Last night in a temporary fit of boredom I demanded that everyone on Twitter send me the tale of their worst exes. They delivered and then some.
I won’t link any of the responses here, because, you know, some of these bad exes are actual murderers, but feel free to read the remarkable replies at your leisure. (The grocery store guy!) Please add your own stories in the comments.
Had one testicle and broke a pair of very good headphones.
Not that exciting, but I’m still salty about those headphones a full eleven years later.
How is it that there’s another person on this earth who reads the toast AND has an ex with one testicle? Soul sisters.
Not quite what I was expecting to bring me together with a soul sister…but I’ll take it. Cheers!
*clinks glass with yours*
Me too! Maybe it’s the same guy? Was yours a musician of some kind?
The alarming thing is that, well, you know who else had one testicle?
I mean I haven’t heard the soundtrack yet but I’m gonna have to guess Hamilton?
It’s Hitler, right?
That’s the rumor, although it’s been disputed.
I’ve heard the song, so it must be true…
Make that four people.
I ALSO do
So we’re up to five then? I always knew they were delicate but I didn’t know guys lost them left and right!
If neither of you are my uni bestie, clearly the one-ball phenomenon is more common than we have been led to believe.
Huh, I guess so!
A college friend of mine knew a guy who had an elbow fetish. (Like, he got turned on by shapely elbows). I’ve always been curious if he was the only one, or if that’s something else that’s more common than I realized.
Now I’ll be up all night wondering if the boys think my elbows are shapely enough. Hmph.
Well Katishaw of The Mikado had a right elbow which was on view Tuesdays and Fridays, on presentation of a visiting card.
Adding my voice to the one-testicled-acquaintance club.
Adding another voice. My cousin only has one, because of cancer when he was a teenager.
British musical tradition has long known that men with only testicle are literally Hitler.
(I tried to make the code work and it has failed me, or vice versa.)
The amazing thing is, apparently the writer of Colonel Bogey _didn’t know _. It was a random insult that wonderfully turned out to be absolutely true.
not an ex – but a guy I kinda made out with had one testicle.
This ex was actually a great guy and is now married to my former roommate (w/ my blessing, they’re both wonderful).
That said, he did state that his goal in life as a scientist was to attach robot arms to monkeys and my life is nothing if not a rich tapestry.
Does your ex want to become the world’s most wonderful super villain?
It’s hilarious because he’s the most gentle and delightful dude! The monkey tests were eventually meant to be used to help people who were paralyzed/lost limbs. But it sounded like BOND VILLAIN level stuff at that time.
I laughed and thought he sounded delightful, then read this and realized he wasn’t kidding even a little bit. Yikes.
I mean, hopefully the monkeys were already missing arms? I didn’t think this through.
ETA: This is the project he wanted to work on, no monkeys lost their arms. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/science/29brain…
I’ll always remember the one that got away, bionic-arm monkey savior.
And now this is happening: http://www.jhuapl.edu/newscenter/pressreleases/20… and it is freaking amazing!!
I have a lot of friends who do similar research. I’ve worked on a lot of related stuff as well. Neuroscientists need love, too.
NGL, that research is AWESOME. And it’s done really great stuff for locked in/paralyzed patients. I’m glad he’s found love!
My worst ex was my first bf in high school. He was a smug a**hole and this is not just my opinion. He apologized to me years later about his awful behavior. He was 2 years older and a sophomore in college while I was a senior in high school when we finally dated. We had know each other throughout MS and HS. I had this huge crush on him for years so when he finally noticed me I was amazed. And he knew I was soo into him. That fed his massive ego and he treated me like at best I was some kind of annoyance he had to deal with from time to time. But i put up with it cause the “cool” guy liked me.
A+ for the apology years later
My worst: the guy who I loved and dated seriously and talked about marriage with, and was totally compatible with and all. He had to go away for a week for work and then just…ghosted. after A YEAR. Never texted or called, deleted me on Facebook, and then when I emailed him to say “WTF, you child,” he pulled the “oh truly I am awful! I don’t know what else to do! I suck as a human!” To which I responded “Yes, you do. I concur.”
He used to periodically email me to see what’s up and friended me on Facebook again after I got married (I suspect to look at my wedding photos and check out my infinitely more handsome husband). I loved him very much, but he was a weird dude and now I understand how people will just walk away from their families after many years.
WTF THAT IS SO CRAPPY. “I don’t know what else to do”??? How about “not what you did.”
“What could I have done?” LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE. Or used your words! It wasn’t like he was an unemployed moron–he was a smart dude with a degree in engineering and he was a professional damn pilot.
Good lord that is horrendous. I’m glad you found someone better!
The same thing totally happened to me. He moved to the next state for grad school and we planned to try the long distance thing, but he literally never called again after kissing me goodbye, telling me he loved me, and getting in his moving van. (I did get ahold of his friends to make sure he didn’t die on the way).
Jesus. That is terrible.
literally screaming
I love this post! Especially after the red flags thread on the LR, I will be following this with interest and wine.
I don’t have any really terrible ex’s, just the mansplainy stoner whos still clinging on and who I’m still in a passive aggressive ‘I’m having a better life than you’ war with. (I’m winning.)
nothing that bad. a really queeny bi-identifying dude who was sort of microdating three or four people and enjoying the affection we payed to him. bit manipulative, not that interested in me looking after my own emotional welfare, enjoyed basking in attention but not really making much effort to reciprocate it, at least in my case. eventually finally realized he was kind of a terrible human being I could no longer interact with after thanking him for introducing me to a friend of his I’d go on to healthily date for a couple months and his response was something about how I was “preying on his most vulnerable friends” or something. that was, oh, eight years ago, just after I’d turned eighteen, and he and his clique of those same guys he was hanging with back then are well-known as a continuing trainwreck in the local gay community to this day, which surprises me not at all.
bizarrely, I now live in a little community of like 35 permanent residents 45 minutes outside of town up a winding mountain road which itself starts at the far, far end of town–about 60-90 minutes away from anywhere, basically. and about six months ago he got a job working at one of the two restaurants up here. seriously, what are the odds? there was a momentarily exchanged stare and then me nnnot patronizing that establishment anymore.
OMG I have one. Went into school after summer vacation and another girl was showing off a pendant he had given her in a way that very much implied they were an item. (We were not in an open relationship.) My birthday party was the next night. He gave me the same pendant. I exclaimed “Oh, how nice, X has one just like it!” in front of everyone. This was one of the highlights of my life.
Omg. Your response is the stuff of advice column dreams.
That’s AMAZING. Good for you! I would have been a wreck.
It helped that I had also started dating someone else while he was away. He was not a good boyfriend and I had suspicions… And after a few months of no contact while he was travelling for the summer, I was like, ok, I’m moving on. Ah, the carefree days of my early 20s!
