My wife and I, the other night, were entertaining some guests, and the group of us got to talking about our romantic pasts. As we shared our stories, some of us told stories of shy and awkward dealings in romance, while others seemed to have taken the experience more “in stride”; some had lucky tales involving relatively few stepping stones between them and true love, while others seemed to have blazed a swath of destruction through the dating world.

During this conversation, I revealed the fact that I’ve never dumped anyone. At no point in my life have I ever been the person responsible for ending the romantic relationship. Even my own wife dumped me, but more on that in a minute.

If you think about the phrase “being dumped”, it is simultaneously A) a phrase that sounds unpleasant enough so that people would avoid wanting to “be dumped”, and B) an accurate description of the experience. Believe me; I should know.

* * *

My wife and I have been married for more than nineteen years. We’ve been together, as a couple for more than twenty-six. Those first seven-plus years, from March of 1994 to May of 2001, we were dating.

Well… almost that whole time.

The last person who ever dumped me was my wife, in the Fall of 1994.

For, you see, my wife and I started dating when I was a senior and she was a sophomore. I was eighteen at the time, and she was sixteen. What that lead up to, as spring turned to summer and summer faded into fall, was a high-school junior dating a college freshman. Now, luckily for me, my first undergraduate degree came from a university just down the street a little bit, so it wasn’t that hard for me to get back home to keep the fires burning, so to speak. But, the fact that my wife was dating a college freshman was a point of contention with her parents.

And, what possible chance would I have had –if I had been made aware of the concern in advance of my then-girlfriend deciding to take action– in trying to convince her that her parents, who’d raised her and cared for her for her entire life, the very people with whom she shared her home, were wrong and our relationship was right?

I would have had no chance. So, looking back, I guess it was fine that it came at me out of a clear blue sky.

I was at my then-girlfriend’s house on what was –no doubt– a weekend evening, and she and I were watching television. It was a movie, converted to television (back in the day, when they used to do that kind of stuff), with the racy parts removed to make space for the proper number of television commercials. The movie was The Pelican Brief, starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington. I only remember because, like so many of the other details of that evening, it is burnt onto my brain.

During one of the commercial breaks of the movie, when the network gave several moments to a certain number of advertisers, working on behalf of a certain number of corporations, to try to sell my then-girlfriend and I a certain number of products, we spent the time, instead, breaking up.

I got dumped during a commercial break in a movie-edited-for-television.

As a side note, to this day, I have not seen the ending of the movie; I am afraid of what might come, were I to try.

I got in my Plymouth Horizon (I think it was an ’87), and I drove as far down the road as I could get before my vision, through my tears, got so bad that I had to pull over. As it turns out, that wasn’t very far. I wondered, only after the fact, if the sound of me, beating on the hood of my car in frustration and pain, made it all the way back to my then-girlfriend’s house.

Thus began the long dark winter of my soul… ahem, ahem.

To be completely honest, the months that passed between the time when we broke up, in the fall, and when we got back together in the spring, were lost to me in the fog of my freshman year at a university where twenty percent of the freshmen never made it to sophomore year –or so the story went back then. I was so deep in textbooks and lecture notes, trying to keep my hopes of becoming an engineer alive, it was probably better for the both of us, not to be attached.

In the spring, when my then-girlfriend needed a date to her junior prom, she asked me. We’d been able, over those months, to stay in touch and to remain friends. To hear her tell the story, that time involved –for her– a couple of dates with some other guys who weren’t suitable replacements for me.

For, you see, part of the problem was this: I was my then-girlfriend’s first boyfriend. I’d called her, to ask her to go to the movies with me coincidentally, on the day before her sixteenth birthday, and –unbeknownst to me– she’d been prohibited from dating until she was sixteen. On Wednesday night, March 30th, 1994, I needed a date, because my best friend was busting my chops to go on a double-date with him and his girlfriend. So, despite the fact that she was, at the time, 15.997 years old, her parents gave their permission and we went to see The Mighty Ducks 2, which had premiered the weekend before.

I can’t fault my then-girlfriend’s parents –my current in-laws– for feeling the way that they did, at the time. Now that I have not one, but two teenage daughters (they had three, which is to say that I have two sisters-in-law), I’m not sure how I’d feel about them getting exceedingly exclusive with any particular guy in the near future.

In any case, it all worked out in the end; it was a bump in a road that has otherwise been fairly smooth.

Twenty-six years, give or take about six or seven months, is a great run, so far.