As a child, my mother used to work nights. Hating to see her go, I would employ a series of desperate stall tactics. “If you sneeze when you get there, God bless you,” I once yelled, as her car pulled away and I waved goodbye. 

40 years later, I’m still coming up with tactics to tolerate the stark realities of love and loss. Not too long ago, for example, I fell in love with a phlebotomist. Ironically, he was one of the few ex-partners I’ve had who did not bleed me dry, nor go for the jugular. After ten months, he came over one night and said I need to be alone. Up to and including his drive to my place that night (“on my way!” he’d texted, with a smiley emoji), he’d given me no warning that he was in any way unhappy. 

He said he was still in love with me and always would be, but he would never again be in a romantic relationship. The best explanation I could extract from him was that he cannot (and will not ever) figure out a way to stop torturing himself with the idea that he is, in some way, always disappointing someone he loves. If he did not have to take care of his ailing mother, he said, he would live on Gilligan’s Island, or jump off a bridge. 

“When did you decide this?” I asked him, sobbing. 

“Today, I guess,” he answered. But to his credit, he was sobbing too. When I asked him why he wouldn’t even sleep on it, he said, “Because I don’t want to have this conversation all over again.” 

That was when I knew it was over. 

Over the next few days, I tried to process and accept the break-up with a thousand imagined conversations in my head. I found it impossible to mentally drop the idea of trying to talk him out of this obviously stupid and impulsive mistake. But I begrudgingly had to admit that Seth knew himself better than I did. You have to trust that he knows what’s right for him, I told myself. 

But he’s a goddamn idiot, myself responded. 

Normally, my relationships end because I have been scorned. To recover, I rely on the energizing rage of resentment and pettiness. This is a very effective method of getting me off the floor I’ve been sobbing on. But what does the Queen of Hard Feelings do when a relationship with the ideal morbidity curve jumps off its cliff? This one left me completely unscathed until the very end. The hands of my mind hung awkwardly at the sides of my hemispheres, like they were having their picture taken and didn’t know what to do with themselves. My pacing brain needed a pacifier. 

As a crutch to help me accept the break-up and mentally wish him well, I opted to tweak reality and pretend that the reason Seth was breaking up with me was that he’d decided to move to Sweden. Some sort of amazing opportunity had come up, and he just couldn’t miss the chance. (We’d both agreed we weren’t cut out for long-distance.) In my head I began to imagine bad dubbing over my thoughts, replacing the words “being alone” with “moving to Sweden.” This drastically reduced my impulses to talk him out of his dream. It also solved the conundrum that I truly did wish him the very best, but I could not speak the truth in my thoughts without sounding sarcastic and mean-spirited: 

I’m so happy for you that you get to be alone. move to Sweden. 

Congratulations on your upcoming isolation! move! 

I hope you love it so much that you are alone for the rest of your life. never leave. 

Swedes build their tables and chairs by instinct alone, instruction manuals be damned. No one needs anyone to tell them what to do. No one stands in the way of their bad decisions. “Surely Seth is loving it,” I thought. 

My kids had never met Seth, but knew that I’d been seeing someone. I told my 15-year-old that Seth and I had to break up because he got a job in Sweden. Teaching English as a second language. 

The little smartypants who is genuinely curious and in no way doubts the veracity of my statement: Aren’t 90% of Swedes already highly proficient in English? 

Me: Well. Someone’s gotta teach the other 10%. 

Smartypants: Couldn’t they hire 90% of their own population? Do they really need to bring in an American? 

Me: Did I say English teacher? I meant meatball chef. Sweden ran out of meatball chefs. And Seth has always wanted to roll meatballs for a living. Chance of a lifetime, kiddo. No hard feelings.

To my pleasant surprise, buds of tenderness and acceptance began to blossom within my soul. But within a week of our breakup, I came across Seth’s freshly-reactivated Bumble profile. His new profile picture was one I’d taken of him when we were together. Below it were the words “looking for a long-term relationship.” And next to that, in finer print, the words you are a dime a dozen, Lindsay. 12 of you costs 10 cents (one Swedish krona). I have thrown you away without explanation because you are a dime a dozen. 

I swiped left. 

I still sometimes fantasize about what I would say to Seth, if I somehow had a few moments of his undivided attention. If I could look into his splendid speckled green eyes. It would probably be something like: 

My dear Scandinavian manchild: Any day now it will dawn on me that you have become as insignificant to me as I was to you. But please, remember the best of me, and I’ll remember the best of you. And if you sneeze in Sweden, God bless you. I’ve heard sneezes can blow meatballs right out the door. Better hold onto them tight, like all things precious. Hold on tight.