Breaking up is never easy. That’s why so many people write songs about it and rom-coms are so popular. Each break-up is difficult in its own individual way, but low is low, and so there are some never-fail methods for consoling yourself and getting better. There’s basically two phases for someone who has just gotten out of a meaningful relationship, sheer depression and learning to be yourself again, and so we’ve divided these lists into two. Also, duh, there’s a difference between what dudes and dudettes need to do, and you can find the link to the girls page at the bottom of this one. As in average age of death, guys go first here.

DO A SHITLOAD OF COCAINE WHILE LISTENING TO KILLDOZER
Really, there are endless combinations of this for you to explore, but the basic gist is that you ingest heroic quantities of hard drugs while listening to blisteringly angry music. You know it’s working when anger and grim hatred fills your being to the point that you feel so emotionally void that you wish the anger would return just so you could feel something, anything. You may even get to such a dark place that you devise complex murder/suicide scenarios that you have every intention of enacting. That’s fine. It’s your right to go more than a little crazy. Still, if you get high enough you’ll wake up the next day feeling awful, but when you finally break through the wave of drug-induced psychosis late that afternoon all the seething hatred you felt the night before will suddenly feel very far away. Repeat as necessary until you let it go. Ah, the glories of catharsis. 

CONVINCE YOURSELF THAT YOU’VE ALREADY DIED
This is big for only that it takes you so low that there’s no place to go but up. One of your closest friends has to come to bring you out, and you have to try to fight him, not out of any sense of injustice, but because you simply want to kill everyone. After he peels your punches from him and tries to convince you to come out to the bar, you had best chase him with a very sharp knife. It’s despicably embarrassing afterwards, but no one will ever bring it up. Becoming a pseudo-vampire is about as low as you can go. You’ll be fucking gross sluts to get over the bitch soon after this.

MONOPOLIZE YOUR FRIENDS’ TIME
With girls, this sort of thing is second nature after the end of a relationship. Every morsel of your recent failure must be analyzed and catalogued for future reference. Group crying may be involved. With guys, though, it works a little differently: they'll try to cheer you up at first, maybe take you out and get drunk, but after the fifth or sixth time you call someone to hang out at 3 in the morning because you can't handle being alone, don't be surprised if they stop picking up. Your friends will be there to talk shit with you for the immediate aftermath, but don't expect they're going to care too much when they want you to come over to play video games and all you do is weep silently to yourself in the middle of a round of Call of Duty 4.

BILL ANDERSON’S “3am”/GEORGE JONES’ “HE STOPPED LOVING HER TODAY”
Both these country songs perfectly describe what it means to be a broken man. Anderson’s song is all about wandering the streets looking at all the closed up bars while thinking about your old woman making love with another man at an hour when you can’t even buy yourself some drinks to drown your sorrows in. The guy then jumps off the bridge. Jones’ track is even more fucked up. It’s about how the only way anyone can ever let go of the love of their life is after they die. Listening to both these songs on repeat while drinking whiskey as the sun comes up is pretty much the only way to become a man. Emo is gay. Country did that shit first and far better. So listen to these songs instead of Bright Eyes or Iron and Wine or whatever other faggy shit you wanna bum out to.  Trust me, these songs (along with Son House’s “Downtrodden Blues” and any Townes) are much more contusive for getting into fistfights with your apartment, which is really what you wanna do anyway. Indulge, motherfucker. Indulge.

AND NO MORE SHALL WE PART
This Nick Cave album will rightly fuck you up. It’s consoling, but it also perpetuates your sadness. The title song is horrendously depressing, as are the rest of the tracks. You’ll want to play it on repeat as you fall asleep. It will make you into an awful, emotionally repressed person, but that’s fine. You don’t need to be attracting people at the moment. You’re a wounded soul who needs to partake in a bit of introspective wallowing. Don’t commit suicide, because that’s fucking gay, but you need to at least grab a kitchen knife a few times and consider chopping off a few digits because of your sins. Fuck that. This album is pretty restful, so just let its sorrow lure you to sleep. Deal with your fingers in the morning. You won’t have any interest in chopping them off then, because you’ll need them for flipping channels on the remote due to all the shitty TV that you’ll be watching for the next few weeks. 

FIGHT STRANGERS
This usually occurs in bars and at parties, for obvious reasons. You may take on the douchebag who keeps going after girls long after they’ve stopped finding it amusing, or it may be the hip fuck who has girlshanging all over him all night. You might even fight the good-natured soul who tries to stop you from being such a Grumpy Gus. Whatever. You’ll feel weird about it later and your friends will tell you that you’re a complete asshole, and they will be correct. You should feel bad, because doing this is really fucked up. But it also allows you an opportunity to feel empathy for others, which you need because dude, you’ve spent six fucking weeks brooding over yourself like a one-legged Russian and it’s about time that you started thinking about other people’s shit for a change. 

