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When to pardon your turkey of an ex-boyfriend

Why is the president the only person who gets to pardon turkeys in this great nation? Let’s usher in a new Thanksgiving tradition: pardoning your turkey of an ex-boyfriend. What about the ex-girlfriends, you ask? We can tackle them next year.

On to the fowl moves!

You met at the gym. He seemed normal at first, but then he got really into CrossFit. Pretty soon, he went paleo and started critiquing your diet, saying things like: ‘Do you know what gluten, dairy and refined sugar do to your body?’ (Yes I do, but they’re delicious.) You tried to get him help for his habit, and he tried to get you to do more push-ups before bed. When he skipped your birthday to attend the CrossFit Games, you bolted. You recently ran into each other at a power yoga class, where you held your plank pose twice as long as he did. All of that nightly conditioning paid off. Pardon.

You met at the dog park. His pug and your dachshund bonded after getting bullied by the bigger pooches. Soon you were sharing a dog-walker, a groomer and baking dog treats together. When you went on a work trip, he volunteered to dog-sit. But your pooch got loose and ran off, and he did nothing to find her – no fliers around the neighborhood, no long walks calling her name. Just a shrug and an admission that maybe he’s more of a cat person. No pardon.

You met at a mixer for tech innovators. The relationship developed quickly; soon there were pictures of you two together on every social network imaginable, even ones you hadn’t been invited to beta-test yet. Then you realized his “move fast and break things” tattoo reflected not a love of iterating but a knack for breaking hearts. Instead of telling you the relationship was over, he untagged all the photos of you together and ghosted. That new tool to help Facebook users win their breakups was your idea, inspired by your split. Pardon him? You just sent him a month’s supply of Soylent, thanking him for every like, RT and great idea.

You met on Tinder. You Netflix’d and chilled your way through October and thought this might be going somewhere – only to learn that he’d also right-swiped his way into your best friend’s bed, your work nemesis’ booty call rotation and your neighbor’s acro-yoga practice. When you confronted him about it, he shrugged and suggested you two move on to 3nder. Pardon him? Sure, but mostly you pity him.

You met at a bar. You bonded over shared tastes in music and craft beer. You broke up after he asked you to put a percentage on how certain you were the relationship would work out. Neither of you had gotten to the end of “Master of None” yet, so you had no idea what a risky move this was. To keep your mind off the breakup, you’ve been sending sad tweets to Aziz Ansari and planning a girls’ weekend to Nashville. Every day since, he’s been texting you “?,” hoping you’d reconsider. You won’t, but you will pardon him.



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