TKOG Who pays you to break up with her

Announcement! The last official NTKOG of the project (but not of the blog! not by a longshot!) goes up on Monday, and I’m going to need your help on this one. For the last day, I’m going to be the kind of girl to — do whatever you say. On Sunday, from 12:01AM to 11:59PM, I’m going to let y’all make all of my decisions for me, via blog comments and Twitter. Tune in on Sunday! Make me flirt with a cop, eat a squid, or whatever else strikes your fancy!

NTKOG #248: The kind of emotionally-promiscuous, utterly histrionic nutjob who — dissatisfied with the dissolution of her previous affairs — hires a stranger for a break-up redo.

I am: super great at planning what I want to say to people, but…

I am not: one for grabbing you by the ear and actually demanding to say my friggin’ piece.

The Scene: Nervously pacing outside the hole-in-the-wall diner by my office, waiting for a forty-year-old stranger to show up so I could pay him to break up with me. Wait, what?

This third of my TaskRabbit challenges stems from an idea Kiss-Ducker and I worked on a few years ago: the emotional equivalent of a haunted house. A Break-Up-A-Torium, where every mild-mannered girl could live out the crockery-shattering, snot-rattling break-up of her masochistic dreams.

And while we never got the caper off the ground, one measly buck on TaskRabbit had bought me a forty-five minute break-up with a local professional actor during my lunchbreak at work. We were set to meet at 11:30AM; by 11:33, I was shivering anxiously. I called to ask where he was — “I’m just walking there!” — then, after another five minutes had passed, texted again and left a voicemail.

Eight minutes into our relationship, I was clingy and he was emotionally unavailable. Great. It’s like we really were dating.

Moments later, I was greeted by a distinguished man with a gorgeous, gravely voice who bore a distinct resemblance to my Epic High-School Crush. We introduced ourselves warmly and headed into the diner. Nice to meet you. Now break up with me.

We chatted amicably while we waited for his food to come out, me angsting over how to begin the break-up. Because my last relationship ended so well (hearts, The Ex), I didn’t have any recent history to saddle him with, so dug through The Vault for a half-decade-old situation I never really got closure on. To prepare, I’d sent him a character description and a few paragraphs of synopsis. I was toying with various opening lines, when he pushed aside his burger and fixed his eyes on me:

“Well come on,” he sighed with all the weariness of a flickered-out former flame. “You brought me here to talk it out, so let’s talk it out.”

“You — I just — why were you such a dick to me?”

“I reject your basic hypothesis,” he shot back, sounding so much like the character he was playing that I had to catch my breath. Oh snap, guys. The break-up was on.

My basic objective in the exercise: to secure from Faux Beau a genuine apology for something kind of screwed-up he’d done a handful of years ago. And to my delight, the actor didn’t immediately cave — he made me fight for the apology I wanted. Throughout the first ten minutes of the argument, he weakened gradually.

I don’t know what you want from me. I’m sorry you feel that way. I’m sorry there’s nothing that could be done. I — I’m sorry.

But even after he’d apologized, still, it wasn’t enough. It never is, right? I kept bristling and — classic break-up move — he went on the offensive.

Faux Beau: No matter what I do, you’re going to see what you want to see in me. If I give a waitress a big tip, you think it’s because I want to sleep with her. Did it occur to you that maybe I didn’t want to wait for change? Maybe I just got really good service. Maybe–
TKOG: Oh come on, of course you want to sleep with her.
Faux Beau: What can I say? I like waitresses.

Like all of my arguments, we spent half of our time just making each other laugh, setting aside the anger and guilt long enough to spike a perfectly arch aphorism. And, like all the best fights, our argument followed its own dreamy break-up logic. Accusations bled into apologies which flared into rage and then, for one soft moment in the middle, fond reminiscing.

TKOG: God, I just. You — you have the most beautiful nose.
Faux Beau:  Really? You think so? It’s been broken a few times.
TKOG: Probably by some waitress.
Faux Beau: I really do like them.

As is so characteristic, although I’d brought him there to scream and guilt, I ended up apologizing to him, just a little. I rationalized why we were sitting there, having that discussion, so many years after the fact, and — in a very meta move — hypothesized that I was injecting drama to my stolid life by creating an ersatz relationship.

Faux Beau: I think you mean archetypal. Like the platonic ideal of a relationship.
TKOG:  Dude, Plato must have been a fucked-up guy.

The conversation meandered its weird course to the natural finish and we looked at each other, seriously, not unkindly, before I shrugged and told him, look, I care about you, I want you to have a wonderful life. I just want to have a slightly more awesome one.

“I think you deserve that,” he said, then we parted ways, strangers again, strangers finally.

Ha! No! That was just douchebag melodrama. In reality, as he finished the burger, we snapped out of character, I thanked him profusely, and we chatted easily about the local burlesque scene. But I thought about his last line on the walk back to the office and, you know? I think I do deserve it.

The Verdict: Holy frig, guys. Holy frig. Instead of internet dating sites, there should be internet break-up sites. The second I dashed back into the office, Co-Worker asked me how the break-up went, then answered her own question: “You’re glowing!” What can I say? It was a spiritual spa treatment.

I only wish I’d thought to do this back when all the wounds were fresh. I can’t even imagine how helpful it could have been. Right now, I’m coming at the experience as a well-adjusted dude in a good emotional place but — but when something painful happens, the worst possible feeling is voicelessness. You can talk to your friends, your cat, your therapist, but they’re all people who exist to fight on your side. They’re incapable of an unbiased approach to the other person’s point of view.

All afternoon, Co-Worker’s and my minds clicked over other situations we could hire actors to role-play. Painless fights! Righted wrongs! Closure! And the best part is, after the fight, you can walk away from your opponent really-forever, the way you probably should have in the first place.

Thanks to TaskRabbit for hooking me up with a $25 gift certificate to use their amazing service in what I can objectively call the weirdest. way. possible.

Tagged as: a boon for local eavesdroppers, boston, break-up, break-up-a-torium, i always forget i was a drama geek in high-school until i get a chance to chew the scenery like this, i have no idea where it came from but i just might have cried a little during this exchange, i swear i'm emotionally well-adjusted, i'd really like to hear the way the actor tells this story at cocktail parties, oh hey if you're a guy with whom i have history and to whom parts of this fight apply then cat's out of the bag -- you have a really nice nose, role-playing, TaskRabbit, you should try this