For three months leading up to my Bar Mitzvah, I met with my rabbi every Friday evening to practice reciting my Torah portion in Hebrew. In the Jewish faith, a boy's thirteenth birthday marks his transition into manhood. I was still very much a high-voiced, buck-toothed, bald-bodied boy. Yet here I was, about to become a man, and all I needed to do was memorize some Hebrew to become a man and collect several thousand dollars from family and friends at my Bar Mitzvah party.

My rabbi, "Rachel Reisman," granted me five minutes at the start of each session to "kvetch" - to complain - about my week. Rabbi Reisman was gentle and plain - plain-spoken, plain-faced, plain-featured, her makeup-free face sporting deep smile lines and her dark hair not so much styled as positioned into a utilitarian bob. She spoke in the same way she laughed: soothingly. Not yet a man, at age of 12 I regarded her simply as ordinary, kind, perhaps a bit dull, but generous enough to allow me my five minutes of kvetching. Not until many years later did I begin to detect true wisdom in her ordinariness.

I can't remember what exactly I kvetched about during our sessions. I'm sure I complained about how much homework I had. I never spoke of the ridicule I endured at school (Hebrew school included), though I believe she sensed it. Whatever my complaints, she listened, nodded, and smiled, encouraging me with her kind, slightly tired gaze. At the end of my five minutes, she never interrupted or cut me off. Instead, she gently shifted my attention to the task at hand: learning my Torah portion; learning to become a man.

Were Rabbi Reisman to read this blog, she might suggest a more fitting title: Kvetching About a (Gay) Breakup. Yes, I'm aware of how much kvetching I've been doing - here on the internet as well as in person to anyone who will listen. And yes, I know how tiresome it can be, and I thank those of you who are slogging through it in search of something more substantive. To borrow the words of one of my commentators, Benjamin, I may have a tendency to go overboard in the "Woe is me!" department. Some complaining, I think, is necessary, and only the saintliest (or least experienced) of humans can deny its place in the grieving process. That said, too much of it risks transforming the process into one of complaining itself. More importantly, it threatens to distract me from my real purpose: becoming a man after 12 years of emotional and financial dependence, 12 years during which I had the luxury of remaining in many ways like a child.

This is a selfish purpose - my own personal goal for documenting my breaking. But it's not my only goal.

The night Ex became "Ex," I feverishly scoured the internet for stories by other gay men and women about how they dealt with their own breakups. I found several short articles outlining the usual (and by no means ineffective) coping strategies: burn all pictures of him (which I didn't do); spend time with your friends (which I'm doing); take up a hobby (a blog?); know that things will get better (my mantra). I also found a scattering of personal stories and forum posts. (Moments ago, as I was looking for a particular search result, I even found a blog! The author, "secretblogger," is not openly gay in his non-internet life. But he shares my love of the "Notepad" style template, and I look forward to reading his blog and learning from his experiences.) However, what I was looking for and didn't find was a warts-and-all account of a long-term relationship gone bad. I'm not sure how many of us are out there, but I wanted to start a blog for us - for gay men and women coping with the heterosexual equivalent of divorce. Your "marriage" needn't have lasted for 12 years to qualify as "long term." Whatever your number, if you hitched your wagon to a partnership for the long-haul only to find yourself broken down, I started this blog for you.

Share your own stories in the comments. Talk to each other; talk to me. Start a blog. Help build an electronic library to which other queer people can turn as they search for reflections of their own experiences. I'm not saying all queer people are alike; nor am I convinced that gay breakups differ so greatly from straight ones (which is why I put the word "gay" in parentheses in the title of this blog). But they might, just as LGBT people of different ilks might share enough common experience to connect more intimately with stories like secretblogger's, mine, or yours. One commentator, Joshua, thanked me for putting "into words what I've only been able to express through primal screaming and twelve hour drives alone in my car." In the United States, activists and lawmakers continue to petition for national recognition of same-sex marriage. There have already been same-sex divorces (or "dissolutions" of civil unions or domestic partnerships), but I want (and hope) for more recognition of these - at a national level as well as a personal one.

My purpose for this blog is three-fold. One element is healing - or, in the words of Erica Jong, writing "to save my own life." Another is connecting with and giving voice to others who share some of my experiences. The third is storytelling. By turning this moment of my life into a story - the story of a heartbroken, angry, stupid, and hopeful 32-year-old man entering a new chapter in his life - I hope to amuse, horrify, surprise; to make you think and feel, regardless of your sexual orientation. I want you to consider the Rube Goldberg machine of intimacy and its demise, the interconnected triggers that set a relationship in motion towards a dizzying and irreversible stop. Eventually I hope to inspire you to think about and feel great joy, but I'm still only 34 days into my process. The fact that I'm feeling better at all is, I think, a small miracle.

Kvetching has its place in this blog, just as it had its place in my Bar Mitzvah sessions. It served as a sort of palate cleanser, washing away the bad tastes of the week prior to the main course. But lest my diary end up devoid of actual nourishment, I've decided to implement Rabbi Reisman's rule: no more than five minutes (or one clearly-labeled paragraph) of kvetching per post.

I might not always know when I'm kvetching. I might mistake a complaint for a meaningful idea, or vice versa. I invite you to correct me in either case; not spitefully, I hope, but as a mitzvah - an act of kindness.