ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the breakdown of relationships through the erosion of intimacy in the author's life and in the lives of his close friends, interview participants, and students. Poetic analysis, a technique of using poems as data for qualitative analysis, helps him make explicit connections between poetry and interpersonal relationship dissolution through the creation of a poetry performance of relationship breakdown. Breaking up is not just the ending of a relationship, and the use of the term "ending" or "dissolution" may be a misnomer; relationships alter forms as partners disengage from the idea of being a couple. The term "frogging" references a process of unraveling or ripping back knitting to fix a mistake or recycle a project; a frog says "rip it, rip it". This seems an apt metaphor for the breakdown of personal relationships and one that the author employs to contextualize the dissolution process.
