Unless you marry your first boyfriend, you probably have some experience with breakups. While some relationships end amicably, others have rather intense conclusions. From scary to almost funny, 10 women across the country share their tales of terrible breakups.

Every week, the gentlemen over at GuySpeak answer women’s relationship questions in guy style. Then they handpick some of their favorites and send them over to us to answer (read: fix) them in girl style. We call it GuySpeak/GirlSpeak. This week—is hooking up the best way to get over someone?

I’ve been told by several people that the best way to get over someone is to hook up with someone else. What do you think?

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Amazing! Getting your heart broken does not have to be the worst thing in the world. After ending my most recent relationship last week, I’ve found myself bouncing back in rather good shape, due in no small part to the lessons I learned from having my heart broken once before. The breakup with my fiance over a year ago was the first real huge kick to the stomach I’d ever experienced and it taught me six things that made coping this time so much easier.

Watching the recently released Nancy Meyers flick “It’s Complicated” got me thinking: Wow, Meryl Streep has beautiful skin. It also got me thinking about the notion of a relationship reboot. Not to be confused with backsliding, where you ill-advisedly reconnect with a very recent ex after a breakup, the reboot presupposes that a goodly amount of time has passed, as it did in the movie when two middle-aged divorcees tried to give it another go after ten years apart. It’s no surprise that the relationship reboot has become a rom-com trope – it fulfills a fantasy that a lot of us have about the “what ifs” of relationships that have ended for one reason or another, and exploits hopeful ideas of personal growth and fate. There’s an undeniable allure and romance to reviving those lost loves, but does it work in practice? Or is it true that everything ends for a reason? Two women debate whether relationship redos are worth it or not. 

“Just because your divorce was messy doesn’t mean your house has to be!”—a catchy motto the peeps out at the Colonial Park Goodwill in Pennsylvania have been touting in support of their Dump Your X’s Stuff Drive. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the charity has decided to help the brokenhearted unload some of the literal baggage from former relationships. After all, it’s enough s/he wasted your time, you can’t let them continue to suck up valuable shelf and closet space, girl! So, bring that box full of crap down to Goodwill on Feb. 12 and dump them for good. As for all that emotional baggage you’re dealing with, you can count on us gals at The Frisky to help you sort all that out.  [PennLive.com]

I am newly single (again). After a fun, but exhausting, up-and-down five months, my boyfriend-ish-person and I broke up this week. I’m sad about it—I really did fall for him and had so much fun with him. But I’m also a little relieved. The drama was wearing thin. Plus, he hated my clothes. Yeah. My clothes.

There will be some point in your career as a 20-something when someone will break your heart, and bad. By bad I mean, you may think you’re having a nervous breakdown and will have the desire to be hospitalized. In some cases, this actually may happen. Here’s how to deal:

Suck it up: When I was crying at my desk, my older, married co-worker sat down and looked me straight in my tear-stained eyes and said, “You have to understand, this guy might be one of a bunch of different guys you will date until you find someone who’s really in it to win it,” he said. Putting this person who had just knocked me on my ass within the context of a long line of potential douche bags down the road somehow made it hurt a bit less.

If there’s one thing that redeems the terrible process of breaking up with someone, it’s the transformation-rich recovery period that follows. Don’t get us wrong: Breakups are a sad, sorry business, and even the cleanest ones entail some kind of annoying consequence or follow-up, like adjusting to an empty bed or having to return that awesome space heater he left at your apartment. The key to making the most of your breakup is engaging in life-affirming activities: little things that will empower you start over and set out into the great unknown (singlehood—eek!) with courage and resilience. Resist binge-drinking, rebound guys or ex sex, and consider these fun post-breakup activities instead.

I think we can all agree that the internet has made it much, much harder to get over a breakup. Sure, you may have successfully erased his number from your phone, used his junior high football T-shirt as a rag, put away all your couple photos, ordered him never to call again, and cursed him to hell, but all of that effort is almost a waste considering he’s just a click of the mouse away.

After a while, though, watching how he’s growing in the midriff via Facebook photos loses its luster. You already know almost everything about him anyway, after all that time you spent/wasted. But what about his new girlfriend? She’s someone to be curious about.

A couple months ago I discovered that the husband half of a couple I’ve known for years was leaving his wife for one of his grad students. I was shocked. I mean, I’ve had friends go through relationship ups and downs before, but this couple was one I’d always looked up to as a relationship ideal. It sounds cliché, but they seemed like the perfect couple. They were both creative, independent (yet also very supportive of each other) and seemed very much in love. They went on adventurous vacations, were both still super hot—hell, they even had a house with a white picket fence! How could they break up?! How could they do this to me?!

Hey, breaking news, guys: the paper of record has just discovered that social media makes breaking up harder than it used to be. In an article called “Breaking Up in a Digital Fishbowl,” The New York Times reports that in this day of shared email passwords, Facebook, Twitter and various other social media platforms, it’s nearly impossible to truly disconnect from an ex:

[The] idea of what it means to break up is [also] being redefined. Where once a spurned lover could use scissors (literally) to cut an ex out of the picture, digital images of the smiling couple in happier days abound on the Web and are difficult to delete. Status updates and tweets have a way of wending their way back to scorned exes, thanks to the interconnectedness of social media. And breakups, awkward and drawn-out in person, are even more so online as details are parsed by the curious, their faces pressed against the digital glass.

