Breaking up sure is painful.

A British man named Luke Howard was so distraught that his girlfriend dumped him he decided to play the piano without stopping in a town center until she took him back.

Bad idea.

Howard's plan soon went viral on that side of the pond, with several people bashing him for coming across like a stalker (they only dated four months, after all). Almost 48 hours after he started playing, the music finally stopped after he claims he was punched in the head. He explained his decision to stop tickling the ivories to iNews:

...The attack wasn’t the reason why I walked away from the piano...I simply do not and would not care if the whole world hated me. I would much rather be hated and attacked for being who I am than being praised and loved for who I’m not. And I am just a guy who was trying, albeit naively, to show someone how much he loved them. And I am very sorry that has offended so many people...I stopped playing yesterday because I realized that what I had wanted to do had spectacularly failed. The social media reaction turned it very quickly into something that would cause the one person I didn’t want to hurt embarrassment and pain."

Maybe next time, he'll think with his head and not his heart, because both could've wound up broken, thanks to this stunt.

While his intentions may have been honorable, perhaps the sweeping romantic gesture was best left to a movie when audiences want to buy into the love between a man and a woman, despite the odds. When a gesture of this magnitude falls on deaf ears, people often view the smitten person unkindly. Call it the Dobler/Dahmer Theory, popularized on How I Met Your Mother.

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