There’s a two letter word in the English language: “Ex.” Nobody is anyone else’s property. Nobody.

Now, granted, you don’t want to go out and sleep with your friend’s ex-girlfriend the night after they break up. There needs to be some time that elapses.

I truly believe that you can date anyone, as long as the person who used to date them is okay. Here’s what I mean.

Let’s say your best friend dated someone for six months. It didn’t work out, and now your friend has processed the relationship, realized why it didn’t work out, and is now dating other people. In that situation, there is no reason why you can’t go out with his ex-girlfriend if you want to do so.

Nobody is anybody else’s property. Just because you dated somebody in March of 2010 does not mean that nobody else can date them in September of 2010.

It doesn’t make any sense at all. If you think about it, this person wasn’t right for you (as evidenced by the fact that you broke up). You’re no longer having sex with them, dating them or hanging out with them.

One of your friends, though, maybe got along with that person really well back when you all used to hang out together. They actually probably would have been a better couple than the two of you were. The problem is that you met her first.

There is no rule that the first one to meet her is the last one to date her. So, as far as I’m concerned, the minute someone goes back into the dating pool anyone can swim with them.

Let’s stop with these silly rules. If you are not sure about it, then sit down with your friend and say, “Hey, look, how would you feel if I dated Ginger (or MaryAnn or whoever)?” If your best friend is the Skipper or the Professor, then you’ll understand that.

Breaking up is tough. You could do it like Sylvester Stallone and break up with someone via FedEx.

You can also can sit someone down, look them in the eyes and be 100% honest with about how you feel. You can tell the person exactly how you feel about them — that you love them as a person but that you no longer romantically feeling them anymore. You can tell them that you’re great as friends but not great as lovers.

Honesty is really, really hard for certain people. By being honest, though, you are allowing someone not to live with any doubt or questions, and it allows them to move on. It will of course hurt in that moment, but then that person can start healing and move forward.

Too many people don’t allow someone to heal. By being honest with someone when breaking up, though, you are allowing them to start healing.

So share with me today some of the toughest times you had breaking up with people. I’d love to hear from you guys.

You have already made a determination that they don’t understand you, that they will never understand you and that the relationship just won’t work out with them. So, all of a sudden, the incredible anger that were starting fights decrease.

You start walking away from them. You used to feel like she was busting your balls or like he was riding you and not understanding you. Now the minute you get into a fight, you just walk away from it.

The fact that you are on opposite sides of the bed, which used to bother you and keep you up at night, turns into the natural way things are and you are able to sleep with no problem. You go to your side of the bed, they go to theirs, and you both just go to sleep.

You are not up for four hours every night thinking, wondering, feeling and missing them. You just want to go to sleep.

When it hits this point, i.e., when it hits the breakup point, then you need to face the business of breaking up. You know breaking up sucks, but there is only one good way to do it.

When you think you might have hit that breakup point, you must tell the person that you’re disconnecting from them. You need to be honest and raw.

If you don’t think the relationship is going to work or you know you’ve already disconnected based on how things have been going, then you might want to consider walking away for a week. Spend a week without that person.

Go visit some friends or family. Really think about what life would be like without that person. How would you feel without them being there?

When you’re in the thick of things, they never seem to be able to work out. So take a break. Take a walk. Take a week long walk.

Take that week to ask yourself some questions. What does your life look like without them? Do you like and enjoy the way it feels?

Then, after you’ve taken this time, go back and either take a stand for the relationship or break up. Whichever decision you make, you need to be honest with yourself.

Life is too short! There are a lot of wonderful, amazing people out there whom you can meet.

When you take this time to think, be sure to think about what it was like when you first met this person. How did you feel about them before things got so frustrating? Did you feel like they were your soulmate and the two of you were meant to be? You’ve got to dial back into that.

A friend of mine said to me one time, “Pretend you just got amnesia and all of a sudden someone told you the person with whom you are living (or in a relationship) is the person you are going to marry. You would have none of the bad feelings and none of the fights. What would you do in that situation?” What you would do in that situation is try to get to know that person again without all the anger, fights, frustration and history getting in the way.

So maybe take a week to yourself and then a week with that person. Get to know them again and remember the reasons why you fell in love. If you guys can do that, then you might be able to save your relationship.

A lot of you have been in multiple relationships. I would say all of you have probably been in at least one relationship. No matter in how many relationships you’ve been, however, all relationships have what I call a breaking point.

You may have been in a four year relationship, but you might have hit that breakup point at year two. It’s like the television shows that “jump the shark” according to that website, meaning a good show stops being good but remains on the air for one or more seasons after that.

Every relationship has a breakup point. The breakup point is the point in the relationship where the fighting escalates to a place where you no longer feel like you’re understood by your partner. All of a sudden the sex stops, the communication stops, and you are living like roommates.

You get into that dynamic when you’re at the point in a relationship where you are trying to understand each other, but then you get so frustrated because you feel like you just don’t understand each other anymore. When that happens, you end up just kind of coexisting in that new dynamic.

It is this dynamic which leads to a lot of the parts of your relationship deteriorating. The sex decreases. The communication decreases. Maybe you stop kissing each other goodbye or stop texting each other during the day.

However it manifests itself, when you get to this place you are at the breakup point. It is the breakup point because the longer you stay in that dynamic after the sex, communication and tender moments stop, the harder it is to regain the original dynamic in that relationship and, eventually, it can’t be regained. That’s why I call this the breakup point.

