10 Classic Breakup Lines Translated For Guys

Guys, as most of us are good people that consistently go out of our way to make relationships work, it can sometimes be confusing to figure out exactly why we’ve dumped. So I’ve put in the leg work to decipher these common woman-speak phrases into normal, everyday English that we can all understand, so at the very least we can know what’s really going on. Ladies, if you read this keep in mind that we now know what you’re really saying, so there’s no reason to keep sugar coating things. We’re men. We’re resilient. We’re tough. We can handle the truth. Besides, it’s your loss anyway…

1) “I’ve been thinking a lot lately…” Your average break-up spiel will usually start along these lines. This is rarely, if ever, true. The truth usually lies somewhere in the “My friends/family/coworkers have been spoon feeding me a lot of shit about you lately…”

2) “It’s not you, it’s me” (or some derivative thereof). This one is so popular that it has become cliché, and its popularity is due to the fact that it is fucking easy. This one doesn’t need much translating, as it is almost always true, but never for the reasons the speaker thinks.

3) “I still want to be friends.” This is a sneaky little fucker, as it can have multiple meanings. From the manipulative but otherwise harmless, “I’ll keep in touch so I can try to string you along any time I need something” to the downright fucked up, “I cannot wait to get a new guy so I can rub your nose in it.”

4) “I still love you.” Same general jist as above, but with a couple added twists. The first being, “if the next guy doesn’t work out I’m going to come to you to complain about him in an effort to make you feel like an emasculated pussy”.  The second meaning can be a set-up for meaningless sessions of fuck-buddyhood, “I don’t want to have anything serious to do with you, but I don’t want my bed to go cold before I get the next sucker in it.”

5) “I’m just so busy.” This just may be the most insulting of all when you really think about it. Unless the woman in question is the head of a major nation, there is nothing going on in her life that is so damned important that she can’t make a little time. Translated into normal English it goes something like, “I would rather sit in the waiting room while my neighbor’s cousin’s dog gets its teeth scraped than spend time with you”.

6) “I need some time alone.” This one is more a sin of omission than a lie. The full idea behind the phrase is, “I want to fuck someone else, but I don’t have anyone lined up right now (alternately; I have someone lined up but I don’t want to look like a big ol' mattress hoppin’ whore frog), so there will be a small window of time where I am alone. So, yeah, I need some time alone”.

7) “I’m not ready for a relationship right now.” This is another example of women not quite saying everything. The full phrase should be, “I’m not ready for a relationship with you right now.” Because, let’s face it, nine times out of ten, the woman who says this already has someone else taking ghost swings on deck.

8) “There’s nothing wrong with you as a person.” This, basically, means exactly the opposite of what it is trying to say. “There is something that I don’t like about you, but whatever that something is it is so insignificant that if I actually say it even I will think I’m a shallow bitch.”

9) “I don’t want to hurt you.” Using this line in a break-up context makes about as much sense as saying it right before intentionally running someone down with a Mack truck. The translation of this one is, “I am going to reach inside of you, rip your still-beating heart out of your asshole, and then show it to you, but I’m going to tear up a little and tell you I don’t want it to hurt.” Like above, this one is designed more to make the speaker feel less guilt than to actually ease the pain of the listener.

10) “You’re a great guy.” First of all, you’re goddamn right. Secondly, we can all now know what women really mean by this is, “I can only feel whole as a person when my significant other treats me like shit and gives me something to bitch about, so you’ve gotta go.” Happily.

White Scarf

 

            The vertical blinds gave their whispering vinyl clack as I stole out the sliding glass door. In the east, racing behind pine covered hills on the last vestiges of wind from a thunderstorm, low wisps were just beginning to show black before the predawn gray sky. Not high enough to be thought of as clouds or low enough to be fog, the wisps struck me as the sad, forgotten orphans of atmospheric phenomena. I pulled up the collar of my leather jacket, wishing that it offered more protection from the wet cold.

            I could see my breath. Rainwater was still dripping from the roofs and trees. Overhead, weaker stars were getting dim and dying against the power of the still unseen sun, but some stood bright in the deep dark. Broken wind chimes, handed down to her from her mother and which she never had the heart to throw out, tinkled half –heartedly as I crossed the wide, unfenced yard to the gravel road.

            I left behind all of my clothes aside from what I had on my back. I could eventually beg, borrow, or steal more. She could burn everything I left behind for all I cared, but knowing her she would donate them. The thought of getting dressed in some cold, stinking rest stop bathroom and putting on a shirt that she had once pulled off of me in the warm dark of her bedroom was enough to make me sick with sadness.