Unemployed, abusive (fairly common nickname of his for me was ‘hideous emotional cripple’), rotting teeth, and kicked a pigeon to death in front of me. I was devastated when he left me for a 48 year old.
How awful!
</3
D: D: D:
I was with my ex for more than three years before needing to move across country against my will for emergency medical reasons. We (well, I. I) tried long distance for a year before I had to dissolve it. In that time we met once for three days in one of my favorite cities, I brought so much hope and so many candles for our B&B, and he would not even hold my hand. He sent me many long emails about his suicidal leanings. He had all of my worldly possessions and my dog 3,000 miles away and did not send the stuff for seven years. When he sent it he had not repacked it so many things, including nearly all of the pottery I had made arrived broken into pieces.
I wish I could say this was fiction. It is precise.
That is awful also!
I may have mentioned this guy in the comments previously, but my worst ex was my college boyfriend, who:
1) Would watch me sleep and stroke my eyelids
2) Did not have (and refused to get) a checking account or any sort of bank anything, so would carry literally thousands of dollars on him in cash at all times
3) Would run out of money halfway through the semester and so I had to pay for anything if we wanted to, I don’t know, leave the apartment
4) Was so hideously jealous of any male I even looked at that we would have BLOW OUT FIGHTS anywhere and everywhere
5) Once refused to speak to me for an entire day because I bought myself flowers
Two years. I was a young fool.
Weren’t we all? Also, I’m still shuddering over the eyelid stroking.
“1) Would watch me sleep and stroke my eyelids ”
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT
I. KNOW.
But didn’t it wake you?
It did! Kind of…I am a very heavy sleeper so I would emerge from the blackness of REM sleep feeling the *taptaptap* on my eyelids, but it wouldn’t register unless he kept doing it (which he often did). I also only knew about the watching me part when I would feel his eyes on me in the mornings.
taptaptap
taptaptap
taptaptap
This is something out of a horror movie.
the sort of horror movie where someone ends up wearing someone else’s skin. good GOD.
D: D: D:
I may never sleep again.
I just gasped loudly at work, and now I have to explain why I’m not finishing this client newsletter.
wut.
STROKE YOUR EYELIDS. Everything about this is also horrifying but AAAGH.
wait what “Did not have (and refused to get) a checking account or any sort of bank anything, so would carry literally thousands of dollars on him in cash at all times ”
all of these are absurd, but what.
Apparently his Dad was also “off the grid” and so he didn’t want banks being able to track him…? I don’t know, I never got a straight answer.
My friend works in the solar industry and gets a lot of people who are off the grid like this. Several people have asked they could mail gold bars as payment because they didn’t have any bank accounts.
Being off the grid has some logic to it (though I often don’t agree with the reasons behind it) but there’s a difference between keeping all of your cash under your mattress and carrying it around on your person!
(This goes for people with decent earnings, the problem of the poor being unbanked in this country is a topic for another time).
My eyebrows just disappeared into my hairline.
I can not even tell you how happy this story makes me.
And can they?
My father does this, but it’s mostly because he doesn’t want the IRS to know his actual income. He gets paid “under the table” and then only pays taxes on the small amount his check actually reflects. Which I think is partly related to the time before I was born when he was the guy in charge of other people and just…kept all the withholdings. So like, people thought they were paying into social security but he was actually keeping it. Anyway, at some point he got caught and was supposed to pay it all back but because he doesn’t accurately report his income…anyway, it basically translates to large quantities of cash on hand at all times.
Your ex’s dad was Ron Swanson??
Sounds like Nick Miller come to life.
Oh. Oh! And I had to pay his speeding ticket from him getting caught speeding IN MY CAR because he didn’t have any money (Re: #3)
Dude.
Is your ex Edward Cullen? SUPER YIKES.
So…was a he a time-traveller, or a river spirit, or an ocelot in the body of a man? Because that cannot possibly be a human person in the 21st century.
I’m not going to say your ex deserved to be robbed.
But I’m not *not* going to say that either.
Just not, like, violently or anything.
I just made distressed flappy hands at this story. STROKE YOUR EYELIDS JESUS YOU DATED AN ACTUAL MONSTER.
Not murdery, just silly:
When I was in high school, I briefly dated a boy who would reference “Old Yeller” as though it were a happy story. I prodded him about it until he went back and discovered that his mom had edited their videotape to cut out the part where the dog dies.
THAT IS AMAZING. My mom would actually feign illness as a child so that she could skip school on Old Yeller watching day.
Was your boyfriend Phoebe from Friends?
I KNOW RIGHT? He wasn’t, though. Just an extremely sheltered kid who was homeschooled to work on his parent’s farm, where he probably wasn’t allowed to watch Friends.
RIGHT!!!?? TOTALLY died laughing!
Maybe I’m not such a shitty boyfriend after all
Have your partner write in! We’ll be happy to be the judges of that.
[slightly evil, grinch-like smile]
I mean, you took a conversation where people talk about the worst people they’ve dated and turned it into a way to rationalize your own insecurities AND also compared yourself to the worst people, and were like “Oh, I’m slightly better than that!”
I can’t give you great odds.
This is unnecessarily unkind
No. This is absolutely, necessarily unkind.
Nope.
we must consider that this one-line comment was actually made in the spirit of Humour and Gentle Self-Deprecation, as with many things on this website
That’s how I read it too.
But seriously, what ABOUT the menz, and their important feelings. FFS.
No exes because I have pretty much always been single but I did refuse to go out on a third date with a guy because he took a summer internship with Fox News
This was a good judgment call and a narrow escape.
That’s a healthy boundary if you’re asking me.
I took a summer internship with Fox News. I needed the credit to graduate college and I had a family connection. It was like a spy assignment behind enemy lines.
That was not the case here. I learned on the second date he was a Republican. Then I learned how Republican he really was.
He did send me a really nice copy of Prizoner of Azkaban in Hebrew though…
Good call.
A+ choice.
That can and should definitely be added to the “Red Flag” thread in the link roundup from earlier.
Right after he broke up with me he got arrested for meth trafficking. Which I didn’t find out until we were having one of those post-breakup talks and we were driving around in my car and we got pulled over and he said, “Oh yeah, they might want to search your car because I got arrested for meth trafficking.” He called about a year later wanting to get back together.
One guy wasn’t necessarily a bad ex, but he did basically break up with me by calling another woman to come get him from jail after he was arrested for shoplifting.
One threatened to kill himself a couple of times and left long letters on my car windshield while I was at work.
I just really had terrible taste in guys there for awhile.
“Oh yeah….”
Yes, just casually in passing, like this is not a big deal at all. He did not seem to understand why I would have preferred to know this information BEFORE letting his ass into my car.
