Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

In a recent post, Bitch Ph.D. compares leaving academe to being dumped by a boyfriend or girlfriend who was never that into you:

what’s so painful about “leaving” academia is that we usually aren’t leaving by choice. More often, academia is leaving us, and all we’re doing is having to slowly come to the point of acknowledging that we’ve been left alone in this big apartment full of books, maybe with a cat or two, and a big pile of bills on the counter. Academia, that bastard; he just up and walked one day, and it took us a while to realize he wasn’t going to come back.

You try to convince yourself that you’ll get back together, she writes:

Oh, you know, maybe we could maintain the fiction that the relationship isn’t over. We could seek him out, hang around in the background picking up a few scraps of part-time attention when he needs someone to fill a gap in his schedule and hoping that at some point he’ll realize/remember how great we are and we’ll get back together on a full-time basis.

But, deep down, you know you’re probably just kidding yourself, Bitch Ph.D. concludes:

Our friends will try to make us feel better by pretending that we left him, and we might do the same. Maybe we’ll even believe it. But he doesn’t seem to be spending a lot of time feeling regret over our loss, does he?