The Dumpster: It really is hard being a teenager in love

Getty Images
Getty Images


Think your breakup was harsh? Meet the true teen romance tales of woe on online art project The Dumpster:

"today really sucked i wanna die my parents hate me omg waaa waaa waaaa i cut myself the prozac doesnt work my bf broke up with me and i got stuffed into a locker"

"Larchie thinks Bad Religion is better than Fugazi, so I broke up with her. Then she played Sublime."

"omg my girlfriend broke up with me because i uploaded naked photos of her on to my photobucket, and she reported me to livejournal abuse. so much for that love fest."

The Whitney Artport and the Tate Online co-commissioned The Dumpster, an online "visualization" project where you can surf twenty thousand blog posts written by American teenagers with broken hearts. (About seventy percent of the authors were female, go figure.) While a lot of the entries are shockingly flip--"ok me and my girfiend recenty broke up ya see i think it was cuz we have diferent signs see im a sagitarius and she was a w---- tune in for next weeks;)"--sometimes the pain of these romantic breakups is quite palpable, and makes you not so nostalgic for that simpler time when it seemed you could barely survive such heartache, you know, in the days before you knew what the word "mortgage" meant. Check out the project here.