How To Get Rid of the Bad News Dude

This is a long post, but many of you will need to read it today.

Jasper: You know what I was thinking? When you get back to London, maybe we could sneak off somewhere together. Maybe Venice. You and me in Venice could be good.

Iris: Do you mean that? I mean, are you free to do that?

Jasper: Darling, I've just traveled halfway across the world to see you, haven't I?

Iris: [Iris & Jasper almost kiss before Iris pulls away] Yeah, that doesn't exactly answer my question. So, are you not with Sarah anymore? I mean, is that what you've come here to tell me?

Jasper: I wish you could just accept knowing how confused I am about all this.

Iris: Okay, let me translate that. So, you are still engaged to be married?

Jasper: Yes, but, I mean...

Iris: Oh, my God.

[Iris gets up from the couch]

Iris: This was a really close call. You know, I never really though I'd say this, literally never, but I think you were absolutely right about us. Very square peg, very round hole.

Jasper: You cannot mean that.

Iris: The great thing is I actually do. And I'm about three years late in telling you this, but nevertheless I need to say it. Jasper. Wait, I need the lights on. Jasper, you have never treated me right. Ever.

Jasper: Oh, babe.

Iris: Shush. You broke my heart. And you acted like somehow it was my fault, my misunderstanding, and I was too in love with you to ever be mad at you, so I just punished myself! For years! But you waltzing in here on my lovely Christmas holiday, and telling me that you don't want to lose me whilst you're about to get MARRIED, somehow newly entitles me to say, it's over. This - This twisted, toxic THING between us, is finally finished! I'm miraculously done being in love with you! Ha! I've got a life to start living.

[Picks up Jasper's jacket, walking to the door]

Iris: And you're not going to be in it.

Jasper: Darling.

Iris: Now I've got somewhere really important to be, and you have got to get the hell out.

[Opens the door]

Iris: Now!

Jasper: What exactly has got into you?

Iris: I don't know.

[Pushes Jasper out the door]

Iris: But I think what I've got is something slightly resembling, gumption.

[Slams door shut in Jasper's face. Lifts hands up and screams with joy]

(Source: The Holiday)

A while back, I wrote about The Bad News Dudes, in summary, there are those dudes who have that control over you that you know you should not let anyone have over you.  Somehow, you just can’t seem to get away from them.  Asking yourself how many more New Year’s texts or birthday tears are you going to waste on this guy.  I know, trust me I know, you’re tired of waving your hands at your favorite blog or author because it’s like he or she takes all the things in your head and puts them on paper perfectly to explain your situation with your Bad News Dude.  Truth be told, you’re going to have to stop it.  Back in the day, Jackson used to be smoking PCP, and it would send me into these crazed highs in which I could not be moved to stop chasing ass around the club.  My line brother had this tendency to grab me by my shoulders and slap me across my face.  Yes, this negro would literally slap me across the face and say, “Jackson stop this shit.”  So without further delay, this is the follow up post to Bad News Dudes but more accurately described as a “slap across the face.”

In the last post, I told you that the way the BND is able to keep you in his spell is because of the female flaw of hating to lose, or always needing to have the last word.  What you will want to do is learn how to lose the game, but win a championship.  If a boxer fought every round like it was his last, he’d lose more matches than he ever won.  Sometimes when the 4^th quarter comes in a football game, Tom Brady has to make the decision that in order to make it to fight another day, he’s not going to expound all his effort on this one game.  Nobody said the game wasn’t important, nobody is saying that if you tried hard, you couldn’t win either.  What I’m telling you is to realize that it’s just not worth it.  What are your goals in life?  A girl told me one time that she always imagined she’d be married by now, but she is in love with a guy who isn’t trying to get married anytime soon.  I gave her a verbal slap across the face.  I told her, Kevin Garnett played for the Minnesota Timberwolves for over a decade.  He was trying every year to win a championship with the team that drafted him straight out of high school and made him the highest paid player.  Every year somehow the Timberwolves organization or roster would let him down and tell him, “Don’t worry Kev, we’ll get them next year.”  Kevin is a stand up guy, and he wanted to succeed at what he had set out to do.  One day, Kev looked at his situation and thought to himself, “I’m never going to win this battle, but I won’t lose this war.”  He left Minnesota and went to Boston.  He won the war in one year.  The point is, you can’t miss out on winning the championship because you’re hung up on one game.

So you want to know how to get rid of this guy?  You’ve got a few things you can do, these aren’t steps, they’re all mutually exclusive, however if you want, feel free to do all of them.

Crash the Car

You guys remember my post, Crash the Car?  If you don’t then take a minute and go back and read it again.  If you don’t have that type of time right now, let me put it this way, sometimes you have to get in the car and then crash it.  But why would you crash your own car?  Simple, because the BND is never going to let you crash his car.  So how do you crash the car with your BND?  I can only tell you this much; you have to convince him that you’re actually in the car.  Don’t make him feel like you’re willing to give it a try, convince him that it’s not as simple as trying, convince him that you’re ALL IN.  Once you’re in the car, drive it for a little, make him feel like he can feel comfortable taking a nap.  When he’s just about ready to doze off, crash the car into a pole and save yourself. 

This can be done various ways:

• Make him an option, just like he makes you.  For some reason, men don’t like when this happens to them and they quit the game.
• Do what most women won’t do when they need to, just start asking questions.  Ask a lot of questions, sound interested, but just ask so many questions it makes him uncomfortable.  Men hate questions because they’re pathological liars, the more questions you ask the more their chance of getting caught in a lie increases.
• Tell him you’re pregnant.  When he asks if its his, tell him, “I’m not sure.”  You won’t hear from him again until the Jimi Hendrix Experience reunion tour.