Interestingly, I found out a few years ago that he and I have the exact same wedding anniversary. He and his wife have four kids and he seems to have grown into a well adjusted adult human being. Which is the only thing that makes me feel even slightly better about how into him I was.
I realize neither of these are THAT terrible, but I look back on both of them and think… why?
The Virgin is thus nicknamed because he didn’t tell me he was a virgin until after we’d slept together the first time. Sadly, we continued dating because I was desperately, desperately lonely, but it only last a few months.
The other one… I work in nonprofits, and his company had a volunteerism day where the employees could volunteer instead of going to work. He went on this rant about how his time was too valuable for him to bother volunteering, and if we just paid poor people to do that work instead of having volunteers do it, we’d solve poverty. This is when I realized he was a raging libertarian, and immediately broke up with him.
>>if we just paid poor people to do that work instead of having volunteers do it, we’d solve poverty
I mean, our government is currently underfunding councils and local authorities, causing council workers to be made redundant and suggesting that services like street-cleaning and libraries can just be done by volunteers instead, so he’s not wrong, but…
Ha! I also dated a guy who didn’t tell me he was a virgin until after we’d slept together. But then I married him about 9 years later.
So, I assume he donated the money he made working instead of volunteering that day to someplace that created jobs for the long-term unemployed? No?
I thought that said “raging librarian” and almost flipped my book truck
I would be ALL OVER a raging librarian. (I think raging would be a good thing in that context, right?)
Nobody’s complained so far! 😀
Currently sitting next to a raging librarian. Can confirm, it’s the best thing ever.
Wait, what’s so bad about virginity? He didn’t owe you any information about his sexual history (other than handling like, disease risks appropriately.) Why is it sad that you continued to date?
Yeah, that was my thought too. Like…why are you mad about that?
This question is unfortunately relevant to my interests (ie, my social anxiety and internal symphonies on failure in all the thing), so. . .thank you for asking.
If you would like my annoyingly verbose but hopefully carefully thought out advice on this topic, it is this: you do not owe anyone disclosure of your sexual history, with the exception of disclosure of health risks that are important for informed consent, etc, no matter how many people you have or have not had sex with, and no matter what you have or have not done. It can often be easier if you say “I haven’t done this [whatever this is] before”, but you don’t owe people that knowledge. It’s always okay to ask someone to go slower, or to stop entirely. It can definitely be awkward to disclose afterward, should you choose to, because there’s a lot of social narratives around how your first time having sex “ought” to be, and a partner might feel hurt that you chose not to tell them beforehand. But it isn’t a wrong thing to do, or a bad thing to do. Also, you are not alone in finding these things extremely anxiety producing; I know I definitely do.
no, that was lovely! thank you.
We have such fucked up narratives about sex and virginity. I was upfront with my fiancé about not having had sex before we met (we were both 25), and he told me he’d only had sex once and told me a story about getting drunk at a party and waking up the next morning naked next to someone, in a way that made it seem like it had just happened, oh well. This distressed me, especially since when I mentioned it about a month or so after we had started having sex he got really distraught – I mean, it sounded a bit like he had been raped. But he was actually upset because he was trying to figure out how to tell me he had lied – he’d never had sex before me and he’d made up what sounded like a plausible story b/c A Man Is Not A Virgin and all that bullshit. How screwed up is a culture where that’s the story someone chooses to make up as a plausible sounding ordinary first experience?
If you would not like my annoyingly verbose advice on this topic, please disregard it entirely!
I was wondering about this, too! My first time having sex was… much later than the average age for that sort of thing, and I did not tell the guy in question before or after, because I knew that would Make It Weird. And we both had a great time and it was honestly no big deal. So. It doesn’t have to be a sad or awkward situation?
I hadn’t entirely examined my feelings about this – it was a long time ago now, thanks for making me think about it differently! As robot_dinosaur said, he didn’t “owe” me anything, but it is information I would’ve like to have had beforehand. I also felt used, like he was embarrassed about being a 20-something virgin and I was the first girl willing to sleep with him, so he wanted to get it out of the way. Being able to talk about sex is important to me in a relationship, and not discussing it was a bad sign to me (among a few other issues we had, personality-wise).
College boyfriend was obsessed with having a squeaky-clean reputation. He was convinced that he was one day going to be famous, maybe in politics, and that anything even slightly off-color that he did would mar his reputation forever. He thought that HAVING A DRINK IN PUBLIC was one of the most offensive, irresponsible things a person with any self-respect could do. See me going through most of my college years without ever setting foot in a bar in an effort to appease him (spoiler alert: obviously I never could, on this and so many other accounts).
One time, at his request, I wrote down all the reasons why I thought that drinking alcohol is not necessarily a bad thing. He then annotated my list at home, came back, and lectured me about why I was wrong on all my points. He lectured me on a lot of things, like not being a virgin and being okay with not acing every single one of my classes, but the alcohol one sticks out in my memory.
Oh! And he always kept a loaded gun in the glove compartment of his car.
Oh god, if he ever actually does become famous or a politician you have to tell the world what an asshole he is, just to save an innocent person from accidentally liking him.
Please, please tell me he is a well-known politician now. I need this.
Is it Ted Cruz?
beat me to it.
The last I heard, he was still living with his parents (he’s like 29-30 now) and is a perpetual grad student who has never held a job. That is not as good but still feels like sweet, sweet karma.
lol at that guys reaction when he found out that Obama wrote about his drug use in a popular book before being elected President.
Based on OP’s description of him, he probably thinks Obama is a Muslim hack who bribed his way to the White House or something, so he probably still feels morally superior and justified in his smugness. (I know … well, knew, a lot of Obama haters.)
If I were a cat, my ears would be flat to the top of my head after reading this description. So glad you got away from him.
Let me guess – he was the president of your campus’s Young Republicans group?
Well, he DID convince me that feminism is a sham and that reverse sexism is a real thing, so basically, yes. (Ugh, he was seriously the worst.)
An ex convinced me that climate-change was a conspiracy. And I had interned for environmental organizations, so it isn’t like I was unaware of the science. Whatever, he taught me a good lesson–never ever ever date a conservative/libertarian again.
That last part is really the kicker
oh, man, I have now been reminded of my ex who was a law student with political aspirations and who didn’t want me to go to a protest against the Iraq war b/c he thought I would get arrested and lose my scholarship and also that it would reflect badly on him if we got married and he ran for office (he was also a Republican, gods help me)
Ha, maybe it’s because I’m not from America, but the main part of your comment is weird and controlling and red flag-y, but that gun bit sounds WILDLY UNCOOL. Loaded guns! In a moving vehicle! For no reason! Not in, like, an active war zone! Bizarre.
