Breaking up is hard to do.

Everyone knows the joke about lesbian courtship. "What do two dykes do on their second date? They rent a U-Haul!" Lesbian breakups, on the other hand, are no joke. As if driven by millennial madness, couples around me have recently been hitting the rocks and tearing asunder with astonishing speed. The spectacle has made me wonder just how well-equipped we lesbians are for our own lifestyle.

Sure, breaking up is hard for everybody. But heterosexuals have the advantage of divorce courts to regulate their mating rituals, while gay male couples--although inhabiting the same extra-matrimonial zone as lesbians--often have more flexible boundaries within the relationship to cushion the moment of exit (like, um, a steady diet of dalliances).

Lesbians are not good at splitting up. I mean, where are our role models? Gertrude and Alice never broke up. High Art tried its best, but the audience went jittery over those scenes of Patricia Clarkson, jilted on the couch, losing Ally Sheedy to the "chick with a leak." When it comes to breakups, the lesbian motto remains "Don't ask, don't tell."

In my life the worst untold story of the season, if not the millennium, belongs to a friend who was driven to such extreme despair by her girlfriend's deception, infidelity, and abandonment that she actually bought a gun and killed herself. She. was brilliant and passionate and on the verge of a great career. If only, I thought, there had been institutions in place that could have helped her, then leaving that exclusive relationship might have been less traumatic.

Lesbians need some living structures to provide an alternative to the married bliss (or living hell) of partnered relationships, something other than going it solo. The terror of solitude can't be underestimated, especially for lesbians from Latin American or other cultures that offer a safety net of intimacy beyond the couple. Maybe we lesbians need some sort of mutual aid society or civic responsibility, like Scandinavian immigrants once brought to Minnesota. What a shame that lesbians are too busy resting and birthing to help one another. Not only would some shared nurturing help avert the tragedy of suicide, but it might also keep relationships from crumbling in the first place.

I'm reminded of two friends who lived together for decades until one's terminal cancer finally got to be too much for her partner to bear. After years of heroism she succumbed to the very human need for attention and succor, which she found outside the relationship. But what if she hadn't had to carry the whole care-taking burden alone? What if lesbians struggling with cancer had anything like the resources available to gay men with AIDS? This couple had nobody to deliver free food. Nobody to walk the dogs, pay for drugs, provide transportation to the hospital. The entire nightmare was bottled up within their relationship until it finally exploded.

Sure, lesbian breakups may result purely from the problems of each couple. But they also occur within a context of unsupportive families who may never have approved of the relationship in the first place or disrespectful, friends (gay and straight) who don't want to believe it will last.

It's time for lesbian breakups to come out of the closet. Canada's landmark Jane Doe case in May, in which its supreme court ruled in favor of alimony in a lesbian "divorce" case, thereby providing legal precedent for a whole host of marriage-like protections for same-sex couples, should inspire some new thinking.

We do have some good examples too--corollaries to the U-Haul myth: lesbian ex-lovers who become the best of friends, creating expanded kinship systems. A friend of mine, faced with having to leave her long-time home, got unexpected help from an ex and her current partner, who both came to town and lovingly helped her pack up.

Lesbians have devoted lots of their resources and attention to victim intervention, from repressed memories to alcoholism. Now we need to look hard at the nature of lesbian life and devise some modifications. Lesbian breakups are a fact. But the alternative--longer-lasting couples, new institutions, community support--needn't be a fiction.