Fatal error: that’s the message my old laptop gave me just before it crashed. Physical memory dumps were par for the course, but this crash shook my world. In the blink of an eye, everything was gone: every dirty little poem, every half-written novel…all gone.

What had I done wrong? Was it all the free internet porn? To be brutally honest, I did get a little hooked on it for a while, but I always practice safe internet browsing. I swear! Or maybe it was all of the music I stole. There’s no telling.

It was on that long, desperate night of removing my battery, blowing on the charger input, and pressing the power button till my finger blistered that I realized the striking similarity between the crash of my computer and the demise of my last relationship. Just like the ever-annoying “driver unloaded” pop-ups I’d been receiving on my computer, my last relationship had a series of error messages.

Now let’s set one thing straight before I get way too into this topic: My last boyfriend and I were great together. We could make it through ridiculous, sixteen-hour car trips without killing each other. We had the most amazing, mind-blowing sex, and we genuinely enjoyed each other’s company. But towards the end of our almost yearlong relationship, there were system meltdown messages. I missed all the warning signs.

Contrary to what you might have taken away from my last column, sex is not everything. The prospect of a future together always ends up getting in the way – and I don’t just mean those crazy, body-tangling trysts at the end of the night. And that was just the problem with my last boyfriend; we’ll call him Matthew. Matthew and I were hitting that take-you-home-to-meet-the-parents, travel-through-Europe-together wall. It was either all in or all out. We got out.

The downward spiral was an uncomfortable one, particularly because we still really liked spending time with each other. Figuring out how to cross back into the “friends” world was a tricky thing to do, but it was painfully obvious we needed to do so.

Here are just some of the many error messages in our relationship:

·       The number of Matthew’s girl friends rose exponentially. Catty little plastic girls were always calling him to discuss “how much fun last night was.”

·       I started listening to his parents’ warnings. All those jokes his father made about how I was “too good for Matthew” started making sense. The idea of taking his last name made me queasy. And I stopped imagining what our kids would look like.

·       He stopped saying “I love you.” More importantly, he stopped meaning it. I became the great, convenient girlfriend.

·       And the real kicker: I stopped volunteering to give him blowjobs. No, really: the sex became less personal. I no longer cared if we faced each other during our marathon sessions.

And then the crash came. I had a two-page “speech” prepped for the “talk.” But before I’d had just enough alcohol to induce a drunk-dial and end our relationship, he beat me to it. One afternoon, he called to say we should go on a “break.”

(Ladies and gentlemen, there is no such thing as a “break.” There is only a “let’s break up for a while so I can sleep with other people and, when it’s convenient, with you.” Don’t fool yourself.)

And that was the end of it. Much like the total crash that overcame my precious, life-giving laptop, it was dead. No more typing dirty poetry till three in the morning. No more get-it-on playlists. No more pornotube.com. What is a girl to do?

Sexless, concert companionless, and an emotional wreck, I got back out there. That’s what a girl should do. Because in the end, it isn’t about the crash and it isn’t about that hit-you-in-the-stomach empty void. It’s about flirting with men at lunch downtown and partying all night under the Perkins overpass.

And that crashed computer isn’t the end of the world, either. There are better laptops out there: better, beautiful, white MacBooks, waiting out on the internet. And while I may never recover my old files, I’ve still got that same creative flow that got me started in the first place.

So if your relationship has suddenly experienced a meltdown, have no fear. You’ll be fine. I was. And I have the feeling my next Matthew will be up an upgrade from the last.