollllllllllollollollll fuuuucccck but seriously, don’t go there, or do, whatever, but no one will like you). (Also, if one breakup-ee is genuinely homeless and one isn’t, a couch is a couch is a couch, do the decent thing and give them head, I mean, let them crash.) I think this “support both parties equally but separately” holds almost no matter what the reason for the breakup, relationships being the weird black boxes they are — no need to make moral lessons out of your friends’ pain, y’know? But, common sense: If your dad had a secret family, I’m not going to make you drop in for coffee and a chat with the recently married dude who impregnated his thesis advisee.
Finally, and this is a bonus, but do this, and it will (a) be one of the classiest things you do in your whole life, and (b) gain you a tooth-and-nail ally forever. When you know a couple and they split — if you’re closer with one of them, still drop the other a note. Here, copy this one: “Hi Melissa, I know you and Tim are both in rough spots. I’ve been in touch with him, and he’s as well as can be expected. Of course he is an old, dear friend, but just know I am thinking of you as well. These things are hard on everyone, and if I can be of any help to you, I’d like to.” Melissa also thinks the world has just ended, a kind gesture like that can help her remember it hasn’t really: It will be there whenever she’s ready for it, full of normal, friendly acquaintances who generally wish her well and acknowledge that yeah, they did kind of know her for years, huh? Good job, you, you have just acted a full-on adult, and all you had to do was cut and paste. And switch the names/genders as needed. DON’T FORGET THAT. (Woman, in bathrobe, to HER slobber-friend: “Who the fucking fuck is Tim? What is this shit? Seriously. I can’t believe that fucking idiot, is this a joke, do you think I should call him to ask? How many times? How long a quavering voicemail should I leave? How much Valium should I take first?”)
According to my degree(s), I am a journalist, yet I have not worked in the field for over two years because I wanted to try online marketing (plus my bills could not wait for me to land my dream gig). Now that I’m ready to get back into journalism, I can’t apply to certain jobs; my clips are too old or they were taken down from the websites I worked for (I cursed at myself so many times for not screen-capturing my articles). Without clips, you really don’t mean shit, so what advice can you give a clip-less journalist? Thanks.
So, I’m not a journalist: You couldn’t pay me to be. Literally. You could not pay me, because if you were a thing that paid journalists, you would have no money. But. My friends who are journalists are basically slitting their mothers’ throats for internships right now, and these are not the latest litter of j-school kittens, either, these are frighteningly fearless working reporters. So the advice I’d give a genuinely clipless journalist would be “try online marketing for a couple of years while you pitch the non-paying places you couldn’t afford to work for if you needed the money, and make your own world wide web site.” But you’re not clipless. I mean, yeah, you might need to find a way to push out a couple of more-up-to-date things, but you HAVE these mystery clips that have disappeared with these websites. This is not tough love, it’s genuine confusion: What on earth kind of journalist can you be if you can’t track down someone you used to to write for? (Actually, Ask a Marxist tangent: For what it’s worth I think it’s soul-killingly stupid we feel like we need to be both good at our jobs-as-stated and good at at hustling, which is really totally its own skill set. That said, um, the hustler skill set and the journalist skill set overlap pretty dramatically, yeah? Like, maybe that’s one place the double expectation makes. . . sense?)
Here is what you need to do: Ask some motherfuckers for those clips. Your old editor? The IT guy? The hosting company or whatever it’s called? If I can track down my totally hypothetical idiotic blog from 2001 which I hypothetically took down like six times in six different ways, you can track down your actual clips. Seriously. I genuinely do not believe you can’t find them, I just think you tried the site, maybe Google cache, and then were like whatever and had another piece of American cheese and watched Louie.* Which is exactly what I would do, so I judge you only as much as I judge myself.
It would be mean if I picked this question just to eyeroll at this one poor hopeful, though, right? No, I picked it to eyeroll at ALL OF Y’ALL and also myself, because we ladies plus also other humans minus some of the ladies have a serious problem asking for things. The subtle dance is fine in social interactions, I guess, but out there in the hustlosphere (what would that even BE? Who AM I?), you gotta get some practice asking. I swear, nine times out of 10 people say yes, and when they don’t you’re not worse off anyway. Let’s do a choose your own adventure with our journalist friend, Nellie.
Nellie: Hey, former editor, I’m getting together my clips and I wanted copies of the stuff I did for you, do you have any please? How are your dogs, OK, bye.
Likely: “Hey, yeah! I have that stuff you asked for. Here!”
Possible: “I do not have that stuff!” (Note: S/he doesn’t not have it because s/he hates you, s/he JUST DOESN’T HAVE IT. Don’t start going there, I know you are.)
Unlikely: “I do not have that. It is very horrible that you don’t have copies, I judge you for it.” Here, the editor is being a Huge Prickhole, which is not Nellie’s ish. Nellie, remember, when people are Huge Prickholes, it shows that your problem is. . . you happened to talk to a Huge Prickhole.
Most Unlikely: “I have it but I know you murdered that person and plan to turn you in.” In this case, Nellie has a real problem.
Lesson is: Ask for things today, OK? Tell me about it! What did you ask for? What slightly demanding but generally reasonable email have you been putting off? Write it! Write it! Go, go, go! Unless you have murdered someone AND been seen, then lay low. With that, A Lady is like, PEACE OUT.
*I don’t know, girl, if you REALLY can’t track down your clips, write a story about how you can’t track down your clips because the internet just ENGULFS stuff! Then put it on the internet and wait for it to get engulfed! Write about young journalists getting fucked by online publications literally disappearing? No one will care but other journalists, and honestly they probably won’t either, but you’ll get your journalisting arm back in shape and you’ll get some practice hustling.
Previously: Single Dads, Aging, and Acquaintansex.
A Lady is one of several rotating ladies who know everything. Do you have any questions for A Lady?
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