Making things right on December 7, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

I am in a very complicated situation involving my ex-girlfriend. We are both college students; I’m 20 and a junior, she’s 19 and a sophomore. We were dating for about a year and a half and monogamous for about a year or so. I broke up with her six weeks ago for many reasons, but mainly because I felt unwanted and unappreciated… I had almost always treated her with love, respect and dignity and felt that she was not reciprocating. In the cases in which I made a mistake, I always attempted to understand her concerns and apologize when appropriate. Although I initiated the break-up, it was not something I wanted to do; I felt compelled by the situation to save my self-esteem.

About a week after we broke up, I found out that she was pregnant. I went to be with her for the ensuing abortion which was obviously exceptionally difficult for both of us.

A few days after the abortion, I heard about some things that had happened in that week. My ex had tried to hook up with a friend of mine two days after we broke up and had hooked up with three other guys in a short period of time. This hurt me intensely… she was my first love, and I hers; I thought it unbelievable that she would treat my feelings for her in such a disrespectful manner. We have tried to talk about things the past few weeks, but about 10 days ago I finally blew up. She was trying to have it both ways… the alternative experiences that she thought she needed with other guys combined with my support and romance. I basically told her to get out of my life because she was being so unfair and cruel to me. She has never apologized for trying to hook up with my friend, and she continues to maintain that she loves me even though she needs these other experiences. I cannot understand that, and it was that insistence of her love for me that drove me over the edge. It felt like she was completely playing with me.

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Unresolved feelings on September 28, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

I went out with a guy for 4 years. Two years into it, when I was 24, I found out I was pregnant. Pretty bad timing since I was about to move to another city and he was about to go on tour with his band. We were both broke. We hadn’t really decided to break up, but he had insisted he wasn’t interested in maintaining a long-distance relationship (although it turned out we did, a sloppy on and off one). We knew that I was pregnant for a week before I had my abortion. In that time, we didn’t discuss it very much. Although I wasn’t entirely against having a child, I couldn’t picture ourselves together. I’ve always been pro-choice, so although it was a painful decision, I felt at the time it was the right one. I was pretty sure I would have to do it alone, and I didn’t think I could be a good mother in those circumstances.

He and I have been apart now for about 4 years. I, for some unknown reason, am still very attached to him. He lives on the other side of the country and just became engaged to someone else. I am with someone else too who I enjoy a lot, but am not in love with. Me and the long-distant ex- had been talking on the phone, in the hopes that we could build a friendship that could continue after his marriage. During our last conversation, he asked me why I had had an abortion since he had been ready to have a child. I am pretty sure that he never told me that back when we had an option. We might not have discussed it as much as we should have, but then again, we never discussed anything enough which is probably one of the reasons the relationship didn’t work out.

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Love and loss on August 31, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

Today my girlfriend got an abortion. We had talked about it and both agreed that it was the lesser of two evils, the other being pregnancy. We are both young and I will be going away to college in the fall. I went to the clinic and sat with my g/f in the OR while the procedure was going on. Then on the drive home I began to feel a sense of loss, despair. I thought that I had prepared myself, I was more worried about my g/f’s emotions. But I had forgotten about myself.

I want to be strong but it’s very hard for me especially with the added stress of my leaving and being 2 hours away.

The questions are:

1) How have male partners dealt with abortion in the past?

2) Would I be a bastard to break up with my g/f after she has had time to get over the abortion?

Thank you.

— James

BG’s advice after the jump

A long one from August 24, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

It’s my first time on your website, and I think it’s great that people could write to someone and get some advice. (I found that my friends have given me pretty biased opinions about my situation!)

I went out with this guy for three, almost four years. We started going out when we were 15, which I realize now was too young. It ended pretty badly . We have broken up and gotten back together many times before. We actually broke up, but kept dragging the relationship on before we really went our separate ways. We had a really close relationship; there was nothing I could keep from him. He was my bestfriend. I lost my virginity to him and he lost his to me. We did everything together and we were inseparable. Towards the end, I had doubts about my feelings towards him. I started to have feelings for another guy that I was friends with. Basically, I ended up telling my boyfriend that I couldn’t see him anymore because of the other guy. He wasn’t too impressed. I wanted to be the one to tell him because people in my school always talked, and I figured it was only a matter of time before he heard. He yelled and cursed at me, and I ended up hanging up on him, bawling my head off. He kept trying to call me back, but I refused to talk to him. He dropped a letter off at my house an hour later.

