Beth Cook is a dating coach and wing-woman who throws private dating events for San Francisco’s most awesome and unattached. She also writes and draws about her own dating experiences and would love to hear from you. Want advice? Have advice? Send her an email.
Not sure whether to break up with your boyfriend? There’s an app for that!
The cutesy, 6-week-old mobile app Should I break up with my boyfriend? promises to help you reflect on your relationship for two weeks—and ultimately decide whether you should to kick your guy to the curb or continue cuddling with him.
I desperately want to download it for 99 cents, not because my boyfriend is on the chopping block, but so I can see what kind of crappy “customized advice” this thing spits out. Unfortunately, I don’t have a fragile, overpriced iPhone.
I’ll admit, I would have loved this thing when I was 25 years old…when I cataloged dates and made graphs of my feelings in an attempt to discover whether I was on the right romantic track. (Note: I also used a Magic 8 Ball and one of those Fortune Teller Fish you get at Chinese restaurants.)
Once I had a few more years under my belt, I realized these efforts were futile. You can’t measure like/lust/love, and it’s easy to fool yourself and derive conclusions that support your delusional self but which are far from the truth. I was dating assholes (as young females are wont to do) and kept convincing myself that the next asshole would be different. He’d get his act together and fall madly in love with me. Ha—youth! I wish one of my graphs would have told me to wise up.
The truth is, you should break up with someone when you—or your significant other—chooses to stop working on the relationship. By work, I mean working on the rough spots, attempting to meet your mate’s needs and communicate yours, and trying to be the best, most loving, happy person you can possibly be.
It seems that it’s become a goal of ours to use technology to trivialize relationships. My advice? If you want to maintain any of your humanness, stay far away from junior-high-school dating games like Should I break up with my boyfriend? Your boyfriend deserves more thought than the 2 minutes it takes to mark your mood via smartphone (unless he’s one of those assholes I mentioned).
If you need an app to tell you whether you should end a relationship, the answer is probably ‘Yes.’
Photo by Should I break up with my boyfriend