Even for those of us who have been spared messy online breakups, it isn’t exactly news that sites like Facebook redefine (and invent new) dating rituals that are complex and difficult to navigate. Though the article lacks any actual news, it does give us an excuse to revisit the issue, one that brings many questions to the forefront. Like: is the convenience of connection worth the price of our privacy? And: are we merely “performers” on the stage of social media platforms, continually changing our role as our relationships to the other players change and evolve?

I’ve gone through breakups on the day before Valentine’s, on Yom Kippur, and once even naked. Actually, that was probs the best one, strangely enough; it felt so honest and, hey, at least I spared myself bad sex. Anyway, as someone who dates a lot—pretty unsuccessfully—I know about breakups. They’re a fact of life love. So, if you’re planning on dumping your boo, here are some times you’re gonna have to carry that weight just a little bit longer. Otherwise, you might wind up in a situation similar to this tragic Dater X Christmas story. As they say, timing is everything!

Fine, I’ll admit it. I had many a daydream about how I was going to spend the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I was looking forward to a staycation and getting to spend lots of time with the Architect. We’d been dating for a month and a half and I imagined us heading out in the snow to museums, cuddling up on the couch to watch TV shows, going to parties as a couple, and having sleepovers where, for once, we could actually sleep in. So my stomach got that just-belly-flopped-off-the-high-dive feeling when he called on Christmas Eve and said, “Can we talk?”

Noooooooooo!

While flipping through a copy of People recently, I saw that in the “out” section of a recent Style Watch “in” and “out” list—sandwiched between things like “stainless steel home decor” and “molten chocolate cake”—was “long distance relationships.” This struck me as something that really could never be either in or out, so I had to hear the explanation.

“It’s part of a new green, eco-conscious attitude: Break up with your out-of-state boyfriend or girlfriend because it’s not sustainable, and date local!” Jennifer Ganshirt of Frank About Women, a marketing-to-women consulting firm, told the mag.

Granted, it makes for a lot of fantastic break-up lines: “Colin, it’s not you, it’s the environment,” or, “I think we should see more sustainable people” or even, “There’s another woman: Mother Earth.”

But beyond the fact that this is taking the green thing a little too far, is there seriously anyone who would actually use an excuse like this to break it off?

Apparently, there is. After quizzing friends, it turns out that there are even more lame ways to pull the plug. Read more ...

Over the last year, I have spent a lot of time—both in my free time and on this site—thinking and venting about the mistakes I made and the lessons I learned from the breakup of my five-year relationship with my ex. Lots of “I’ll nevers” have come out of my mouth and onto the keyboard. I’ll never date a professional bulls**tter again! I’ll never try to heal an emotional cripple! I’ll never ignore my gut instinct again! Good lessons, for sure. But honestly, all this “never” talk makes it easy to forget that I—hell, we—did a lot of things right in that relationship too: habits, feelings, and actions that I will always want to be a part of my romantic relationships going forward. Here are 15.

No matter what stage your breakup is in, a good song helps. Whether you’re swollen from crying or red with rage, it’s comforting to know that someone else has felt the same anger, regret and pain that you’re feeling. Here are some of 2009’s best songs for drowning (out) your sorrows.

Consider, if you will, two breakups:

Bachelor #1, a summer romance, invited me on to his parents’ motor boat. It was the day after we’d slept together for the first time and I thought we were having a lovely date. But this jerk puttered into the middle of Long Island Sound, stopped the boat’s engine, and then, as the boat was rocking back and forth in the waves, dumped me. Then he puttered the boat back to the marina, deposited me on a pier, and left, presumably to get in his car and drive himself home. Shocked doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt! ‘Did he REALLY take me on a boat in the middle of Long Island Sound just to break up with me? What a psycho!’ I said to myself, as I called someone to come pick me up.

A breakup almost always sucks, but this time of year it can be especially painful. The good news is the holidays can also serve as a wonderful distraction from your heartache—and you don’t have to worry about shelling out money for a gift (or acting delighted when he gives you socks again). Luckily, not only are there plenty of reasons to love being single at this time of year, there are lots of ways to ease your loneliness, process your feelings, and improve your mood, too.

As we earn more money and work longer hours, new statistics show that more women are cheating on their husbands—but that doesn’t mean that men are as forgiving about affairs as we can be.

According to a 2001 survey, about 15 percent of men admit to cheating on their wives or girlfriends, and women were not far behind with a 10-percent cheat rate.

But here’s one thing that hasn’t changed—women are willing to forgive their husbands for infidelity, and men aren’t. A recent study found that men were significantly more likely to end a marriage based on spousal infidelity than women. Read more ...

What’s more important to you: your shoe collection or your dude collection? Survey says … shoes! A new study proves that Carrie Bradshaw was right to worship her Manolos because shoes are way more important to us ladies than men are. The shocking stats say that 92 percent of women remember the first pair of shoes they purchased with their own money while only 63 percent remember the name of the first dude they kissed. And even more insulting for the gentlemen … 96 percent of women regret throwing out a pair of shoes while just 15 percent feel sorry for dumping a boyfriend. I must be in the slim minority here, because I have no recollection of my first pair of shoes but I could never forget my first kiss with Jeremy. Dreamy.

And PS: Of course we don’t regret dumping a bad news dude. Good riddance. Maybe I’ve just never owned the right pair of shoes or something, but this study seems insulting to me. How about you? Are shoes really more important to you than men? [Daily Mail]