I’m only half serious about that last one, but I think you get the point.  You’re going to make him think you’re onboard, even offer to drive, and then crash that car.

The Master Delete

I would cite the post that I wrote about this, but I don’t need to, I know it almost by heart since I’m the one who invented it.  One day when you’re not upset or feeling anyway about your BND (anything done in anger never sticks), pick up your phone and delete their phone number.  Then, delete them off Facebook, delete all the pictures of you guys together (at least untag them), unfollow them on Twitter, delete them from BBM, pick up your old phone and delete the number from that phone too.  Go on gchat, filter by their email address, take all those emails and delete them, if you want to save them, send them all to a folder and name it, Past Due Bills.  I think you get the picture, what you’re going to do is basically remove their presence from your life.  You’re going to cease all connection to this person.  “But Jay, I know the number by heart” – yes you do, and you also will be reminded that it’s a reason why you don’t pick up number that you don’t have saved.  Hell if you need to, save that number as “HSBC Collections” if you have to.  Just delete the BND from your life.  (Caution: You probably have done this before, you’ll probably do it again, but each time gets you closer to actually meaning it.)

Change up your routine and Feng Shui

The last thing that the Master Delete should contain is a complete renovation of your space.  The best thing to do after you’re ready to move on to a new part of your life is to rid yourself of the energy from the previous life.  Rearranging your bedroom is the best place to start.  It’s where you begin and end everyday, (hopefully lol).  Walking into your room and seeing that place where BND used to put his shoes when he’d show up at 3AM, or where he would place his cell phone, or just looking out the window in the same way that you always did will always remind you of his energy.  You want to get rid of him, rearrange that energy and flow.  The other thing you have to do is to come to grips with the fact that you can’t do everything you always did.  You can’t frequent the same place for happy hour, you will lose the mutual friends; this isn’t a divorce, you don’t get to keep Potbelly and he can have Cosi.  If you don’t change the places you go and the people you hang out with, you’ll be destined to continue running into him.  At a minimum, do not go to the same places where alcohol is served anymore.  That’s how you end up having a few too many drinks and causing a scene or making a bad decision.

Reconnect with your friends, but don’t Vietnam vet them

Your friends should be your best support group.  I always tell people this because most people think it’s their family, but at times, it’s not.  Your family is flawed because of fear.  They don’t want to see you get hurt and sometimes they won’t give you all that you need.  Sometimes your ass needs to get your feelings hurt, your heart broken, or you just need your ego broken down to the size of what I would imagine O.J. Simpson’s ego feels like right about now.  Your friends will be there for you, they’ll hang out with you.  You can’t convince nobody to do a movie or game night like you can convince your friends.  But be careful, don’t be the Vietnam War veteran to your friends.  Vietnam War veterans hate their lives so they try and bring everyone down with them.  That’s why so many of them ended up homeless, jobless and with no family to turn to.  You don’t want to turn every outing with your friends into a BND bashing contest.  Your friends are giving you an outlet to get away from you troubles, they don’t want to be part of yours.  When you Vietnam vet your friends by bringing everyone into your misery, you become that friend who is negative about everyone else’s relationships and constantly howling all night long.

In the end, you’ll grow to love him less and HIM more

You have to move on to another guy.  This is funny, “The best way to get over a guy is to get on top of another one.”  Yeah, but nobody likes advice that tells them that sex is going to solve all their problems.  So as I close, let me be honest with you.  The day you decide that you don’t want to be with BND anymore is not the day that you stop caring about him.  That won’t happen for a long time.  I once went through a situation with BNG and it took me about 3 months to get to the point where I was over the situation, and about 6 to stop being salty about it.  But you got to get back on the horse at some point.  It’s completely natural that the next guy you date, you don’t feel for him as much as you did the last guy.  Stop thinking about that, think about the fact that each day that goes by, you love the BND a little less.  “Objects in the mirror appear larger than they are.”  You know what that means?  It means that if you keep looking at your past, it will always seem like it’s right there, but in reality it’s way behind you in a distance and soon you won’t be able to see it and it won’t see you.

I’m going to stop right there, because there’s really no better way to end this post, but…

Bonus: Detonate, don’t desecrate

Anonymous asked how you can show the BND what he’s missing out on, so I figured I’d answer this here, and maybe inspire a few posts on some other blogs.  If you use this, please link me so that I can read.  Detonate, don’t desecrate is about exacting your revenge in the best way possible.  The first part is thinking about it like the difference between the guy who plants a bomb and walks away and pushes a button, or the suicide bomber.  You don’t want to be the type of person who destroys the BND, shows him what he’s missing, but you end up taking yourself down with him.  Never be a suicide bomber.  No making a scene by throwing a drink in his face at the club, no 10 minute voicemails and never smash the homies to get his attention.  Neither do you want to desecrate.  By desecrating I mean you don’t want to hurt him or put him down to prove your point.  It’s not worth it if he is down and out when you exact your revenge.  You want him to be doing just fine, but you’re doing better.  The best thing you can hope that he does is that he gets all that he ever wanted in life, and you get what you wanted, but his just doesn’t quite match up.  If your BND never wanted to truly commit because he had one foot in the streets, give him his streets.  In ten years time he’ll still be in the streets and you’ll have you happy life, whether that be a life abroad, a husband and kids, or whatever it may be.

Forgive and forget, bitch I already forgot

I'm over the bitch, and she over the top

They say love is the key, somebody changed the lock

Well, and I wish I never met ya

And I heard you're doing you, and you heard I'm doing better

And all I had to do was put two and two together

But that just makes four, but not four-ever, damn

So much for being the perfect couple

I put in overtime, I was working doubles

I wish you the best, good luck boo

(Source: How to Hate – Lil Wayne)