Achy Breaky Break-Ups

I have a confession.

I have never been dumped.  Unless we count my eighth-grade boyfriend’s announcement via his best friend that he would no longer sit with me at my lunch table, I have never been on the receiving end of a break-up.  I started dating my husband, David, when I was fourteen and a freshman in high school.  He was sixteen.  We dated all through high school and college, then got married after graduation.  And the most serious argument we had was when I told him I felt like his priorities were family, church, school, hunting, fishing, his truck and then me; and his response was, “Oh, come on, you’re ranked ahead of my truck.”

He was eighteen.  He’s grown since then.

So here’s where this is a problem -  I write about people falling in and out of love.  And while I am familiar with the falling in and staying in love process, I have to imagine the most angsty,  hurtful parts of relationships.  As with my current project, in which I am trying to come up with the worst possible way for my main character to be dumped by her lazy, emotionally unreliable boyfriend.  I’ve written a couple of different scenarios:

-Finding out that he’s cheating by coming home to find that he’s moved his stuff into another apartment in their building (occupied by the woman they refer to as Hot Neighbor.)

-Him dropping her off at a company retreat only to tell her that he “doesn’t think it’s working out” in front of her coworkers.

-Seeing him in public on a date with another girl and when she approaches, he pretends he doesn’t know who she is.

But none of these seem to be bad enough.   So I’m asking you for some inspiration. What is the worst break-up you’ve ever been through?  And how did you respond?

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