WHISKY
Rally up your best friends and drink a bottle, or perhaps two. Make them buy. Get so drunk that you talk about eating out your third grade teacher’s asshole. That’s good, it means you’re forgetting about the girl who broke your heart at least a little. Most assuredly you’ll say a bunch of embarrassing shit about her too. None of your friends will remember that, they’ll just be stoked that you’re out again for once. Let all the sick shit that you know about the one you used to love fly freely. Once it’s released, you’re well on your way to getting over her. That usually takes about a dozen of these, which is why you should start during the dark days.

GET RID OF PICTURES OF YA’LL TOGETHER
Unless you’re faggily theatrical, don’t burn them. The better bet is to put them in some collage or photo album that you’re collecting of all the people you’ve ever been with in your life. If you keep obsessing over the pictures after that, just move the collages over to your parents’ or to somewhere else where you can’t get to them when you’re alone at 4 am. Keep making collages of all your exs, that way when you’re 70 you’ll have an awesome book that you can look at that will show you all the attractive and interesting people that you fucked back when you were able to actually use your dick for something more worthwhile than pissing every ten minutes. I’m only 23, and mine is already fucking epic.

CALL REALLY OLD EX-GIRLFRIENDS
Everybody does this, but they do it the wrong way. Just talk for a while like your life is totally roses and let them tell you about the shit that they have to deal with everyday. Eventually they will wax nostalgic on all the good times ya’ll once shared. That’s how girls do. Okay, so now there’s someone besides your mom who loves you, holy shit! Now stop feeling sorry for yourself and go out drinking with your buds again. Don’t say anything more to her, though I know you’ll want to. Trust me, it’s a bad idea to date your high school girlfriends again. Just take the love that they throw your way as an assurance that you are someone to be had, then start fucking everyone that lets you. These girls are an insurance policy that you’ve invested in that tells you that you’re the shit. If they can love you at sixteen, girls forever older will fall in love with you too. After talking to them, you no longer need to worry about dying alone. Get over that retarded notion.

GET OVER THE FACT THAT YOUR EX IS ALREADY FUCKING SOMEONE ELSE
After a breakup, girls immediately take to fucking lots of dudes. It’s a psychological test they have to wade through to prove to themselves that they are still attractive to a wide cross-section of men, and it’s kinda sad if you consider it in depth. Think about that. It gives you some moral high ground. If you’re gay, then well, that dude is just as horny as you are and he’s most assuredly out there worshipping a new anus. Don’t fret on it. I’ve met many of my ex’s new boyfriends, and while some of them have been assholes, a lot have been pretty similar to me and a little rad. If that’s the case, then your ex is trying to repeat you, which is also sad, but it’s something to take solace in. If the new dude is a bigger douche than you are, fuck, that’s gravy. That means she’s fucking stupid anyway, so let her float away into an emotionally abusive relationship that will be a living hell for her, the slut. If the dude is cooler than you, take a deep breath and start fucking fat girls. At least they’ll let you do some shit that she never would.

FUCK FAT GIRLS
They don’t even have to be that fat, or even fat at all. The only thing that matters is that you’re having sex with people that you shouldn’t. It will feel very unrewarding while you’re doing it, but it keeps your dick primed for what will come later and it keeps you from sleeping alone in the in between. Most of my friends skip this step, and are foolish for doing so. It’s pretty much the only time you can do it without catching any shit. Fuck, your friends see it as your reward. Take full advantage of this phase. It will give you surprising things to beat off to in your later years.

EAT A PIECE OF CHOCOLATE CAKE
It’s fucking delicious. Can you really be a sad sack while devouring cake? No. No one can. That’s why girls have had this shit on lockdown for centuries. Also, drink several glasses of orange juice a day. It’s really hard to feel despair when you’re drinking orange juice all the time. I have no idea why this is, but it’s true. 

LOOK THROUGH YOUR PARENTS’ COLLEGE PHOTO ALBUMS
Your folks had bad breakups too. If they didn’t when they were your age, they’re probably divorced now. Supposing that they once dated a bunch of people, you’ll get to see a whole conclave of pictures of them with people that they used to love that they barely even remember these days. Your ex will eventually become one of those people that your kids ask you about where you’re like, “Fuck, I wonder what ever happened to old what’s-her-name…”

OBSESSIVELY LISTEN TO “FOURTH TIME AROUND”
You want this Bob Dylan song to become your life. The basic story of the song is that she breaks his heart but he’s able to convince her to let him back inside afterwards, then he drinks all her booze until she passes out and he drunkenly wanders over to his next lover’s apartment where he tells her, “I never asked for your crutch, so don’t ask for mine.” It will take you a period of months to make all the details of this song into your life, but if you can somehow convince yourself that it all happened in one occurrence you will be well on your way to greener pastures.