I caught myself wondering silly, inconsequential things. Would she miss my boots at the foot of her bed? What would she do, with her crippling arachnophobia and aversion to killing any living creature, the next time she saw a spider and I wasn’t there to shoo it out of the house? How many years would pass before I didn’t find myself thinking about her from time to time? How many months would pass before she didn’t find herself thinking about me?

She had neglected to bring in the laundry before the thunder cracked open the clouds the day before. It hung from the line soaking wet and gleaming like bleach white beacons in the gloom. As I passed the clothes I snatched her favorite item off the line. I wrung out the dripping linen scarf, rolled it up, and slipped it into a jacket pocket.

The wet gravel didn’t crunch under foot so much as slide and slosh. Each foot fall sounded like marbles rolling around in a mouth. The puddles were a milky gray and they tried desperately to splash, soak, or seep into my boots. There is a narrow window of time before the sun rises when a diffuse light permeates everywhere and illuminates everything equally from all angles. It is a calm, spooky beauty. I knew that if I were still in bed to see it, her face would be washed with a blue light that would make her look like a stone angel in a graveyard. I knew she would be waking soon, so I hurried down to the paved road and stuck out my thumb.

“Jesus Christ, this goddamned rain, huh?” The big face of a big man in a big truck wearing a big smile. Old gitter-box country music was playing low from his radio. “Hope you weren’t out here trying to hitch in that storm last night.”

No, I was in bed.

“Where ya headed to?”

As far as you’re willing to take me, I guess.

“Well, I’m hauling it all the way down to Redding today, I suppose I could do with some company.”

I got in. The number of feet between me and her bed kept adding up, then the miles. Every one of them broke my heart just a little bit more than the last. Every one of them told me just a little bit louder, this is really over. Every one of them called me weak, called me a coward, called me a liar and a lowlife and a phony for leaving. But I kept racking them up. There was nothing I could do.

She said that we could work things out. She said that we could start over and make everything like sparkling new. Beneath eyes argent with tears her mouth said that she loved me. She meant it. I told her that I loved her more than anything. I meant it. She kissed my black eye. Together we poured every bottle of liquor in the house down the sink and went to bed in each other’s arms. Every bottle except for the pint of whiskey that I found in the pocket of my jacket.

The driver didn’t pretend to not notice the bruise covering a full quarter of my face for very long. I was taking a pull from the bottle when he brought it up. “That’s a hell of a shiner, buddy. How’d you manage that?”

I’m a drunk, these things happen.

“Hell, don’t I know how that goes?” He took a swig when I offered the bottle. “Ya mouth off to the wrong person, get your ass kicked?”

I told him how we got drunk and she hit me with a vodka bottle. How I started to strangle her but stopped. I left out how I started to sob when I let go of her neck and she crawled away from me.

The driver was silent for several seconds. “Hell, we all want to strangle ‘em from time to time.” His laugh drowned out the country music. He punched my arm.

The sun was up and I wondered how long she would worry about me before she dabbed cover-up on to the bruises on her neck and went to work. I wondered how long she would bother with trying to find me. I wondered how long she would be alone before someone else took my place in her bed. I wondered if she would notice her scarf missing from the clothesline and understand that I had left, and why.

It Only Takes One

 

 

 

 

           I was beginning to lose patience as a sling bellied old man mounted the dais at the front of the hot box of a church annex building in which I was sitting. I could tell from his stiff legged taking of the steps that a lifetime of heavy Southern cuisine and front porch sittin’ had taken their toll on his knees. The black trucker cap that sat gingerly over his white hair did nothing to match his slightly too tight cream colored suit. When he turned to face his standing room only audience I was able to see the “NRA” splashed across the front of the cap, and it seemed like the cap fit in with the rest of the room better than the suit.

            “Afternoon, all.” The old man said in a voice of sandpaper and rancid honey, a voice that said he had been smoking for just a couple of decades too many. “Most of y’all know me, but for those of you that don’t, I am Pastor Rutherford, preacher of this here church. I am very proud and mighty honored to have our little church hosting this cause, and it does my heart good to see so many of my fellow patriots come from far and wide to take part.”

