Please Do Not Break Up With Me Unless You're Going to Pay a Celebrity to Do It
LatestWhen I was a sophomore in college, the guy I was dating broke up with me by reading to me from Descartes’s Meditations on Philosophy, a move so cryptic and weird I actually didn’t realize he had dumped me until several weeks later. I tell this story often as an example of an outrageous breakup, but it pales in comparison to the work of one Cheyenne, who allegedly paid Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath to dump her long distance boyfriend over Cameo.
Cameo, for the uninitiated, is an online service where you can hire celebrities to send your friends and family personalized messages, and rates tend to vary—Lisa Vanderpump requires $350 per message, but Tomi Lahren will terrorize your loved ones for $60. It looks like it only cost Cheyenne $100 to have McGrath dump her Brayden, her boyfriend of an indeterminate time and inconvenient location. But hoo boy was it worth it, if just for McGrath’s deeply apt declaration that Sugar Ray is “off the charts, but always in your hearts”:
Now, there’s been some speculation—specifically in my group chat but potentially in the real world—that this is just marketing for McGrath. This is in part because the video doesn’t appear on his official Cameo page and also because it does seem a tad too well-suited for virality. [Update, 9:13 p.m.: Rolling Stone says it was, in fact, a prank, so congratulations to my very astute group chat!]
But whether or not poor Brayden really did have his heart ripped out by a late ‘90s pop star, let this video serve as inspiration for any and all of my future exes: hire a celebrity to dump me. Specifically, please hire Tyson Ritter, former frontman for the All-American Rejects and love of my 14-year-old life—while I am certain that having him dump me will be humiliating, it will also mean he knows my name, which is all any heartbroken person can ask for.