Dumped!

She was an attractive Latina lawyer, my age. She was fit, smart, and religious.  I was dating her.

Was.

She broke up with me by e-mail.

In the e-mail, she talked about her life. She talked about her struggles and what she had to overcome. And she concluded that I was not as tough as she was. And that was unacceptable to her.

I acknowledged her wishes and wished her "good luck".

That might not have been much of a response. But she had just virtually called me a wimp. If I had written a sensitive, nurturing response, she would have accused me of lactating.

So it’s over.

Fine.

She didn’t have to tell me why she was breaking up. "I want to break up" is a fully sufficient reason. In my experience, women act like men can sue them if they don’t have a good reason for ending the relationship.

But in my experience, most men would rather not know. Because let’s face it, most women can come up with a pretty good reason. And that doesn’t build the guy’s self esteem.

But at the same time, if she didn’t say why, I would have been curious.

Still, I take the reason with a measure of skepticism.

That’s because of my philosophy of dating. I believe that some relationships are inherently hardy. Others are inherently weak. Only time reveals whether you’re relationship is hardy or weak. A hardy relationship will survive or thrive in circumstances that would drive the partners in a weak relationship apart.

In truth, I used to torture myself after break-ups. I used to say, "If I had only said (thus-and-such)!" Or "If only I hadn’t said (whatever)!"

But that was a long time ago, and I don’t torture myself that way any more. Because now I believe that when a relationship works out, or doesn’t, it has to do with who the people are on a deep level. The you-said-that stuff, or the you-are-thus-and-such stuff – these are just surface observations that might hint at the deep reasons why the relationship did or did not work. Or they might not.

If anything irritated me about the heave-ho, it was her attitude – sweet in its way – that she knew that I was going to be crushed by this. In fact, I liked her, and I was pursuing her for a reason, but I was not crushed.

After passing through many years, I have a certain fatalism about relationships. I use baby turtles as a metaphor. When I was young, I saw a National Geographic episode about sea turtles. The mother turtle lays her eggs in the sand. Predators eat some before they hatch, or they get stepped on by humans or animals. Of the baby sea turtles that hatch, some are eaten by predators on their way to the sea. In the sea, there are many more predators. Few sea turtles survive to adulthood.

To me, relationships are like baby sea turtles. It’s remarkable when one matures to adulthood. It’s un-remarkable when one doesn’t.

That attitude is consolation when a relationship doesn't work out. Also, for consolation, nothing beats sour grapes.

One of her stand-out qualities is her strict morality. Before the break-up, I saw her strict morality as a tonic from the disintegration of morality in the larger society. Her uprightness was admirably against the tide of a society that increasingly has bad values or no values at all. But after the break-up, I started to think, "If she were any more ‘principled’, she would wear a burqa."

Even with such consolations, I was not unaffected by the break-up. I got her e-mail this morning. All day, I was more irritated about things than I otherwise would be. So she hit a raw nerve.
    
But raw nerves heal. I think things are more tragic to young people, because they are not inured to disappointment. But we survivors of five-or-so decades know disappointment. Sometimes we even know tragedy. Over time, I have suffered great shocks. Compared to them, a break-up is a small thing. Life’s disappointments and shocks put every new unhappiness into perspective.

And compared to all of the tragedy in the world, this is very modest suffering. Thousands of people in Northeast Japan would swap misfortunes with me in a nanosecond.

So, I’m OK with her choice. Not happy, but OK.  I wish her well. And tomorrow is another day.