“I got dumped on Xmas”

Illustration: Sylvia Park

My holiday dating track record is so bad, it’s actually become a punch line. Ever since I was a freshman in college—dumped by my first love for a younger, thinner blond on New Year’s Eve—I’ve racked up several romantic comedies’ worth of seasonal heartbreak, some of 90210 proportions.

In 2006, I was ending one relationship and starting another, but they overlapped a bit (oops). I took one home to Chicago for the holidays without telling the other and lost ten years from my life when the second guy flew in and surprised me—at the place I was having lunch with the first guy. I didn’t spend New Year’s with either, but flew to South Africa instead. With a third guy.

In 2007, I was brutally dumped by my boyfriend in mid-December, about ten days before he was supposed to come home with me to meet my parents for the first time. He canceled the trip—and then proceeded to toy with me throughout the holidays (writing me a sweet e-mail about how I was “perfect” for him, then two days later telling me he never wanted to talk to me again). Even worse, he took another girl on the New Year’s trip to Cabo we had planned together—while I spent the first day of the year in New York, reeling from the news I’d just received: He and my best friend’s little sister had hooked up a week after our breakup. Happy 2008, indeed.

This year, I’m shooting for “nothing leading to an acute need for therapy.”

It turns out that I’m not the only one with stories of unmitigated holiday love-life disaster—unfortunately, “You’re dumped” seems to be one of New Yorkers’ favorite gifts to give. But beware: It isn’t just Santa who’s making a list. Karma’s got one going too. Pull one of the following stunts, told to us by tortured readers, and next holiday season, you might just get checked off.

Codger dupes bird!
“The night before Thanksgiving, I had just turned 18, and my (much older) boyfriend of three months came over. He asked what I wanted to do that night; I told him ‘sex, drugs and rock & roll.’ He brought wine, we turned on the music, and I lost my virginity. It was beautiful. After he left but before I went to sleep, I wrote in my diary: ‘I have a lot to be thankful for this year.’ About eight months later I found out he was married.”—Laura, 28

Sinner screwed in church!
“Every year on Christmas Eve, my family has a very long, multicourse, very Italian dinner, which includes a lot of cocktails. And every year, we end up at midnight Mass at some little Podunk church. I spend the entire Mass scouring the congregation for cute guys. Sacrilegious? Probably. Entertaining, especially when I’m halfway in the bag? Absolutely. It keeps me awake, and up until one year, nothing ever came of it.

“That Christmas, I spot this one guy across the aisle. We make eye contact, exchange glances, etc. At one point, I get up to use the bathroom in the lobby in the back of the church. Apparently, he took my glances as some sort of signal that he was supposed to follow me, so just as I’m about to head into the ladies’ room, he comes up behind me and grabs my hand. My reactionary and motor skills are slightly slowed at this point, so I do nothing as he pulls me out the doors and outside. He pulls me around the corner to the side of the church, underneath one of the stained-glass windows, and we start making out. And making out. And making out. For so long that all of a sudden I hear organ music coming from the window, and I realize the Mass is over and everyone is beginning to process out. I tear myself away from this person whose name I have yet to learn and go sprinting around the corner and come head-on with the rest of my family, who are very curious about where I have been. ‘I had to get some air,’ I stammer. ‘It got too hot in there, I was feeling a little light-headed.’ Light-headed, indeed. I looked over my shoulder to see if I could catch him, but couldn’t find him in the crowd. I never learned his name nor ever saw him again, but I still look for him every year.”—Casey, 22

Shrink flips out, feeds wrong pussy!
“Holiday ’04: My boyfriend of eight months and I had just broken up at the beginning of December. Or rather, he got overwhelmed at school (he was working on his master’s in psychology) and decided that we needed to take a ‘break.’ About a week before Christmas, a few days before I was to leave for Brazil for two and a half weeks with my roommate, he calms down and decides we should ‘work on things’ en route to ‘getting back together.’ He asks that I not fool around with anyone on vacation and promises to feed my cat for me. While I’m gone, I get e-mails about how he misses me and that he would go over to my place to take naps in my bed so he could smell me. When I get back, there’s sweet little notes hidden all over my place. Come to find out, he’d slept with at least three girls in the two and a half weeks I was away. Sad thing is, we still dated on and off for another two years.”—Elizabeth, 26

