Until B. broke up with me in the food store parking lot last weekend, thereby ending my winning streak, our breakup score in the past quarter had been 20-0, my advantage. Now it was 20-1. Frankly I found his behavior annoying. Each of my breakups had involved weeks of prior anguish, hours of tears and self-recrimination violent enough to evoke nothing but relief in the other party at the thought of ending it. Some breakups had been absolute feats of diplomacy; so much so that I was the only one of us realizing that they were in fact breakups. Here was B., breaking it off on a whim.

It took B. less than a minute to calm down enough to ask me to get back into the car to have lunch together as planned. I could not bring myself to reply. Honoring the one solid rule we have applied during our fifteen years as a couple; to avoid causing irreparable damage during a fight if possible, I dug out the broccoli he had asked me to get, chucked it through the car window and dragged my bags to the closest bus stop.

There was no doubt that we were experiencing turbulence. Breaking up twenty-one times with the same person has some advantages however. Like with fire drills at work, if you pay attention during drills instead of just being annoyed at having to interrupt your work you can concentrate better when a real fire breaks out. You may even manage to smuggle your purse out in defiance of the rules so you can sit at Wayne’s Coffee while the others stand around freezing and waiting for directions. Since I had been paying attention during previous breakups, I knew that the important thing was to avoid grief at all cost.