One of his love letters heavily featured a lyric from Mr. Jones and Me.
We broke up at his prom and he almost got arrested! He spent the next few weeks calling and leaving me creepy blame-y letters.
He’s now a lawyer.
I’m so curious how breaking up at prom almost got him arrested??
Haha, I guess I worded that a little misleadingly!
I was feeling sick and wanted to go home early. We went outside to fight. He got super angry and aggressive (first time I ever saw that in him), and I just wanted my keys and shit to catch a cab and sleep. Since it was prom, there were cops outside and they caught the tail end of our screaming match. He got lippy with the cops and got a not-so-fun ride home. I also got a ride home, but the officer was very sweet and made sure I was okay and told me that my bf’s behaviours are usually a red flag 🙁 I cried the whole way and never thought to get his name or info. This was 10+ years ago now, but I realize now he handled the situation as tactfully and non-judgmentally as he probably could’ve.
That’s so awful! My experiences at prom were also terrible. Does anyone actually have a good prom?
I’m waiting for someone to start a local Goth Prom I can attend as an adult.
There is Queer Prom and Goth Prom here in Montreal, if you’re local! Also Gay Goth Nite, which is both at once and a great party
Portland Oregon has a “vampire masquerade” every year that is basically goth prom with booze. I’ve been to several and they’re FUN.
I did, but I went to an all-weirdo art school.
Me too, and I also went with my BFF who’d moved a couple of years before. Seeing people’s reactions when she “crashed” prom was great.
I know this isn’t really the point of the story, but…it’s nice to get a good cop story for once. I knew they must be out there somewhere.
Seriously, yay for that cop!
Oooh! Another one about a perfectly delightful ex with an odd quirk.
I was in high school when the Narnia movies came out, and looked EXACTLY like the actress who played Susan Pevensie. (The similarities in looks and expression are actually creepy.) BF at the time was a cool dude, but I definitely noticed when I went over to his family’s house that he had a copy of the Narnia dvd, lotion, and tissues on his bedside table.
I chose not to think about it.
OH GOD
This is amazing.
Yes. Yes it is.
I regret deeply that my vote took this comment from 69 votes to 70.
And now I have bestowed the same gift to your own comment.
The Internet is amazing.
I mean, FWIW we were both chaste teens who met through church youth group. And as a grown-up woman, there is something almost precious to me about the idea of a homeschooler beating off to an actress who looks exactly like his girlfriend in a Christian children’s fantasy film. Like, that is literally the geekiest and most innocent form of sexual expression I can imagine.
I come from a similar background, and that makes total sense now, but also would have 100% scarred me at the time. 😛
Oh, at the time I LITERALLY CHASTISED MYSELF for being dirty minded and making such an assumption! 27-year-old me is like, nope, teenage boys are the actual grossest.
MMMMmmm those MOMENTS.
tbh, I probably wouldn’t have known what I was looking at and therefore never had such a wonderful detail like that to remember at a later date, & simultaneously laugh and yell “EWWWWWW.”
I also feel like I can’t cast too much judgement here, considering that I was a bonafide schoolgirl sex-pervert for Captain von Trapp in high school. Conservative religious backgrounds make for some weird sexual awakenings.
My favorite “weird crush” story–
One of my best friends (who grew up in a highly educated family in the Soviet Union, and spent all her time reading) was in love with Spartacus when she was little.
Not the Kirk Douglas film Spartacus, but the historical guy.
My best Worst Ex has achieved legendary status among my friends who were lucky/unfortunate enough to experience him. We only dated for about five months, and it was like 7 years ago, but when we’re all together we still laugh about/are horrified by him. Some of his antics were horrible and abusive and misogynistic, and some were hilarious. One time, shortly after we met, he took me to Pittsburgh for the weekend. At one point we were driving around on Mt. Washington and he took me to this scenic lookout spot where he had hung out in college. It involved driving off the main road, up a tiny gravel access road, and into a clearing. It was all very steep because, you know, mountain. Coming back down, he decided to reverse the whole way even though he could’ve easily turned around, and as we’re going backwards I realize that the car is going off the edge of the gravel road and is tipping rather precariously. I yell and he stops and starts reversing again, more cautiously, but at this point we’re completely off the road and into the brush. For some reason he keeps going, until we stop with a thump. The car is totally off the road and has somehow become suspended with its front and back bumpers on the side of the hill and the paved road, respectively. All four wheels are off the ground. Then he cried. That’s probably the most innocent story. I also got a bladder infection after literally EVERY TIME we had sex. On new year’s eve, I invited him to a party at my friend’s parent’s house. He got shitfaced on maker’s mark, tried to fight one of my friends, and then tried to have sex with me on a couch in a room full of people. When I refused, he replied with ‘Fuck you you fucking cunt, I’m so sick of your shit.’ He also used to fiddle endlessly with my boobs while I was trying to sleep, and once when I asked him to stop because it was keeping me awake and I had to work in the morning he laughed at me and said “I’m your boyfriend, I can touch you whenever I want, you should be happy that I want to touch you.” He also told me, with a straight face, about how he had stalked his last girlfriend after their breakup and how she was such a bitch because she had started hiding her car after he kept leaving notes on it and wasn’t that ridiculous?
I dumped him in a text message and it was great.
I also recently heard that he got dumped by his fiancee, who now has a new boyfriend who is way hotter, and I admit I cackled with no small amount of glee.
“I’m your boyfriend, I can touch you whenever I want, you should be happy that I want to touch you.”
This is so familiar that I actually dry-heaved a little.
Text message breakups of scary dudes are GREAT 100/100 would recommend every time
I broke up with this one super-manipulative dude over email. It was a dick move in some ways but I still feel zero guilt about it, because I’d tried to break it off in person several times already and recanted because he made me feel so guilty.
My ex had to flee the country last year because of ambiguous legal troubles (99% sure they = selling drugs on the Deep Web). Now he is very obviously in Spain because his current girlfriend moved there and posts vague references to her boyfriend, and photos of his visiting mother. I suspect that he has actually moved to Spain because he has convinced himself that he is of significantly more interest to the legal authorities than he could actually ever hope to be.
Cyberlibertarian.
I really love that all you need is the one word.
Me too. I cackled. And shuddered.
