When I was young, getting dumped by a romantic partner was a whole different procedure from what is appears to be today.  Personally, I prefer a modicum of discretion when being dumped.  I would choose that the entire world not know about my humiliation.

Of course, I haven’t had to worry about that in a long time.  My husband and I just celebrated 30 years of wedded … I am not going to go so far as to say BLISS … but we haven’t dumped each other although I’m pretty certain that we’ve both mulled it over on occasion.

With all the on-the-spot modern technology, your boyfriend can now deep-six you with a few taps on a keyboard or by posting his single status on Facebook.

In the good (or bad?) old days, there were three options:  The face-to-face dumping; the phone call dump or you just didn’t hear from your man for a while.  I had some long-distance relationships that relied primarily on telephone communication in between our occasional rendezvous.  Making contact was, at times, difficult at best. Some of us poor college students didn’t have a phone or the money to pay for a long distance call.  Cell phones, texting, email and the Internet weren’t yet a twinkle in Al Gore’s eyes.

Back then, the tip-off that you’d been replaced was when you saw “your man” arm-in-arm with another woman or you learned via the grapevine that he had moved bag and baggage into an apartment with a home-wrecker named Elaine and that was your first clue that you’d been discarded.

I got the phone call dump once.  It wasn’t pleasant, for sure, but at least I heard an actual voice do the dumping.  I got the didn’t-see-this-one-coming dump when my supposed boyfriend walked into a club holding onto another woman’s hand.  That was so wicked and thoroughly unanticipated that it was almost, but not quite, comical.

Somehow, getting the boot via a text message or voice mail—back in the day, you sure as heck couldn’t leave a message short of sending smoke signals—or on Facebook, where all the world knows about it before you do, seems especially unsavory and brutal to me.

Could it be that relationships are that easily disposable now?  Maybe they always were but because we didn’t have 10,000 means of ready access to our loved ones (or who we thought were our loved ones) getting dumped wasn’t instantaneously broadcast to the entire world.

Not that it hurt any less back then (I might still be wounded; I am writing about it after all) but you weren’t about to get blindsided online and become instant fodder for the social media community because there wasn’t such a thing as being online, not that being blindsided in a club, face to face, is that much better.

Of course, when you realize, in person, that you have been dumped because the woman he’s snuggling up to sure as heck isn’t you, you have the option of breaking a beer bottle over the dumper’s head or clobbering him with a golf club, if you have one handy.  Think Elin Woods, Tiger’s wife.  She was very pro-active.

Not that I did that.  Oh, no, I’m far too prideful for that.  Instead, I remained unflappable and drank myself into oblivion, which seemed like a perfectly reasonable choice at the time, considering the god-awful circumstances.

When my daughter recently told me she had been dumped, via a text message, I thought, man, that’s cold.

I guess texts are the contemporary equivalent of a Dear John letter.

I don’t recall that I ever got one of those or maybe I did and I’ve blanked it out.

There is no gentle or preferred way to be dumped.  However, if dumping is going to occur, I’m sure most of us “ladies” would prefer to be the dumper instead of the dumpee.  Text that!