(Two days before this happened we slept together and it was amazing. I guess he felt more for me than I did for him though) He wrote that he would always love me, but at the same time he would never resent anyone as much as he resented me for what I did. He really lost respect for me when I did what I did, and I fully understood that.

Anyway, I never ended up with that other guy because not too long after that I found out that I was pregnant. I come from a very Catholic and very strict family. There was no way I could keep the child considering the person I needed to be there hated me, and it was my own fault he did. I had to get an abortion and I did. Only one other person knew of this.

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Ripped from the headlines! Turns out our True Confessions retrospective last week has a breaking-news counterpart: efforts to reprint a Massaponax, Virginia high school yearbook in order to remove anonymous R-rated secrets and confessions scattered throughout the pages (along with “quotable quotes,” sometimes [mis-?]attributed, often containing sexual innuendo). Such as:

“I have sex with people just to feel wanted.”
“I worry all the time my ex-boyfriend will use the naked picture I sent him to ruin my life.”
“I had an abortion and my mom doesn’t know.”
“I’m pregnant with my best friend’s boyfriend’s kid.”

Much of the ensuing uproar seems to have focused on the content as “inappropriate,” with parents scandalized and administrators rushing to defend the school as a place where a lot of “good” things happen, too. To be sure, stuff like “I smoked so much pot I woke up high” pretty much is inappropriate for the yearbook. But to me, this is not (just) about keeping “treasured high school memories” clean and pretty. It’s about listening to — to the degree the confessions are true; but why wouldn’t they be — what may constitute, in part, an end-of-year cry for help. If the grownups involved trade their whiffs of moral outrage for a bit more of this, from the principal — “If these things are going on, we want to be supportive and we want to help those students and provide them with appropriate resources” — then future Massaponax graduates might be more likely to succeed.

BREAKING: Our friends over at the esteemed Guttmacher Institute report news that’s sadly about as unsurprising as the lamented John Edwards being Quinn’s dad. That is: “For the first time in more than a decade, the nation’s teen pregnancy rate rose 3% in 2006 [the most recent source of data], reflecting increases in teen birth and abortion rates of 4% and 1%, respectively.”

2006: Let’s plot that on a timeline of SURELY UNRELATED events in U.S. history. Aha: Turns out a long-term decline in teen pregnancy — due in part to increased contraceptive use among teens — flattened out and then reversed…what’s this? The decline reversed at the same time that the Bush administration and Congress ramped up funding for rigid abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that are prohibited from discussing the benefits of contraception. Coincidence, or…? Yeah, gotta be coincidence.

“After more than a decade of progress, this reversal is deeply troubling,” says Heather Boonstra, Guttmacher Institute senior public policy associate. “It coincides with an increase in rigid abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, which received major funding boosts under the Bush administration. A strong body of research shows that these programs do not work. Fortunately, the heyday of this failed experiment has come to an end with the enactment of a new teen pregnancy prevention initiative that ensures that programs will be age-appropriate, medically accurate and, most importantly, based on research demonstrating their effectiveness.”

And: “It is clearly time to redouble our efforts to make sure our young people have the information, interpersonal skills and health services they need to prevent unwanted pregnancies and to become sexually healthy adults,” said Lawrence Finer, Guttmacher’s director of domestic research.

For starters, we’ll need to let them read the dictionary.

(Click here (PDF) for the full report, “U.S. Teenage Pregnancies, Births and Abortions: National and State Trends and Trends by Race and Ethnicity,” and click here for Guttmacher’s Facts on American Teens’ Sexual and Reproductive Health. Also, find Guttmacher on Facebook and Twitter to learn more.)