I would have to say it would be the guy who went insane halfway through our relationship. It was like I went to bed, dating a wonderful, loving person and woke up the next morning next to a complete asshole. Living with him was a constant barrage of insults, all the time. Finally, he moved out, by asking me one day to reserve the building elevator for him. I went and stayed with my parents, bought some new furniture, and moved on with my life. A few weeks later, I got a notice in the mail for an unpaid parking ticket for $200 from a time he had borrowed my car. I emailed him about it and said he needed to either pay the ticket or pay me. Nothing. I paid or contested the ticket. Months later, I got a letter in the mail that contained a check for $200 and a post it note that had something that could vaguely be called an apology. When he moved out, he left a ton of shit at my apartment. When I moved to a new apartment a year later, I asked a mutual friend to take his stuff so I wasn’t hauling it around for years to come. A year after that, so 2 years after we broke up, I got an email from him, that he was moving back to the city and wanted his stuff back. I’ll describe the email as borderline threatening (“I still have your number, don’t make me call you!”) and then adding “and I suppose you want closure so if you want to talk, I guess I owe you that.” I remember reading that and laughing. I wrote “Dude, it’s been two years, whatever closure I needed I got over it 1.5 years ago. I’ve moved on, I don’t think about you. Our friend Blah Blah has your stuff.” I then called my friend to tell her to expect a call from him about his stuff, to which she said “oh I threw it all out on my way home. Fuck him.” I felt very vindicated that day.
I am sorry that happened to you, but I love your friend.
I came here to say the same thing. Go, friend! A+ work.
I had a roommate who essentially pulled all of the same shit. Regularly borrowed my car, promised to return it by a specific time but would always bring it back a good 3 hours later with an empty tank and a bunch of trash strewn around in it. Moved to a different city one weekend when I was out of town without telling me, decided she didn’t owe me her share of rent for the remainder of the lease. Left like half of her furniture in the apartment then called me on the phone literally 3 years later when I was living 1500 miles away to say that I needed to ship all her stuff to St. Louis for her, as if I had been carrying someone else’s furniture all over the country instead of putting it on the curb the week after she left.
IS HER NAME BEVIN? I swear I think we had the same roommate.
It was not, but for all I know she changed her name to go wreak havoc elsewhere.
I got catfished online when I was in college. Flew her from Atlantic City to Pittsburgh for a long weekend. She then immediately tried to move in even though I was in student housing. Additional sad facts in no particular order. It was my 21st birthday. Had sex for the first time and she was overly judgemental the whole time even though we had established what she was dealing with well ahead of time. She made me buy Transformers on DVD.
Wait, but she existed, right? What was catfishy about her?
I feel like somewhere people have come to use this term as ‘any and all untruthfulness over the internet,’ which totally breaks my brain.
She used pictures of someone that wasn’t her.
Aaahhhh ok that makes sense.
I can (sort of) understand why someone might use someone else’s pictures online, even though they’re shitty reasons (e.g., to mess with someone, to extract cash from them, etc.), but I cannot fathom why anyone would do this and THEN ACTUALLY SHOW UP IN PERSON obviously not looking like the photo?? Just bizarre.
I love how the final straw is “She made me buy Transformers on DVD.”
A bridge too far.
Oh, god. A fucking crazy face more than ten years my senior (when i was mid-20s) who had me move in after like two weeks, and was constantly bragging about how rich he was. (Which, if you’re rich you don’t have roommates, but I didn’t care about money, so whatever.) Two weeks after me moving in he breaks it that he hasn’t paid any of his bills in months, and he hasn’t told his roommates so they don’t know they’re about to lose the place. Captain Save-a-Trick here jumps in and pays all the bills because that’s what you do when you’re in love, and I knew he would be making lots of money when he got a job again. (Oh, did I mention he revealed himself to be unemployed?)
Should mention that we met while partying HARD. A week after I move in, he informs me that he’s getting sober now and doesn’t want me drinking around him. I was a complete party girl at this point, so this was a major needle scratch. He expected me to just stop drinking and start staying in every night, buying groceries and keeping him fed. Captain Save-a-Trick once again obliges, going to the grocery store almost every day because apparently “getting sober” means staying in all day every day, sleeping all day, playing World of Warcraft all night and binge eating in-between.
Basically, the whole relationship sucked ass, with him just being really mean/dismissive/manipulative toward me with me paying for evvvvverything, including really expensive salon treatments for him? When he finally, FINALLY got a job six months later, he uninvited me from his best friend’s birthday party, amped up the asshole, and then just flat dumped me and gave me a day to get out of his house. A week after I had also quit my job. I was destroyed because I was actually really in love with him, but that’s a whole other set of issues. When I try to recoup money from him because he is now making more than twice my salary, he nitpicks me on the bills, asking “so, wait, you expect ME to pay for my depression?” um……what?
A few mental breakdowns later and only halfway through the ensuing downward spiral, I start getting calls from Comcast, and then a collection agency. It turns out that despite my request, they never took Comcast out of my name and he and his roommates just never paid the bill again, but did subscribe to EVERY SERVICE Comcast has (multiple DVRs, fastest internet, dozens of pay per view pornos) and left me with an $1100 collections bill as a parting gift. So. Yeah. NOT GREAT, BOB!
Thanks for letting me vent. I don’t think about that guy too much anymore, but when I met him he told me he was going to ruin my life, and he did. Luckily I eventually tossed that life aside and made a new one.
Holy shit, I hope that dude trips into an incinerator.
“…tossed that life aside and made a new one.” Beautiful, and I’m so glad you did!
Wow. I hope you are not one of the people who dated my brother-in-law, because this sounds frighteningly like him.
Glad you got out of that. That is horrifying.
Hooo boy. I dated my worst ex as an impressionable 19 year old, and while I could get into many, many horror stories (He thought all dark skinned people were black, except for asian women, because he was attracted to them! He stained my dorm sheets with his sweat and owned numerous fedoras! He made me listen to his own (terrible) original music on long drives!) I’m going to let his blog description speak for itself:
“Who I am: Singer/songwriter, aspiring novelist, self-proclaimed philosopher, analogy formulator, fighter of injustice, enemy of the people, seeker of fallacies and objectivity, light bringer, controversy speaker, video gamer, small-thing-appreciator.”
I ended it after like 3 months, and he’s provided me with funny stories ever since. I only wish I could also show you his novel.
enemy of the people AND light-bringer? I NEED HIS NUMBER
Does small-thing-appreciator mean what I think it means?
Oh, I’m sure he appreciates it quite regularly.
You can have it! We shared a birthday (ugh) so for a while after I would still get confusing birthday texts. Always took a while to figure out who they were from.
analogy formulator
This was my favourite. It speaks volumes.
fighter of injustice and enemy of the people back to back is one of those if I put that in a book it would be criticized as too on the nose.
I’m not saying you should look up his blog and find the link to his novel, but I’m not /not/ saying that either.
omg omg omg
ahhhhhhh this novel is the woorrrrssssttttttt
as an aspiring writer who isn’t exactly setting the world on fire, I’m impressed by the attempt.
but yeah, not so good.
I’m not saying I looked up his blog and found the link to his novel, but wow.
He has a degree in creative writing, FYI.
