Breaking Up Isn’t Hard to Do With This Book

There’s a bunch of lesser literature reaching far beyond Miss Manners and feminine wiles, to the Anna Nicole Smith school of manipulative arts. Where to trawl for a man. How to know if he’s single, rich, gay, lives with a teddy bear, buys his underwear at Victoria’s Secret, is commitment-ready, or emotionally unavailable. When to bed him, how to wed him.

The antithesis of such captivating advice is “How to Dump a Guy” (Workman Publishing), by Kate Fillion and Ellen Ladowsky. It’s an engaging manual of disengagement, and a coward’s escape route aimed more at the dating game than the married state. As Steve Martin notes in a cover accolade, it’s “a hilarious book that will teach women how to dump guys like me.”

Chapter headings are a hoot; their subtitles, a dirty guffaw.

“Expiration Dates: Ideal Locations for Your Last Rendezvous.”

“Encore! Encore!: Or Sex With Your Ex.”

“How to Get Him Back: When You Realize You’ve Made a Horrible Mistake.”

“OK, OK, I Slept With Your Brother . . . But Can’t We Still Be Friends?”

How to know when to go? When he comes up behind you, puts his arms around your waist and asks in baby talk: “Honey, will you make me a sammy? Pwease.”

Should you be getting serious, or getting out? The future is obvious if you ask him not to come in because your cat has allergies. Or if you decide not to shampoo your hair for a date because you washed it only four days ago.

As advice for the love lost, this little paperback is stuffed with more impersonal wisdoms than a divorce lawyer.

Many breakups occur at parties when a woman realizes she is more interested in the guy over there than in the guy holding her elbow. But remember, nothing makes a cocktail bash more memorable than “a messy public breakup that involves one party sobbing in the bathroom, while the other shouts obscenities through the locked door.”

Some dumpers do believe that post-ditch sex with the dumpee is the apogee of erotic experiences. Particularly as the dumpee is a known quantity that eliminates the need for clumsy conversations about HIV or birth control, and there can be no surprises about size or body blemishes that usually accompany inaugural disrobings.

Still, claim Fillion & Ladowsky, last tangos should be confined to Paris for a variety of reasons. One or both of you might burst into tears. You might feel no emotions. Post-coital conversation will be a strain. And there’s a huge risk that as a final act of revenge, the dumpee will tell all his friends that he’s a maniac between the sheets because you two are still doing it.

By the very nature of its theme, this is a pretty sexist work. Most men are presented as unfeeling, putty-minded clods by a Thelma and Louise duet who acknowledge collective credentials of 30 years spent dumping guys. Their advice for men only is held to one page, and that’s just a short list of indications that we’re about to be kicked out. But as tough guys don’t dance, let alone weep in their martinis, we boys should be able to handle such bias.

We might even consider the book must reading.

When sleeping with the enemy, nothing like knowing her strategies to better execute our own tactics.