An all-nighter from January 12, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

I had been going out with a recently divorced lady with three kids under the age of 12. Long story short, kids love me, she said she did, but never really gave me the attention, and recently told me adios. I am broken totally. I had hoped for the future. I’m 43, work 2 AM – 9:30 AM Monday-Friday. My prospects are nil. I feel totally lost. I just don’t know how to get going again. I am not a bar guy, and am not real aggressive in “hitting on” women. I like myself, think I’m a great catch. I like having a partner; ’tis what helps make life more fun. Give me a road map, if you can. Just some advice that I can really use.

— Peter
Dear Peter,

Okay, here’s some. Start a social group in your community called “People with Weird Schedules and The People Who Love Them.” Breakup Girl is quite serious. There have to be people out there in the same predicament who are dying to attend an event like an “‘E.R.’ Pancake Breakfast.” Advertise in the paper, at the grocery store, on the Web. And keep at it: I just read something about a social group for tall people in NYC whose first meeting had about six people — now they have to rent convention halls. Good luck!

Love,
Breakup Girl

The “Predicament of the Week” from January 12, 1998

Dear Breakup Girl,

I had been engaged to this girl for eight months and I had been going with her for a couple of years. I phoned her one night to see what she was doing and was told that she was gone for a walk. So I waited a few hours and phoned again. The second time I spoke with her little sister and was told she was out walking with the guy from up the road. They had been out walking for three hours and it had gotten dark an hour before. So I went to find my wayward wife to be. When I arrived at her place she was there waiting for me. She told me this story…

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Ask Lynn is, long story short, on a very brief hiatus pending some restructuring over at MSN.com (powered by Match.com).

Meantime, enjoy/comment on previous columns, and oh, find the love of your life.

Gawker’s SciFi blog i09 flirts with the eternal question — also explored on How I Met Your Mother — “Sure they love me, but can they love my Star Wars?”

It’s all fun and games until the Firefly box is opened, and all of a sudden you’re caught defending space pirates. How I Met Your Mother’s season premiere perfectly covered this silly question that those of us with short fuses and huge science fiction collections often find ourselves in….It’s a sweet look at the geeking out we all do when our most favorite movie is on and you really, really hope that your friend/buddy/significant other/or homeless guy on the street will enjoy it as much as you will. The nice thing about HIMYM’s take on the “deal breaker” movie is that at least Sarah Chalke was smart enough to lie. Which is my advice to those of you just getting into the scifi game.

Just this week a beautiful girl approached me and asked what she should do as she “discovered” her fiances’ in-depth collection of Star Trek episodes. I told her to ask him to play her his favorite episodes that he thought she would like, open a bottle of wine (or two), and if she didn’t like it just let him know he can have all the fun friend time he wants with his buddies that want to come over for Trek marathons.

I’m not saying all relationships lacking a mutual love of sci fi are totally lost to the dark side, but if your love interest isn’t willing to at least sample your geeky taste along with a bottle of wine, maybe they are not the droid you’re looking for?

(Bonus: io9 also asks this excellent question: “My favorite can-not-live-with-out-deal-breaker-if-they-don’t-at-least-pretend-to-like-it movie is and probably always will be Aliens. What’s yours?”)

Though I am “of a certain age” (read: not in my 20s, but if Hollywood comes calling I am totally telling them BG wrote this post), nothing reduces me to feeling like a teenager than introducing my boyfriend to my parents.

I bring this up because (a) my boyfriend of several years just met my parents last week and (b) ’tis getting to be the season (or at least the TV season) for such meetings. In fact, the Chicago Tribune’s Red Eye just ran an article listing meet-the-parents DOs and DON’TS — for the KIDS! What were they THINKING? Wouldn’t you say it’s the grownups who need a few pointers?

Like:

DO: Say nice things about your child in front of her boyfriend, excluding admiring comments about her “birthing hips.”

DON’T: Wear that.

C’mon, what else? Add your own in the comments!

This one, at least, was not penned by a supervillain.

Check out Dr. Joyce Brothers’s breakup quiz in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (which “lay(s) out some of the better strategies for a dignified, gentle withdrawal that leaves open the possibility of friendship at the end of the road”) and see if you’ve learned anything from BG — or experience — like, ever.

Here, your newest installment of Ask Lynn, the advice column penned by BG’s alter ego, now appearing on the spanking-new Lifestyle channel at MSN.com (and powered by Match.com). This week, we meet Maybe Not So Mature?, who’s doing a little morning-after quarterbacking after a hot and — well, not that heavy one-night stand.

“I knew this was nothing but a fling,” she laments, noting that he’s four years younger (maybe not a huge mathematical difference, but it gives him a whole different digit in the tens place) and that they have nothing in common except that neither lives in the other’s state. “[But] I cannot stop thinking about him. It’s driving me nuts! This is not what I need because I am finally ready to date after being divorced over a year and dating losers for six months. I feel weak for sitting and hoping that he calls. What should I do?”

Other than be stoked that girlfriend’s still got it? Not a whole lot! See what else Lynn has to say, and then come back here to comment!

Once upon a time, BG had a perfectly magical date with a then-obscure movie star who, as it turned out, was apparently on a different date at the time. One of the fun parts of the story (and its two-years-later coda) is this: the friends who set us up had told me way too much about him. I knew his hobbies, his college major, his newborn niece’s infelicitous name. The challenge for me, then, was to react to his biographical information as if it were news (“Econ, huh? So then how’d you get into acting?”) and to not ask questions about things I wasn’t supposed to know yet (“How’s your niece? I mean — how’s Nice? In the summer? Ever been?”) I met this challenge, thankyouverymuch, but it required a mighty effort. And nohedidn’tcallwhateverthat’snotthepoint.

The point is: that was before Google.

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Chickening out on January 9, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,
What if you know you need to break up with him, but you really don’t want to?
–Lyna

Dear Lyna,
Is everybody listening? Thanks, Lyna — Breakup Girl couldn’t have put the Dumper’s Dilemma better herself.

IMPORTANT BREAKUP GIRL MAXIM: “Because he’s there” is not a good enough reason to stay with a boyfriend (especially, you long-distance people, when he’s not). Nor is “because breaking up sucks.”

Breaking up does suck, you guys. That’s why I’m here. But trust me, feeling sad and yucky is better than feeling confused and stuck. The latter destroys brain cells, permanently. The former — unpleasant though it may be — is the first step of the heart’s healing process. But the longer you wait once you realize you need to do the deed, the longer that process is going to take.

Love,
Breakup Girl

Classic letter from January 9, 1998 …

Dear Breakup Girl,
If I have just dumped my boyfriend, do you think he will tell his friends that he was the one who dumped me?
— The Heartbreaker

Dear Heartbreaker,
Yeah, probably. If he’s a real prince of a guy, he’ll say “It was mutual.”
Love,
Breakup Girl