The Break-Up Artist

A WARNING TO ALL WHO READ THIS

Couples are made to be broken.

That’s what my sister, Diane, told me when I started my business, and she knows better than anyone. “Don’t get duped like I did, Becca,” she said almost a year ago, as she shoved her wedding dress into a garbage bag. She’d had it designed to look like Kate Middleton’s, lace sleeves and everything. It’s a shame nobody saw her wear it.

We all like to think that there’s one person out there who will rescue us from the tower, slide the glass slipper onto our foot, brush away our one falling tear and tell us if there’s six more weeks of winter. Or something like that. But that’s not how the real world works. Just ask the cheating boyfriends and girlfriends I have to deal with on a far-too-regular basis.

Back in olden times, people were up front about why they took the plunge. For land, for money, for children. Marriage was a business contract. That’s how it started, anyway. Farmers would marry off their sons and daughters in order to double their acreage. Society’s first corporate merger. Next were dowries, where brides came with a down payment. But history, as it always happens, was rewritten. The truth was washed away like a house in a flood, and in its place sprouted one vague excuse: love.

People use that word to go around and do what they please. They don’t have to worry about who gets hurt because it’s all in the name of love. Love has no rules, no boundaries. It’s gone all these years unchecked. That doesn’t make it whimsical; that makes it a tyrant.

I may not be an angel in all this, but I’m certainly not the bad guy either. If you can’t handle my line of work, then go read the latest bodice ripper. I’ll leave you with this: How many lives have been ruined because of love?

Who’s really the bad guy here?