I know I’ve been there in relationships. I know couples who haven’t had sex in years, and they can’t even imagine getting back to having sex with each other because they’ve hit the breakup point.

In the beginning of a relationship (which I call “the honeymoon stage”), you are learning about each other and making efforts to create romantic moods and nice evenings. When you’re in that stage, you are really working at building your relationship.

Then, at some point, you start to bump heads with each other and the dynamics change. You take away all of the nice things that you were doing the first year and a half or two years (or for however long it was), and then you move into a new dynamic moving forward. That is the breakup point.

The longer you stay in that dynamic and the further away you get from the dynamic you had during the honeymoon stage, the more likely it is that you’ll ever get it back (and, after a point, you won’t). You’ll never go back to the original dynamic, resentment builds and you get in your head too much.

You are no longer about feelings, and you start really punishing each other. “Well he hasn’t done this for me, so I’m not going to do this for him” are the kind of thoughts that take root.

When your relationship gets that way, you hit the critical point or you hit the breakup point. The critical is point is where one of two things will happen.

You are going to get back to the way things were by immediately forgiving, forgetting, loving and becoming aware of it, or you are going to continue the relationship with the bad dynamic in place and wait for the time years down the road when you realize you were at the breakup point years before that.

So if you are going through this right now, you need to look at your partner and think to yourself “Do I want to get back to the way we were, or do I want to realize two years down the road that we were at the breakup point now and did nothing about it?”

When you are in this place do you stay in ego, finger-point and defense mode? Look back at your last two relationships, and think about how they ended. What all of you are going to discover when you do that, is that you hit the breakup point in each of those relationships long before they actually ended.

Now, let me be clear about one thing. I am not telling you to quit a relationship simply because things get frustrating.

There comes a point, however, where the endless battle can’t be won. That is the point where neither one of you are willing to understand, fully compromise and do the things necessary to move forward.

That is when you stop caring. That is when you sleep on separate sides of the bed. That is when you reach the breakup point.

We don’t cover breakups enough here in the blog. In another blog, I am going to talk about the art of breaking up with someone.

Also, why does housekeeping start so early even when you have the “f*^k off” sign on the door? You can hear them at the crack of dawn knocking on doors up and down the hallway.

I mean, if someone is out of their room at 7:00 am, I highly doubt there are coming back at 8:00 am. So I think the mandatory start time for housekeeping ought to be 9:00 am so the rest of us can get our money’s worth and our sleep!

I am writing this in a cafe called “Mommy World.” We are the only non-childbearing, non-pregnant, non-breast feeding people in here!

OK, I’m off to the streets of New York City, and leaving you with today’s blog…

So, you’ve got to break up with somebody.  Breaking up is hard to do.

I’ll tell you something – I was never a good breaking up person. I mean, it was one of the hardest things in the world for me to do. Through much of my adult life, I would work to get women to dislike me so the relationship could end.

Once a relationship was over, I just hated having to have “the talk.” I hated having to have that breakup talk.

The breakup talk is the worst talk in the entire world.  To sit down and to break somebody’s heart is awful. Then again, they may want to break up with you too — you just never know.

There are, however, rules about breaking up that everyone should follow. I really think breaking up is something that needs to be done face to face. Silvester Stallone is famous for breaking up via Fed Ex.

Other people will break up with someone via text message, which I think is cowardly. Never break up with somebody you’re dating via text message.

Never break up with someone via email. It think that is really tacky. Never stick a Post It® note on someone’s refrigerator or their pillow case right after you’ve had sex saying, “Sorry but I don’t think this is going to work out.”

Once you realize that you need to break up with somebody, you need to sit them down immediately.  The passive aggressive way of breaking up (of which I’ve been guilty in my past) wherein you try to get someone to break up with you by putting them through a year of torture to get them to hate you, is totally wrong.

Once you know you no longer want to be with someone, it needs to be you who initiates the breakup — now and face to face. When you know you need to break up with somebody, you need to sit them down and be honest about how you feel.

You shouldn’t be that passive aggressive person who stops returning someone’s phone calls to get the other person to be angry with you.

Think about it from their perspective. Here is this person who is getting to know you for a month or two, and then all of a sudden you stop taking their calls and stop calling them.

They’re going to be confused. They won’t know what’s going on with you. They will start to get really nervous. They’ll start having talks with their friends about it. They’ll start to wonder what they did to cause you do act this way.

You will be leaving things open-ended. Instead of causing all this upset and anxiety in the other person, all you really need to do is to tell them that you are no longer feeling that relationship. By doing that, you are giving them closure.

You don’t want to leave someone without closure in these situations. Why? Remember what that feels like when someone in the past has done this to you, and you will never do it to someone else again.

So, breakups are something that should be done immediately once you know you want to end things with someone. Don’t hesitate. Breakups should happen fast.

The minute you know you need to break up with someone, you need to figure out how to do it quickly and face to face. There should be some kind of 48 hour break up rule, wherein you must do it within 48 hours of deciding you need to do it.

For any of you who are wondering where the usual Wednesday podcast is, it is still going to be here every Wednesday EXCEPT for this week (when it will be making a special appearance on Friday). So be sure to check back here on Friday for a very special podcast and blog!

Do you want to know what I feel about all of this?

Check out this video today.