Was your last break-up a welcome release from a prison-like relationship? Or do you have second thoughts, wondering what if you'd done things differently?

Everyone has a painful and problematic break-up story - at least for those of us in the dating game. Sometimes those stories are cathartic to tell, and other times they just remind us of someone we lost - whom we left behind because we had to for our own betterment.

In Love Is a Four-Letter Word: True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts, multiple writers present memorable short stories about break-ups. The collection is edited by Michael Taeckens.

Why do people break up? If the relationship was all that it was cracked up to be, presumably they never would. Indeed, accepting the other person for his or her short-comings is often difficult, and in some cases more difficult than others. For example, one story tells the tale of one lover, who found it necessary to watch "Wonder Woman" to get in the mood - a quirk that might be hard for many of us to take.

Sometimes people have so much anger toward the other person - maybe even toward themselves - for causing the relationship to fail. Several of the stories have anger at their core. In one, a man, drunk on beer, urinates into the kitty litter box of his ex - a behavior that is both grotesque and shocking, as well as completely understandable at some level.

And in another about a rage-dominant relationship, one character wonders who was the abuser and who was the abused? It's true that everything in life is interactive, and it's often hard to tell when a relationship is going bad; who is the perpetrator, really? Indeed, things can escalate when another provokes a response.

The stories are not without a modern influence. The book is not filled with tragic love stories from days gone by; rather these tales are emotionally accessible to the reader, and there should be something in this book for everyone - and if you get nothing more than the "me too" response, it still works, as everyone has had a difficult break-up experience that has ever really been in love.