This is part of Breakup Week. We just can’t do this anymore.
DTMFA, or “Dump the Motherfucker Already,” is one of sex-advice columnist Dan Savage’s many signature coinages. Since it first appeared in Savage Love in the early 2000s, it has spread far and wide, populating forums like Reddit, where people armed with nothing more than tiny slivers of information use it to tell others to upend their lives and leave their mate. It frequently pops up on X, has appeared in poetry, and has been called an “astoundingly popular” phrase by Tropedia. In 2016, Savage transformed the abbreviation into ITMFA, that is, “Impeach the Motherfucker Already” (the motherfucker in question being Donald Trump), slapped it on merch, and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. DTMFA has even been immortalized in a song by Speedy Ortiz.
But of course, telling someone to break up via a short string of letters is much easier than actually doing it, and in a recent phone conversation with Slate, Savage admitted that in the past he’d been too glib with the prescription. But if the phrase helped facilitate the “Cut them out and move on” attitude so prevalent in today’s dating culture, Savage is reluctant to claim responsibility. Below, in an edited and condensed transcript of our chat, Savage offers a mea culpa, explaining why he now uses DTMFA far less than he used to.
Rich Juzwiak: When you think of the words, phrases, and abbreviations that you’ve coined—pegging, monogamish, GGG among them—do you have a hierarchy? Do you have ones that you are more proud of than others?
Dan Savage: I was a theater kid, and went to theater school, and read about the words that originated in Shakespeare’s plays. Dude made shit up that’s still in the language. I’ve also made up a couple of words that are going to be in the English language forever. Sometimes it makes me want to pinch myself.
Santorum seems to have had its moment, but pegging is literally in the Oxford English Dictionary, and the citation for its origination is my column. Credit to my readers. It was a reader who said, “Let’s come up with a name for this.” Readers sent in nominations. Readers voted on the winning entry. I was anti-pegging. I have an Aunt Peggy, who was really pissed about it. To have a citation in the OED is like I’ve achieved this very thin, onion-skin slice of immortality because of this dumb sex column.
Where does DTMFA fall?
Man, DTMFA is so awkward that you really have to read the column, and then know the spirit of the column, to understand what it means. It doesn’t feel like it’s crossed the blood-brain barrier into mass culture without an association with my column, like monogamish and pegging have.
So DTMFA is not your favorite child?
Some of my children are CEOs at major Fortune 500 companies, and some of my children are flipping burgers at McDonald’s. I love them all equally.
Do you remember the first time you used DTMFA?
I do remember the first column. I was on vacation with my mom, my husband, my son, and family in Michigan, which we would do in the summers. And I remember where I was when I wrote it, this weird house in Saugatuck, for gay family week. So it had to be the early 2000s. I just tossed it off. I didn’t have a marketing plan. I didn’t roll it out.
What gave it life beyond that first column?
My readers started using it back at me. People started using it in comments and talking to other people who’d written letters. Then I would get letters from people saying, “You’re probably going to tell me to DTMFA, right?” And so it kind of just instantly stuck. A lot of initialisms don’t roll around the mouth very easily. But DTMFA, when you make the sounds, engages different parts of the mouth—the teeth, the lips, the tongue—as you go through it. You can’t stumble over it. It’s not alliterative, but it is melodic in this odd way, with the flow of the consonants.
“You’re probably going to tell me to DTMFA, right?” is so typical. In How to Do It, I frequently read letters from people who have essentially answered their own question by letter’s end. They have it all figured out or just want reassurance. It’s similar to people who are looking for ways to talk about something with their partner, and it’s like, “Use the very words you just wrote.”
People are very eloquent about this thing they can’t bring themselves to talk about when they’re not talking to the person they need to direct it to—because it might hurt them or because they can’t unsay it. They can unsay it to me because I don’t give a shit. The other thing is, I wrote [the first column in which DTMFA appeared] in the first decade of the column. The longer I’ve lived, the more sensitive I’ve become to the fact that it is really easy to tell people to break up. And breaking up is really hard, especially getting a divorce, especially if there are kids involved. Everybody in the comments, everybody everywhere, just instantly goes to Liz Lemon in that 30 Rock arc about “That’s a deal-breaker.” Just end it. DTMFA has that quality about it: End it, just break up. That’s the easy, obvious thing. But in reality, it’s hard to end a relationship. It’s hard to break up with somebody. And yes, I am speaking from personal experience.
How long have you been with your husband Terry? [Editor’s note: Savage married Terry Miller in 2005.]
Thirty-one years today.
Wow, happy anniversary! So do you think you created a monster with DTMFA?
