When I look back on it, I think it was Tolstoy that led me to eventually abandon my collection of stories about how people fell in love in favour of tales of how they split up. All happy families are happy alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. I didn't read past the end of that first chapter but it never mattered. I'd been discontented for a while but knew then why; I'd been wasting my time on stories that at the time of telling only ever ended in the happy ever after. Charming, but limited. I needed to know what happened after she marries the Prince.

Most break-up merchants started out that way; there's only a handful of people like me who switched from telling falling in love to failing in love stories and most of those favour the Slow and Inevitable over the Sudden and Unexpected. Slow and Inevitables can very often end magnanimously, a gradual drifting out of love that finishes with a feel good ending "....and now she's breeding Weimaraners in the South of France, but they still exchange Christmas cards each year." Perhaps the former purveyors of love find these - if not exactly happy then often content - endings easier to digest. I prefer the Sudden and Unexpected, and like most of those who do I have a speciality. Not for me the in flagrante delictos or the Lottery winner's Dear John; I favour the tales of hidden miscommunications and misunderstandings, the unrecognised - blinded either by love or hope - incompatabilities, and the moment when it's realised that happiness was built on something that was never there.

I am mocked, of course, for this preference. More than once I have had to defend myself against the charge of peddling Trisha-fodder, as if my accusers cannot understand the difference in that and a secretly squirrelled, unacceptable passion for underage boys in pantyhose. It was even argued once that my speciality was in fact a Slow and Inevitable, my accuser unable to grasp joy in the delicate, vulnerable balance by which such a thing may never be discovered, or indeed the beauty in struggling with the percieved reality of a former relationship in which it is. Such possibility. As a collector, I couldn't ask for more.

There's no social club for this kind of collection, no meetings in restaurants handy for the motorway. A rather solitary pursuit, support comes in the form of membership-vetted internet groups and late-night IRC conversations; traders in regret and loss are not such favoured dinner party guests. Members have occasionally found solace amongst others of our group, but just as with those who tell falling in love stories the unions do not last long; the faint yet persistant fear that the other is only after a good tale can never be quite shaken. These breaking up stories are as yet an unexplored genre, but no-one seems willing to take them on.