            He leaned full tilt into a prayer to open the day’s proceedings, but I couldn’t force myself to pay attention. Rutherford was not the man I had made the trip from California to Tennessee to meet, and I certainly was not interested in closing my eyes and pretending to listen to his prayer. My eyes scanned over the bowed heads in the humid confines of the modular annex, and I had to stifle a smirk that nearly insinuated itself on my face. Never had I seen so many people, men and women, in camouflage clothing in one place before. Jackets, pants, shirts, I was even able to spot at least two men wearing camo neckties. The assortment of baseball caps acting as political billboards was just as fascinating; Dozens of NRA caps, Stars’n’stripes, several NObamas, and the hat on the man right next to me was thanking God for the second amendment. I didn’t have to see the guns to know that damn near every person in that room was strapped.

            “I know that I’m not the man y’all came here to see today.” Pastor Rutherford said, regaining my attentiveness by winding down his speech. “I’d like to invite y’all, neighbors and visitors alike, to join us for services tomorrow morning at nine in the AM. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce a truly patriotic American, Mr. John Hunter!”

            The door of the annex building flew open and a man of surprising proportions entered in a pseudo-march, stone faced seriousness all but dripping from his bald head with the sweat from the stinking Southern heat. He could not have been more than five foot six, but he was the type who made up for his lack of height by torturing his musculature to distasteful bulginess. His black polo shirt, labeled with the fake Sheriff’s badge that indicated Hunter’s own security company, was too small and stretched grotesquely everywhere it made contact with his body. Plainly displayed in a black leather shoulder holster he was carrying what my recent education in guns told me was a Sig Sauer P220, with OD green grip.

            This has all been so easy, I thought to myself. My mind wandered back to the first time I heard the name James Hunter. It was several weeks after a tragic shooting in a crowded amusement park, in which dozens of men, women, and children were murdered by one lunatic with a couple of handguns and a shitload of ammo. As happens every couple of years in America, that incident reignited the centuries old argument over gun control and restriction. I would be lying if I were to say that I greeted the entire circus with anything other than complete apathy.

            That was until James Hunter achieved worldwide notoriety with a three minute YouTube video that went viral in less than twenty four hours. In the video Hunter extolled the virtues of gun ownership, viciously and venomously bashed the president for proposed gun control measures, and encouraged his “fellow patriots to load their magazines, clean their rifles, pack some food, and get ready to fight.” The video was concluded with the words, “If these gun control rules go one inch further, I’m gonna start killing people.”

            Depending on how one took the video, this garnered Hunter both fame and infamy. For my part, the video changed my life. I had to meet James Hunter face-to-face.

            Searching the internet for five minutes, finding out that Hunter would be speaking at an anti-gun control rally at a church in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in just two weeks’ time.  This is easy.

            A two day gun safety course and hours of research before deciding which gun was right for me. Locking up my closet of a studio apartment with the twin mattress on the floor and the single place setting in the cupboard. Catching a morning flight to Nashville. This is really easy.

            Walking out of a Nashville gun store with a brand new Glock G19 in my backpack forty five minutes after landing. Hopping a Greyhound and getting checked into a cheap motel room in Murfreesboro before sundown. This really is too easy.

            As James Hunter took the dais I smiled and fingered the Glock holstered under my windbreaker. If it weren’t for Hunter I would never have even thought about owning a gun. But there I was. Again, the thought passed through my mind, This has all just been so easy!

            Hunter’s speech was more or less a live version of his YouTube video. Take to the hills, stand up to the tyrants, kill, kill, kill, that kind of thing. But he ended the rant a line I hadn’t heard before. “I don’t expect any of you to have the specialized military training that I do, but one bullet says more than any amount of talking, and any of you can squeeze a trigger. It only takes one.”

            It only takes one. Those words were on an endless loop in my brain as James Hunter left the dais and people began crowding around him. It only takes one. I may have shoved a couple of people a little hard, but I had to get close enough to Hunter to shake his hand. I needed to tell him how he’d changed the direction of my life.

            “Mr. Hunter!” I reached between two men who were talking to Hunter, presenting my hand for him to shake. I shouldered between the men and stood face-to-face with James Hunter. He shook my hand. “That thing you said, about it only taking one. You’re so right, Mr. Hunter. You’re so right.”

            “Well, thank you, brother.” His face registered no emotion, and there seemed to be some depth missing from his blue eyes. “Stay a patriot.”

            He dropped my hand and turned to acknowledge an admirer behind him but my hand didn’t fall to my side. It slipped into my windbreaker. My well-practiced thumb unbuttoned the strap of my holster. A trained finger unlocked the safety of my pistol. I hefted the weight of the weapon out of my coat. The barrel raked the stubble on the back of Hunter’s shaved head. I heard a short, short scream from somewhere in the room and pulled the trigger.