I’m definitely not saying I found his long, intellectual “philosophical rant*” about gender identity and how he defines it, including links to dictionary.com. I am certainly not saying I hope he looks at his blog traffic stats and wonders what’s up.
*Is there any more red-flaggy name for a tumblr post?
I am not saying I went and looked it up but oh. What makes a novel better? ADJECTIVES. SO MANY ADJECTIVES AND DESCRIPTORS.
I copy-pasted the part about trees on page 1 to my writing BFF on Viber. I have no regrets.
“Wow, check out this spike in page views! Looks like I’m finally getting my big break!”
omg omg this is AMAZING. The characters are so pretentious but THANK GODS neither of them is FAT.
“Singing is something I have been able to do fairly well since I was born”?
Is he SURE about that? Also, has he ever actually met any babies?
Holy shit, that is some bad writing. What an insufferable, all-around blowhard.
This. Blog. Oh dear lord.
I’m not saying you should listen to his ~original music~… I’m really not, because you already know exactly what to expect based on the rest, and I should have too.
The original music was my favorite part. The lyric “I’m sorry my love was such a chore” made me giggle for 3 straight minutes.
That line was amazing.
I audibly lost it at “analogy formulator”, and I’m in class.
lkjsadfklsadf that blog description. Was his name Garth Marenghi by any chance?
Oh lord. My college boyf could have written that blog description about himself… fortunately without all the racism, sheet sweat, and fedoras. But with the musical ineptitude.
“self-proclaimed philosopher (…) enemy of the people, seeker of fallacies and objectivity, light bringer, controversy speaker”
So he is LITERALLY Lucifer, then. (Lucifer means light-bringer.)
omg he’s one of those people who comments on every tumblr post he reblogs o m g
analogy formulator
I bet he has a face you could not stop hitting if you started
But he’s totally not a racist anymore, you guys!
http://www.hilltopsunset.com/post/113907260033/ra…
“smile emoticon” what the literal fuck….
“Singing is something I have been able to do fairly well since I was born”
Are those…chin braids?!
He loved Ayn Rand, was completely sexually incompatible, and was an incorrigible mansplainer. But for some reason what sticks out in my mind is the time he bought a book on cat behaviour to try to understand me better.
What.
see, and here I thought “is X more a dog or a cat” was a harmless little thought exercise. Did not know it provided to the key to understanding the behaviour of significant others. Clearly I have been relationshipping wrong.
Hmmm. Did he have weird facial hair…?
I refuse to believe that Jackson Galaxy would be anything other than the perfect boyfriend.
I’m so sorry but this is possibly the best relationship anecdote I have ever heard.
Nearly peed my pants laughing! Excuse me while I go to the litter box. This is the winner on the the-toast.net (while the man who ate fleas is the winner on twitter.)
tbh if any of my ex’s did that, I would probably understand.
1. Answered phone calls from mom during sex
2. Got up to feed cats during sex (??????)
3. Asked for gas money for his motorcycle on the first date
4. Got a secret tattoo of my name over his heart after we broke up
I sure can pick them!
AFTER you broke up?? Omg.
Wait, same ex? Because that’s… that a piece of work right there. I’m both impressed and feel like you should have a security detail, juuuuust in case.
Answered. phone. calls. from. his. mom. during. sex.
Ew.
“Hi Mom! Hey, listen, can you hold on a moment? I need to go feed the cats.”
Why is he multi-tasking during sex? I am generally into multi-tasking, but sex is kind of a thing that I want to pay attention to on its own?
My fiancé actually did this once. ONCE. We hadn’t been dating all that long, his mother lives in another country so he’s used to picking up every time she calls, but just what. I had to muffle my laughter with a pillow. (I still don’t know why he looked at the phone in the first place, though.)
Maybe a month or so after I met my non-boyfriend he asked me to come over for dinner one night. He warned me that his fairly recent ex had agreed to call him that day though to talk about how he’d get his stuff back from her place (in a different country) so he might have to take a call from her while I was over. Of course his phone rang later that night during sex. He ignored it, thank god, or else he might be my former non-boyfriend now.
Later that night: “Yep, that was my ex. Good thing I didn’t answer. I’d never have gotten my stuff back.”
“You also wouldn’t have had any more sex with me.”
“Really? I feel like I could have brought you back around to the idea.”
“Not tonight you wouldn’t have.”
Answering a call from anyone during sex would have been bad enough, but an ex? Things would not have gone well for him.
A primitivist who actively planned for & looked forward to the fall of civilization. Who even knew that was a thing?
That was the last Male I ever dated.
UGH they’re the worst. I’m an actual anarchist, and these guys are super duper into my okc profile, telling me their terrible opinions about Derek Jensen like it’s obvious that I agree. I accidentally slept with one while I was going to school in Oregon last year, and my partner still has not let me live it down!
I haven’t really had any bad exes, but I have (what I believe to be) a highly entertaining story about the worst thing I’ve done after a breakup!
My first boyfriend and I were together for 4 years. The day after our rather amicable breakup, I logged into facebook (back in the “[Name] is…” status update era), and saw “[Ex] is CELEBRATING INDEPENDENCE DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” I became enraged. I knew his standard password for things, not from snooping, but because he’d told me, so I logged into his account and deleted his status.
And then it turned out that it was the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence and I felt like an ass.
This is an amazing story, and also reminded me that I should share the dude who tweeted “There are too many beautiful women in the world, what’s a guy to do??” an hour after we broke up (which followed him finally calling me after straight up ignoring me for three days).
Ha! I broke up with a boyfriend of three years on Israel Independence Day, in Israel. I felt like the whole country was having barbecues in my honor.
Not so much an ex as a friend I lost my virginity to/slept with casually a few times before realizing he was dead inside, but:
Once asked me, “You’re not one of those girls who doesn’t shave her legs because ‘no one can see’ are you?” While we were naked in bed. After I had been blowing him for, like, half an hour.
I once fooled around with a guy who stopped in the middle to make me go shave my pubic hair. And I did it. And went back and kept fooling around with him, because there was something seriously wrong with me at the time. And then he told everyone that I slept with him and his roommate, which definitely did not happen.
WHYYYYYYY WHY WHY WHY
This is an actual fear of mine, mostly because I KNOW I WOULD DO IT AND IT WOULD BE WEIRD.
I’m blaming it on youth – it was my first year of college. I still didn’t believe anyone would ever just want to be with me and I hadn’t learned that being on my own could actually be way more awesome than being with guys like this. But I was seriously humiliated – this other woman who was into him invited me to breakfast with a bunch of people I didn’t really know and ambushed me about how I had slept with him and his roommate. And I was just like….WTF? No.
What does that even meannnnn? Is that as opposed to “girl who does shave” or “girl who doesn’t shave for other reasons”? And if a girl does choose not to shave because she’s got fine/light body hair and no one will notice, what makes that a bad reason?
