CHICAGO -- Taking a break from her job at a Michigan Avenue cafe, Jennifer Brun slides her cell phone across the table, offering a glimpse of her life-shattering moment.
On the screen is a text message from her former fiance.
"I've lost so much hope, and so much optimism, and so much brightness," the message reads. "I need time to rebuild that. Time alone. To myself. I need to live by myself for a while."
That is how Brun's boyfriend of two years, with whom she'd been living for 11 months and planned to marry, broke up with her.
"I freaked out," says Brun, 26, who was working at a coffee shop in Northern California when she got the digital dump just over a month ago. "You don't send a text message! We were engaged!"
As you may have heard, breaking up is hard to do. But ending a long-term relationship is in a devastating, gut-wrenching league of its own -- especially when it's not done right.
Text messaging is one way to do it wrong, as are leaving a voice mail, cheating or disappearing into thin air, though all of those methods are employed far too often, says Liz Kelly, a dating coach based in L.A.
Couples who have been dating seriously -- say, more than three months -- owe it to each other to break up in person, she says, and to make it a kind, clean break.
"Be direct, be non-emotional and be definite," says Kelly, author of "Smart Man Hunting."
The person doing the dumping should praise his of her partner and make the breakup about himself or herself, saying, for example, "This is not the right time in my life," Kelly says.
Dr. Dianna Bolen, a clinical psychologist in Ravenswood, says it's important to focus on loving feelings and to be honest, though the dumper should be careful not to give too many reasons for the breakup.
"If you're breaking up, the reasons only open the door for getting back together," Bolen says.
The dumper also should resist the urge to return to the relationship once he or she suffers the loneliness of sudden singledom, Bolen says. Like when you put down a pet, you want to do it lovingly, but you don't want to drag it out, she says.
Apparently, Brun's fiance didn't get the memo about the right way to break up with someone. Two weeks before sending the text message, he told Brun, "I don't know if I love you, and I don't know if I ever loved you," Brun recalls.
He eventually took that statement back, and Brun hoped that giving him some space might make things right. Unable to eat or sleep, Brun says she lost weight. Then she got the text message.
When she confronted him at home that day, he told her he needed her to move back to Chicago--while he stayed in their Bay Area apartment--if their relationship was going to work out. He wanted to remain engaged but talk only on his terms.
"You have all these future plans, and they're ripped out from under you," says Brun, who is living with her parents in Hoffman Estates until she moves to Logan Square with a friend. "I was dying every day."
Brun isn't alone in enduring a heart-stopping breakup.
Kevin Roach, 28, had been dating his girlfriend for five years when he had to go to Ireland for a three-month business trip, only to be dumped over the phone a week after crossing the Atlantic.
"She said, 'It's just not working out anymore; I fell out of love with you,' " Roach recalls. When he returned from Ireland, she had moved out of his home.
"The way she did it was pretty cowardly," says Roach, who lives in Boston and was in Chicago recently visiting his brother. "But I don't care anymore. In hindsight, it was a good thing."
It usually is a good thing, says Rebecca Agiewich, who blogged her way through her own cataclysmic breakup and then wrote a novel about the experience called "Breakup Babe."
But before it gets good, it feels really, really bad.
Agiewich's boyfriend of two years, with whom she'd been living for one year and hoped to marry, dumped her during a jog. They were running together, arguing about something ordinary, when he turned to her and said, "I can't do this anymore;
I want to break up," Agiewich recalls.
"To have it end so suddenly like that was like having one of your limbs cut off," says Agiewich, who lives in Seattle. "I felt so lost and so alone. It's like somebody dying."
Some good came out of what she's termed The Great Unpleasantness. It gave her inspiration for her first book--something she'd been hoping to do for some time. And she got out of a relationship that wasn't right.
"I'm kind of amazed at how I didn't see the red flags in our relationship and the problems with him," Agiewich says. "I wonder how I missed so much of what was wrong."
Brun has yet to successfully declare, like legions of brokenhearted before her, that this, too, has passed. But she has gotten a job, signed a yearlong lease and removed her engagement ring. If her boyfriend wants her back, she says, he'll have to come to Chicago and talk to her in person.
"My world has been shattering for about two months now," she says. "I'm just now starting to rebuild it."
