Stuff it

The things we leave behind

by Kris Frieswick

What's the hardest part of breaking up with a significant other? Realizing that it's over? Doing the actual breaking up? The weeks and months following the split, when you either nurse your wounds or second-guess yourself nearly into insanity?

I say the answer is "none of the above." The hardest part of breaking up is figuring out what to do with all the stuff.

Aside from custody battles, this is the most painful part of all. Because when you're splitting up the stuff, it's never about fairly and equitably splitting up the items that were acquired either jointly or individually and brought into the relationship or communal home, nor is it about selecting and leaving with the stuff that you own, or to which you feel a deep sentimental connection. No -- what it really boils down to is preventing the other person from getting the stuff he or she wants.

The resulting stuff battles are epic Battle-of-Midway-type conflicts, in which one partner, armed with an armada of battleships, steams toward the occupied island (the stuff) to liberate it, only to come up against the single-minded destructiveness of an angry, kamikaze-like partner bent on destroying not only the war fleet, but the island. Toddlers have grown past the age of majority in the time that it has taken some divorcing couples to divide (or destroy) the marital assets.

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For those of us leaving boyfriends or girlfriends, the theater of engagement is usually much less grand. But even without benefit of a recently shredded legally binding contract, stuff fights can get pretty ugly.

I understand why people who have been dumped will turn the stuff fight nasty. If you've been booted, you're smarting. You want to hurt back. Since you can't inflict bodily harm (or you shouldn't, anyway), the next best thing is inflicting emotional distress. And what better way to do that than by taking his favorite black T-shirt? (Ben Folds Five even wrote a song about the desperate struggle to retrieve one's black T-shirt, which is the closest thing adult males have to a security blankie. But then, of course, there's the little black backpack that you shouldn't expect to get back.) The only thing that comes close to the pain potential of running off with the T-shirt is leaving town with his stereo speakers, or, if you have the 'nads, his amp. It's wrong to take what is not yours, I know -- but damn, it feels good.

What's harder to comprehend is waging a heated stuff battle when you have been the dumper. When you have held the door open wide, waiting for someone else reluctantly to cross that threshold toward you-give-not-a-damn-where, you really should bend a little on the whole stuff issue. Yet it amazes me how often that's not the way it happens. Some people, half drunk with the power that comes after mortally wounding an opponent, will not settle for blood -- they're going for bone.

Regardless of the motivation, the battle for the stuff is in reality less like Midway and more like a final skirmish in a war that has already been lost -- like those Japanese soldiers holed up in caves who don't know the war is over and come out shooting at anything that moves. This is why newly split-up people tend to fight over really ridiculous things. My last live-in boyfriend, who didn't dump me, but cheated on me quite prolifically, would not let me take the only thing I had actually purchased for our house -- a mop, which I'm positive he did not know how to use (the second biggest reason for the split). I know of three women who lost knife sets in their break-ups. None of their ex-men cook. So why keep the knife set? It is a question for which the men do not even have answers. All these men knew was that their former girlfriends wanted the knives . . . which immediately made them more covetable than gold.

Aside from the aforementioned T-shirts, CDs and records are one of the most common sources of stuff-split trauma. I have witnessed near fistfights over Santana, and I lost fully half my CD collection during my most recent break-up simply because I did not have the foresight to mark each one with my name. Looking back, it would have been wise to do so. In practice, though, it probably wouldn't have been the most positive message to send my boyfriend. ("Honey, I love you and I want to make a life together, but I'm gonna engrave my name on all my stuff just in case things go south.")

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For me, however, the things that are hardest to leave behind aren't things at all. They're people. I daresay that if you've loved and lost, you've probably said goodbye to a lot of people who you wish were still around. I've lost a football stadium's worth of friends in break-ups over the past (mumble-mumble) years of dating, and I miss each and every one of them.

Though I realize that the onus is on me, and everyone who has dumped or been dumped, to nurture and maintain relationships with the friends of the ex, it is the one field of conflict where I lay down my arms and surrender. I've been able to maintain some great friendships with some "friends of ex," but only when the break-up was amicable. And that, in my humble opinion, is as it should be. That's because friends are loyal -- even friends of evil, bad, heartless ex-lovers who rip out your heart and dance the watusi on it. When you hurt, your real friends hurt with you. When you get drop-kicked, they get drop-kicked. They hate who you hate. And I would no more expect my ex's friends to reach out to me than I would expect my friends to reach out to my ex. If it happens, and everyone's okay with it, it's a beautiful thing. But no one should ever expect it. And mop-boy should definitely not ever expect it.

Kris Frieswick can be reached at krisf1@gte.net.

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