I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS.
I think I gaped at him like a fish for several seconds, both because I was shocked he would dare ask anyone such a question and also because I couldn’t wrap my head around what he even meant by that.
When I cited the sheer amount of work that goes into shaving, he asked me, “Why don’t you just wax?” So I think his concept of female body hair is limited.
In ancient times, when I was in college, three separate boyfriends remarked “Didn’t shave today, huh?” while messing around. And I shaved all the time then, it was just a little stubble. Ten years ago I married a man who couldn’t care less how often I shave, so I AM one of those girls who only shaves when people will see, or if I feel like it. I highly recommend holding out for a guy who isn’t an entitled douchebag. They do exist. (Related frequent back handed non-compliment “you could model if you lost weight.”) Don’t give into negging! These horror stories are really making me appreciate my relationship! I forgot how awful the guys I used to date were.
Not even remotely the worst thing he did, just the most comical: got arrested for eating a bologna sandwich in line at a convenient store at like 3 a.m. and then realizing he didn’t have his wallet. He was completely drunk, and when the cops happened to walk in on their rounds, he made a (very short) break for it. You know. Like you do.
After he didn’t come home all night, I found out the next day when a friend sent me a FB message saying she read about it in the police blotter.
We dated for like 3 years after that. I’m not proud.
An ex-boyfriend once told me he had cancer and had six months to live. (I believed him because he had some legitimate medical issues.) That was over ten years ago. He is still alive.
That definitely reminds me of Cynthia Heimel’s “If You Can’t Live Without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet?!”
I dated a guy for three years who just didnt’ like the look of testicles on his body or on the male body in general, and was seriously considering having them surgically removed one day for aesthetic purposes. So far as I know, he didn’t suffer from gender dysphoria, he just didn’t like the look of his junk.
In fairness I can sort of see his point.
I mean, yeah, mine are totally not part of my aesthetic.
On the other hand, I am a bit attached to them.
(hee hee hee I have humor like a small child, hee)
To be fair, testicles are weird little things and they’re not really aesthetically pleasing (to me, at least? I’m sure there are thousands of people out there who are turned on by testicles).
Threw a chair across the room in an epic tantrum b/c he lost his wallet and his mom would be mad about it. Got arrested in a to-catch-a-predator style sting, about a week after an acquaintance was arrested in same sting- During my birthday weekend. Current profile picture on facebook is in a caveman costume that I made him (nearly 10 years ago- no idea why he still has it) that he first wore to my Librarians and Barbarians themed birthday party the night before his arrest. Most recently proposed marriage to his current fiance 9 years to the day after his arrest.
And yes, I should stop checking his facebook page every few months. I know.
You dated Dennis from 30 Rock?
“Hi, I’m here to boff some chick named Mary?”
Ok he’s ridiculous but you have the BEST costume party themes
#narcissist #vetyourAZtherapist
Dude manipulated me into confessing that I’d be willing to choose my grad school to be with him. One move across the country later, into a small town where I knew no one else, he tells me that he’s just not that into me.
Proceeds to get my major professor to team up with his major professor so I can’t get away from him at work. Slashes my tires. Damaged my car battery (literally, the repair dude held up a little piece of metal and was like, um, this is awkward, but someone is trying to sabotage your car.) Tried to swerve into my car when I passed him going the opposite direction.
Dated multiple women I tried to be friends with, then told them I was the reason they couldn’t be together. Convinced our church pastor that I was crazy.
Told me there could still be an “us”, as long as I let him “feel free to Internet-date single moms”.
Eventually married one of those single moms, and moved to Arizona, where he started a family therapy practice.
So…he wasn’t that into you, but he was willing to do all that evil work to…wtf? And this is a person who offers other people therapy? I…this is so appalling.
My theory is that he was enough of a narcissist that he wanted to punish me for ignoring him.
All the other rejected girls apparently still…stayed in the harem.
And thank you, your commiseration is like a huge Internet hug.
There is another internet hug here if you want it. Because that is some A-grade messed-up shit you went through, there.
My therapist keeps telling me to tell others, because “bearing witness” is an essential part of recovery, but these aren’t exactly the kinds of stories I can tell at parties.
So thank you SO much for the internet hug, and for listening! It really helps!!!
Perhaps you are going to the wrong parties? These stories would be welcomed at mine, and we would all holler about how you was WRONGED and then make elaborate plans to sugar his gas tank 😉
Your therapist is not wrong, is all I am saying. That terrible, terrible man was wrong. Honestly. They will give _anyone_ degrees these days.
I’ve realized through your wonderfulness that I do, in fact, need to raise my party standards 😀
And yes, having a degree or a license apparently doesn’t mean someone is sane, so everyone trust your instincts!
I think you might win and I’m genuinely sorry about it. I hope you either found someone 1000x better or found happiness on your own.
Being cheered on like this means so much to me.
Both your hopes for me are true! I got lots of therapy and learned to trust myself and my choices again.
I also met a kick-ass boyfriend whom I felt comfortable setting boundaries with from day 1.
All of this took years of medication and grieving and fighting with authority figures and some degree of community isolation. I haven’t really learned any universal lessons other than “I am of infinite worth, and I have an obligation to care for myself” and “you too can fight an evil soul-sucker and win! eventually!”
but I guess, come to think of it, that those are pretty great lessons. Thanks for your well-wishes, internet friend.
“I am of infinite worth, and I have an obligation to care for myself”
Had to write that one down to read as a daily affirmation! Excellent!
I am extremely glad to hear it 🙂
Ugh I am SO SORRY. What an asshole. Your hashtags are spot on … I would ask “what IS it about therapists often being so crazy themselves!?” except my mom is totally loony and also has a master’s in counseling, so, I don’t actually need to ask.
I am with Xolandra, you can come to all my parties too and we will help you plan out elaborate revenge fantasies.
ugh I feel like that would be so scary, with your mom being able to cite academic references for why she’s theoretically right.
I will bring so many snacks! And my reggaeton music collection, for dance parties when we’re satisfied that we could totally combat any and all evil exes!
Aaaaaah, I will bring my old skool ska and reggae, including my Studio One Women of Reggae album and it will be the best party!
If I can also add an internet hug and also you are a total bad ass against soul sucking evil exes
internet hug back! You are a total bad ass cheerleader and your screen name is so great!
I’m a terrible person because I actually laughed at the last sentence. Everything leading up to it just screeeams “competent family therapist”, doesn’t it? The world is a fucked-up place and I’m sorry you had to go through that.
Oh, I’m so glad you laughed, because I also think it’s deeply ironic, for exactly the reasons you mentioned.
