Let’s face it; we’ve all been there. The dull pain and the questions, and all that pop-song fodder crap. We’ve all been dumped.

Hopefully, after the dust settled and you started to eat and shower again, most of you avoided the urge to write terrible music and poetry and tried to suck things up. After all, you can learn from being dumped, and such is the premise of the new best-selling compilation, “Things I’ve Learned From Women who’ve Dumped Me.”

Written by a virtual who’s who of timely comedians and writers including, Stephen Colbert, Will Forte, Bob Odenkirk, Patton Oswalt and rather surprisingly Dan Savage, “Things I’ve Learned” collects a number of vignettes, both painful and humorous, on the male perspective of one of modern life’s great rites of passage.

Edited by Emmy Award winning television producer Ben Karlin (“The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report”) and forwarded by reigning male literary spokesman Nick Hornby (“High Fidelity,” “About a Boy”), the collection attempts to survey the myriad of emotional lessons that can be gleaned (or simply puzzled over) from failed relationships and whole-hearted rejection both traditional and surreal.

For the most part, the episodes seem as stylistically varied as each relationship’s details. Will Forte’s chapter, “Beware of Math Tutors Who Ride Motorcycles,” chronicles the slow demise of a college coupling upon the introduction of his girlfriend’s math tutor, the enigmatic “Steve.”

While the infamous phrase “we’re just friends” is bandied about to no end, Forte is rightfully suspicious. Years after the inevitable takes place (in Steve’s apartment right across the street from Forte no less) Forte comes across his old flame, now Mrs. “Steve,” in a record store and the clichéd phrase begins to unravel. After all, lasting relationships begin as friendships, right?

Thus is the bittersweet and deeply melancholic sentiment of many “Things I’ve Learned” authors in contemporary reflection.

However, stretching the title’s premise to its limit are chapters such as Andy Richter’s “Girls Don’t Make Passes at Boys with Fat Asses,” in which he traces his lifelong struggles with weight issues to a single moment with his overprotective grandmother. While Richter acknowledges his grandmother’s distrust of females and her suggested indulgence as a contributing factor to a lifetime of female rejection, it is also the groundwork for his calling in comedy.

Now happily married, Richter looks back on the experience not with relief, but rather with a solemn respect for the way such rejection has ultimately shaped his life.

One of the stranger entries, written by the Onion’s “Savage Love” sex columnist Dan Savage and titled “I am a Gay Man,” tells in graphic detail of the first and last failed heterosexual relationship of Savage’s life.

Famed faux-conservative Stephen Colbert provides a sordid account of his first brush with the talk of marriage, a three-year relationship in his youth, though details are sketchy as much of the information in the chapter has been redacted by his editor, his current wife. Though humorous, Colbert’s chapter does disappointingly stand as one of the book’s rather hum-ho segments that seems more interested in provoking chuckles than provide any real commentary.

But really, what can a bunch of comedians and writers say to ultimately decipher the complex consequences and life altering lessons that a serious relationship instills on the average male?

The answer is quite simply stated at the book’s finale: nothing. While many of the tales evoke relatable relationship pitfalls, as well as the many unavoidable clashes, nearly all the writers concede that relating to the women in their lives is something never truly mastered or completely understood.

Lacking a beginning and with no conceivable end, each of their failed relationships, sometimes personally at fault and sometimes not, served less as concise trial-and-error conclusions than singular, perspective-altering experiences.

Being dumped may bruise and break, but each mending becomes a part of us, shaping and refining our character for the future.

I know, I know. None of this makes it feel any better, right?