Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

Breaking up in Boston isn’t easy. The city is small enough where you’re bound to run into that guy who broke your heart, and you’re never sure whether you should cry or hit him. If you’re lucky, the jerk will move away and you’ll relax, knowing you won’t ever have to see him again. Unless you’re Teresa Stanley, James “Whitey” Bulger’s ex-girlfriend, and the FBI publishes photos of him every few years.

Two weeks after video surfaced of a man the FBI believes is Whitey, Stanley tells the Globe she doesn’t believe the man in the video is her ex.

“It’s probably close,” Stanley, 66, of South Boston, said during an interview with the Globe. When she glanced quickly at the couple on the video strolling through the seaside resort of Taormina, she said she saw a resemblance to Bulger and his other longtime companion, Catherine Greig. . . .

“The chin sort of came out more,” Stanley said of the elderly man in the video. There was more hair on his head than Bulger, 78, had when he fled, and the nose didn’t look the same either. And she said the woman in the video looks too old to be Greig, who is 56.

We didn’t date Whitey (thank God) but we said the same thing.

Like all ex-girlfriends, Stanley has a message for her ex-boyfriend.

“Step forward and take your punishment,” Stanley said, adding that Bulger should pay for what he did and discredit what is untrue. “I don’t think you should go through life, do all that harm, and just go free.”

If given a chance to talk to Bulger, Stanley said she would urge him to surrender and tell him, “Why don’t you just end this for yourself and everybody else?”

Wow. Our messages to our exes usually involve much more profanity than that, and they’re not even facing multiple murder charges.