On the off-chance you’ve been wanting a graceful exit from your relationship, Twitter is here to help: The hashtag #WaysToGetDumped started trending on Monday.
Most of the advice was all-purpose, the sort of things everybody should avoid in their own relationships: Twitterers especially will dump you if you “take them for granted,” are “showing no affection,” or are “being a hypocrite.”
Others tweets, however, apparently referred to specific personal incidents most people never will experience. These roads to dumpville include “going to prom with another bitch while we’re still together” and “Go behind your young, promising girlfriend’s back to court an older, more experienced girl with nerve damage.”
Many Twitterers who take astrology seriously also appear to believe that people born under their zodiac sign are the only people with enough self-respect to demand good treatment from their partners. Thus, there were lots of horoscope-specific tweets: Don’t “nag an #Aquarian”, don’t “be disrespectful to a #Libra” or “to A #Virgo,” and don’t “lie & cheat on a sagittarius, you will get dumped within seconds.”
Of course, you don’t have to be Sagittarian to dump an unfaithful partner. Most Twitterers who dump cheaters made no mention of astrology at all. “[C]heat,its the stupidest thing you could do,” read one typical tweet, while others expanded upon the theme: “Lying, Cheating, Lying about cheating, and lying about lying about cheating”.
Naturally, insulting your partner’s appearance is a good way to lose your partner. And, frankly, even if your former love’s physical attributes leave something to be desired, it’s still pretty crass to “tell her she’s fat!” or “tell him his dick’s small,” so it’s no surprise to find such comments graced with the #WaysToGetDumped hashtag.
Modern technology gives people many opportunities to wreck their relationships, opportunities previous generations could only dream about. Consider things like “forget to lock your phone”, “leave your phone unlocked & let em see ur texts/twitter/FB” or “pass lock other girls texts”, all of which made the get-dumped list. Our grandparents not only didn’t have to worry about such things, they wouldn’t even understand what they meant.
On the other hand, some relationship-enders are almost as old as relationships themselves. Dumpees in our grandparents’ day never had to worry about pass-locking their smartphones, but they still had to sit through “it’s not you, it’s me” or “let’s just be friends”.