Don’t let the door hit ‘ya.

Where Cupid’s Arrow split ‘ya.**

My Valentine's Day Post.

Everybody has been dumped.

Everyone has stepped off into that moment of relationship defenestration when you realize that there is nothing between your bare feet and the hard ground except a mile of cold air and gravity.

So through some weird alchemy, most of the people I know are “at liberty” right now, in some sense. Some are freshly divorced, and so that’s what we talk about. Some still walk with a limp from the last time they tried to jump the Relationship Cycle over 19 buses…and only cleared 18. Some are perennially single, or work inside a very loose arrangement where the distinction between whatever-it-is-they-do and singlehood is distinguishable only on a subatomic level.

Some date angry and always fuck it up.

Some are perfectly nice people who have just given that part of their lives up: Singlesville can be quite the abattoir full of charming monsters, or yet another Lucy holding a Heart-shaped football and whispering “trust me”, or folks with more emotional tics than a tasered mime and more baggage than the lost and found at O’Hare Airport. And at some point the probable downsides just exceeded the possible upsides by too many fathoms and they simply opted out of the game.

Almost all of them are coping with the backwash/aftermath of some relationship or another; some they terminated, some not. Lots of different circumstances, but it always sucks.

And while there is no right way to do it, a decent human being, even in a lot of pain, will at least try to look for a slightly less than thermonuclear way of saying, “I’m just not into you anymore.” After all, at some point you loved this person.

Or at least kinda liked them.

Or at least liked how their ass looked in those lycra shorts.

So while a grownup may be a little harsh at the moment when the two are cleft in twain, only a prick pours lemon juice on the knife, and then packs the wound with rock salt.

So let's stipulate that are (almost) no good ways to break up.

There are, however, some spectacularly bad ways of doing it….

Welcome to Dumpsville
Marina Hyde
Saturday February 11, 2006
Guardian

When you're the last to know that love ain't here any more

I think it was Jon Bon Jovi who said "Shot through the heart / And you're to blame / Darlin' you give love / A ba-ad name". But Richie Sambora definitely played a big-haired guitar solo on it, and if those lyrics didn't resonate for him with the neo-medieval pain of the courtly lover at the time of Slippery When Wet's release, he could not have failed to feel their special poignance this week after he learned through a publicist's statement that his wife of 11 years was divorcing him.

We all have those days when we have a million and one things to do, so let's assume Heather Locklear kicked herself just the second she realised she'd forgotten to inform her husband she was calling in the lawyers, despite having put out a formal press release to that effect. Had this one detail not slipped her mind, Richie might not have snorted "it's completely untrue" when approached for comment later that day, adding that he had Valentine's Day plans for his wife.

They probably have more of an Al Capone flavour to them now.

Naturally, this raises all kinds of questions. Did she remember to notify the couple's daughter? Who knew Dynasty's Sammy Jo could be such a little madam? And will anyone in Bon Jovi ever attain the romantic idyll delineated in Lay Your Hands on Me? But what we really have to face is that in this one manoeuvre, Heather has joined the pantheon of celebrities too busy, too dysfunctional, just too well-staffed to inform their other halves in person that it's over.

Arguably the Zeus amongst these is Phil Collins, the erstwhile drummer in music-loving Tony Blair's favourite band, Genesis (Genesis!), and always such a likable chap.

In 1994, at the couple's Switzerland home, a fax slithered onto the then Mrs Collins's desk. The exact phrasing is alas lost to the mists of time, but ran along the lines of Homer Simpson's classic brush-off. "Welcome to Dumpsville. Population: You."

What a benchmark, and it took all of one year before the move was precisely replicated by cinema's Daniel Day-Lewis, as he sought to put what Hollywood calls "some distance" between himself and pregnant partner Isabelle Adjani.

Still, there's something quaintly private about these gestures, when considered in the light of Matt Damon's legendary 1997 appearance on Oprah Winfrey's talkshow. On her couch, in a move that may well have unleashed the dysfunctional showbiz energy that last year caused Tom Cruise to mount it and declare his love for Katie Holmes, Matt announced he was newly single.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Los Angeles, his Good Will Hunting co-star Minnie Driver's martini glass crashed to the floor, splintering into a thousand pieces, substantially more than the tally of movie roles she would thenceforth be offered. "It's unfortunate that Matt went on Oprah," she later explained tightly. "It seemed like a good forum for him to announce to the world that we were no longer together, which I found fantastically inappropriate."

Seeking a parallel for Sambora's total blindsiding, however, we conclude with Lock Stock star Jason Statham, who in 2004 was asked how he felt about his long-term girlfriend, Kelly Brook, gadding about St Tropez with Hollywood actor Billy Zane. "You've got it wrong," he snapped. "She's never been to St Tropez in her life." In fairness, no one could accuse Kelly of being a geographer, but the fact that comment was being sought on a set of photographs taken in the French town that very afternoon is thought to have made the subsequent conversation faintly awkward.
…

**(photo from this site by Joe Jennings. It has has a ton of cool, beautiful shots, but it’s a little hard to navigate. Thumbnails, Joe.)