Narrow escape from life in basement!
“My boyfriend of two years broke up with me on New Year’s Eve—about ten minutes before he was supposed to pick me up to go to our friends’ annual bash. He called, I answered all giddy (I looked so cute, by the way—new Abercrombie sweater, which was all the rage back then), and when I asked him if he was on his way, he said, ‘Actually I think we should break up.’ He also thought it would be best that I not go to the party because he was already planning to take someone else and thought it would be ‘awkward.’ Because I was so obsessed with him I let him get away with it. So I sat by myself. On New Year’s Eve. On the couch. Alone. And watched Seinfeld. And cried myself to sleep. The upside of the story? I totally forgot about him, moved on with my life and moved to New York City, while he still lives in our hometown. Because of him and the horrendous heartbreak he caused, I am so much stronger. Did I mention he still lives in his parents’ basement?”—Lauren, 23

Kissed-off at Christmas!
“I made the dumb-ass mistake of dumping my girlfriend the week after Thanksgiving. It’s not worth going into the reasons why (partly because I’m not sure myself), but she was most unhappy. She was estranged from her family and didn’t have a lot of friends in town, so I’d doomed her to a pretty grim holiday season. Following the typical painful-breakup back-and-forth, I agreed that we’d stay together through New Year’s Day.

“The next month was weird—we carried on mostly like nothing had happened (although we rarely had sex). I usually hate Christmas, but it was fun helping her set up the tree. Her holiday cookies were incredibly delicious. Plus, she was one of those women who looks especially cute bundled up against the cold. New Year’s Eve was very strange—we went to a fancy restaurant with my friends. At midnight, I kissed her passionately, and she said, ‘You’re evil.’ A couple hours later, we parted ways—for good. ‘You’ll never find another girl who’ll treat you as well as I treat you,’ she said. I doubted her, but for a long time, she was right.”—Owen, 31

Band nerd plays wrong tune!
“It was during my first year of high school. I had, that fall, gotten my first boyfriend. It was awkward, and since we were both band nerds, the relationship mostly consisted of making out on the way to and from football games. Around month three or four (December), I started to realize I didn’t even like being around him. I was (and am) a very laid-back girl; big romantic gestures make me uncomfortable. For Christmas, he actually wrapped himself in a giant refrigerator box and sat on my porch…waiting to be opened in front of my parents. It was horrible.”—Sarah, 24

Jilted lovers get last word…in bed!
“My boyfriend of five years, whom I had intended to marry, dumped me on New Year’s Eve day. He’d met someone else. A friend came to the rescue and took me to a different party. At this new party, I met Charlie, who had found his longtime girlfriend in bed with another man earlier that week. We immediately hit it off and haven’t looked back since.”—Alyson, 24

Sexes battle in New Year’s smackdown!
“My boyfriend broke up with me right around the holidays, but we both had tickets to the same New Year’s party. So did my boyfriend’s ex, whom he had rekindled with days after our breakup. After much debate about who was allowed at the party, he promised there would be no kissing or obvious displays of the devastating breakup in front of 200 of our closest friends. So when I saw them kissing, I ran over fuming and whispered some not-so-kind words in my ex’s ear, which ignited a full-on fight among me, the girl he was kissing and our groups of girlfriends. The hour-long West Side Story–style battle ended in a drink being thrown and some girls being escorted out. Including me.”—Katy, 23

Girl gives sex black eye!
“Going out with an alcoholic neighbor is all well and good until she punches you in the face during sex. Wasted and on top of me, the call to violence was apparently far too great to prevent herself from closed-fist punching me in the face and giving me a black eye. Sure, I was shocked. Sure, I was turned on. And sure, my reaction was grabbing her, throwing her down and putting a pillow on top of her face until she relinquished. We both dug this particular sexcapade very much, and continued to hump for the next few months until I had to put her in rehab. But this incident happened hours before I had to fly home for Thanksgiving, and in my experience, mothers who pick their sons up at the airport for the holidays to find them with a shiner on their punim are none too happy. I told my mom what happened, and she told me to stay away from (and I’m quoting verbatim) ‘girls like that.’ I fucking love her, man. Thanksgiving dinner with friends and family went off without further harm or incident. And I was the belle of the ball, black eye an’ all.”—Michael, 27