I think I was too quick to toss it out there, and too glib. Now it’s sort of like gunpowder I keep dry for situations where you have to end this relationship, even if it’s hard. In some cases, there’s no other option. I’ve always been a tinkerer. I like to try to figure out how two people who want to be together can work it out and be together, which can require revisions and accommodations and radically adjusted expectations and demands. All of that sounds really hard, but I know it is easier than ending a very long-term relationship. Breaking up with somebody you’ve been with for six months, OK, that’s painful. It sucks. You have to eat a lot of ice cream. It’s doable. Sixteen years and you have a small kid or two small kids, and your finances are merged and you can’t afford two households, and nobody wants to move back in with Mom and Dad with their kids—yeah, you might have to try to figure out some other way to keep that jalopy limping along. You might be happier in the aggregate if you can figure out how to do that.
Sometimes people now get on me in the comments or the emails because they think I’m not fast enough to tell people to break up. And oftentimes it’s in response to a letter where somebody says, “We could probably break up, but if we don’t want to, what else could we do here?” And so I walk them through the “what else,” and then I get angry letters from people who just want to read advice telling other people to break up, perhaps to live vicariously through other people’s breakups. I’m convinced that a lot of people who are like “Just tell them to break up” are in relationships where, if it were their relationship being dissected in the column, everybody would agree that they should break up. There is a weird satisfaction people in relationships take when people in other relationships end them.
Can you pinpoint anything specifically that caused you to soften your stance here?
Lived experience and getting older in my very, very long-term relationship. When I started Savage Love [and coined DTMFA], I thought of the column as a conversation I was having with my friends in a bar about our sex lives. I was 26, and my friends and I were mostly young and single. We were not partnered for very long—there was a lot of churn, and breaking up was common, so it was easy, back then, to throw DTMFA around. And then, over the course of my life—I’m 61 now—I watched my friends, most of them straight, sort themselves into long-term relationships and figure it out. My relationship is very different now than it was when Terry and I were 23 and 30, which is when we met. I feel like there’s not enough allowance for compromise and resignation and inertia, which sounds horrible but has its perks around familiarity, intimacy, and patience. The expectations that you had going in become very different over time.
There is a kind of prevailing “Cut them out and move on” attitude I think a lot of people have lately. I wonder if you feel at all responsible for it.
No.
You don’t think DTMFA had anything to do with that?
Well, a situation has to rise to the level of DTMFA. Remember, I’m the guy who says: If you’re with somebody for 50 years and they cheated on you once or twice, they were good at monogamy. I’m the one who says: Settling down requires settling for, and if you can’t forgive someone that you’re with for betraying you, you really won’t be with someone for the rest of your life, because there’s no long-term relationship into which a betrayal does not fall. Terry has forgiven me for shit that other people would have dumped me for and vice versa. That’s part of why I don’t deploy it as often as I used to.
Do you think people are breaking up too quickly now?
People aren’t getting into relationships as frequently as they used to. A lot of people are single. More people are living alone. And so I don’t want to say that people are ending relationships more. But I do see this discourse about micro-infidelities and micro-cheating and a kind of rigidity about what people are willing to accept around the dating scene. [There’s this belief that] you should never have to compromise, you should never have to settle. The reality is that there’s no settling down without settling for, and realistic expectations correlate positively with lasting and strong relationships. I often hear from friends who can’t seem to make a relationship last, and they will tell me that they’re jealous of me and Terry because we’ve made it last. And then they’ll tell me why they broke up with their last boyfriend or girlfriend, and I’ll laugh because it’s trivial. Or maybe it’s something not great, maybe even a low-key betrayal requiring forgiveness and repair. If you can’t forgive and forget and pay the price of admission to be in the relationship—if the relationship itself isn’t worth eating shit every once in a while—it’s not going to last. And if it lasting is something that you value, that means, every once in a while, you gotta fucking eat the shit.
Have you told anybody DTMFA, and then they wrote back to say, “That was the wrong call—we stayed together and worked it out”?
No. Quite satisfyingly, when I hear back from people in the column, invariably, if it’s a DTMFA, it’s “I finally did it. I should have done it sooner. I should have listened to you.”
In 2011 to ABC News, you said half the mail you were getting was DTMFA. Has that changed in the 15 years since?
Yes. The mail has changed a lot over the past 30 years. When I originally coined the expression, I could fill the column every week with DTMFA. We had started filing them in a special DTMFA file. You can’t run the same kinds of questions week after week after week—people get bored. And I think in that original column, I just ran three or four DTMFAs, and that was all the advice I had. My readers aren’t all in their 40s and 50s, but my readers have aged with me a bit, so I get many more questions from people who are in my situation, who’ve been with somebody for 15 or 20 years, and DTMFA isn’t as helpful or doable.
Editors at Slate advise us to tell people to break up sparingly—Jenée has written about having a quota.
Maybe it’s my readers who are especially toxic (though I don’t think so), but people are very quick to want me to tell people to break up. And I’m the one always saying, like, and maybe this is because of my experience with Terry in our marriage, That is so much easier said than done. Maybe what [the letter writers] actually want is some strategy for figuring out how to make it all less miserable and more endurable. Everybody knows that they can break up with people.
