End This Terrible Relationship You’re In, Please

We all remember LW2, right? She needs to dump this guy, and we all know it. We know it instinctively, because she’s unhappy, and she’s not us. When it’s us, we seem to operate under some kind of lame delusion that a) we’ve invested something priceless in our relationship, and b) it could get better.

What have you invested, exactly, that’s worth risking another, what, two years, before the thing eventually dies on its own? Which it invariably will?

It’s not going to get better. We all know a couple who had a terrible relationship that eventually got better, but it’s almost certainly the same couple, and they just talk about it constantly to reassure themselves that it actually got better.

This is not a “gurl, he doesn’t get how awesome you are” manifesto.

Sometimes your relationship sucks because you’re awesome, and your partner is awful.
Sometimes your relationship sucks because you’re awful, and your partner is awesome.
Sometimes your relationships sucks because you’re both awful, and not in a synergy-creating way.*
Sometimes your relationship is great because you’re both awesome. Like Jon Hamm and Jennifer Westfeldt.
Sometimes your relationship is great because you’re both awful in companionable ways. Like Todd and Margo, from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

(*Honestly, this would describe at least 40% of my bad relationships. I’m kind of awful. Nor have I ever once taken my own, excellent advice. It’s all Edward Albee, all the time, for the last six months each time.)

One year, two year relationships are not that much work, or, at least, they shouldn’t be. Thirty year marriages seem to be hard work, based on the grim expressions. Look, if you’re not stranded on a desert island with one other person, and you find that your relationship is a stressor in your life, just end it. You’ll find someone else, and, if you don’t, ever, at least you’re not in a terrible relationship. When you genuinely enjoy someone and feel like, to quote my best friend’s grandmother, they are a radiator and not a drain, it’s the place you go to to escape your terrible job, or your aggravating family. It’s supposed to be your home.

And, word of advice for the next one? Just be exactly like yourself all the time. Don’t pretend to like the stupid things they like, because you think you should be the sort of person who likes opera. Or hiking. If what you genuinely, truly love is watching The Voice while drinking cranberry juice out of your wineglasses, put that in your goddamn ad, because SOMEONE is going to see that, and think “oh, finally.”

Finally, if you are with someone who is a dick to you, or who seems not to like you, please think to yourself: if I was in a cab being driven by this individual, I would get out, even if no one else would take me to Brooklyn. The rest of us like you just fine.