{ hug }
Stole my poetry, changed the genders around, and used it to woo the woman he then started cheating on me with. Which, fine, whatever, except HE WAS A CREATIVE WRITING MAJOR. Really should have been able to come up with his own love poems, no?
!!!!!!! + standing ovation
(also he named his dick after a pokemon)
(oh my god why didn’t I break up with him so much sooner)
(first love is a hell of a drug)
Okay, I have to know: WHICH POKEMON?
SQUIRTLE???
PIKACHU, THE ELECTRIC RODENT.
Every once in a blue moon when he comes up in conversation now I just call him The Electric Rodent, so I’m pretty sure any friends I’ve made in the last 16 years don’t even know his name. Just “S’s bad ex, The Electric Rodent.”
ah I was betting on diglet.
Did he ever actually say anything like “Go Pikachu!” or “I choose you Pikachu” during sex?
If he did, I have managed to repress the memory successfully and I hope it stays good and repressed.
The real question, and potentially much more embarassing… did *you*?
Christ, no. I did not then, and do not now, understand the entire concept of naming one’s genitals. (Or if you must do so, of telling people about it. I have known the names of the penises of many more people than I have actually slept with. Like, dudes in my life, STOP TELLING ME YOUR DICK’S NAME.) (Which, fortunately, no one has done in years. I make better friends now or maybe just older friends with better boundaries.)
That is the very funniest bit of the Lady Chatterly’s Lover movie adaptation: they try and fail to make dick naming sexy.
Like if all a movie production team and a group of crack editors cannot make it attractive.. ? Perhaps it’s not possible.
It was cringe-inducing in the book, too. Even DH Lawrence couldn’t make it anything but awkward.
“Pikachu is out of energy! Pikachu has fainted!”
Disappointingly uncreative of Mr. Creative Writing. I was hoping for Cuboner. Even Dickachu would be better.
(you stuck with him so long just for the joy of telling us all this now, and we are grateful)
That does NOT sound super effective.
Never once was observed to have taken a shower, despite living in a house with a roof and a (presumably) perfectly working shower. Smelled like and maintained the appearance of a mountain man from the 1820s. I still somehow dated him for about 6 weeks.
My college boyfriend would regularly tell me that all my friends found me really annoying. CHARMER.
We were also once having a fight and you know how sometimes when you are fighting with a significant other it’s like ok look here’s something you need to know about my emotional hangups, my parents, whatever? Well, he looks me in the eyes, takes a moment and tells me very seriously
“I don’t like when people are angry with me.”
HE WAS VERY SERIOUS. I am still not over this. Does he think the rest of us enjoy it??
Also he was talking to another girl for 5+ hours a night (and pretending to barely know her name when he and I were with her) for the last 6 months of our 2.5 year relationship, and when she finally came clean to me and I confronted him he was like you just don’t want me to have female friends.
Late to the party, but: “Also he was talking to another girl for 5+ hours a night (and pretending to barely know her name when he and I were with her) for the last 6 months of our 2.5 year relationship, and when she finally came clean to me and I confronted him he was like you just don’t want me to have female friends.” I straight-up Joaquin Phoenix in “Signs” reared back in my seat and covered my mouth in silent horror; not exaggerating. This *exactly* mirrors what I’ve been through, right down to the lengths of the respective relationships and how long he and Girl would spend talking, except I WAS THE OTHER GIRL. Was? Am? I’m going to lie and say “was”. Okay, I’ll tell the truth. So what I’m hearing here is that it’s *not* normal for a guy in a relationship to spend an hour or so, a few times a week, talking with another girl, even if both parties keep insisting that, “C’MON, we’re just friiieeeends, you guys! This is what friends DO!” Seriously, the coincidences in this story are just frightening and it’s making me rethink how normal this friendship is. Uh?
I mean an hour or so doesn’t sound crazy to me, but if you are straight up pretending to not know each other in public and keeping your entire “friendship” secret like nooo nooo DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER. Normal friendships are healthy! Normal friendships should have regular communication! People in relationships should have other friends- that is healthy!
Also, this is just my blanket feeling but any “relationship” of any kind that has to be kept secret is just bad news bears. So if you and dudebro are keeping it secret from the girlfriend or you are getting weird vibes, take a bit of time to think about what’s going on.
Dude #1 insisted on a private after prom “thing” instead of the progressive prom party with all our actual friends, I think because he was setting things up for sex in the back of his brother’s SUV. He got mad and yelled at me when I didn’t want to, because he’d gotten champagne and strawberries and everything, but I was only 15 and still had some boundaries and was like, “get the fuck away from me.” We fell asleep fighting about it, but didn’t break up until he went to college and had sex with as many people as possible and informed me of it later, but “let’s just have a good summer” :).
Dude#2 was a straight-up gaslighting abuser, the reason I’m trying to not be an emotional lawyer all the time. [Insert years of stories here. No further explanation needed.]
Dude # 2 and my ex definitely need the party upthread to give us some wonderful revenge ideas.
Sort of off topic, but man Jude Law was almost unbearably beautiful back then, wasn’t he? Just look at those lips…
They chose well for Bosie.
I actually prefer him now, now that he looks like a man rather than a statue.
Ooh I was thinking that too. *sigh*
I saw him in Hamlet and it was the first time that was like CARDIGANS. OH BABY.
To be honest, the worst thing about my ex-husband is that we were both too young to a) have had a child** and b) understand and cope with how hard it is to navigate a relationship when one party is often crippled by depression or anxiety or both. (Me.) He’s apologized more than once when drunk, and I’m like, “Bro, you were a complete jackass about so many things — like that prolonged affair you had — but shit, we weren’t emotionally literate enough for that stuff yet.”*
But I’m now prepping to marry his childhood best friend, who was in our wedding and who I also cheated with two and a half times the month that our marriage finally imploded, so TBH I’m probably the worst ex here.
[* Not an actual quote, but the right meaning behind the quote. Also, my divorce is interesting as fuck. But not “my ex is an actual murderer” interesting.]
[** I love the squishy little bastard, though.]
But I’m now prepping to marry his childhood best friend, who was in our wedding and who I also cheated with two and a half times the month that our marriage finally imploded, so TBH I’m probably the worst ex here.
Okay, but my grandmother married her sister’s first fiance and my aunt is currently married to her first husband’s best man, so I think this sort of thing happens more often than you’d think.
Oh yeah, I expect the only difference is that our grandmas weren’t getting drunk and telling their hilarious-in-hindsight sex/romance stories at work parties.
Not that I have ever done this.
(Also, as much as I like my ex-husband as a friend, he is also kind of a self-involved toolbag, so if we were to sit down and tally up who “feels” more hurt, he’d probably say that I had more right to be hurt, then go home and tell his friends on the Internet about how I didn’t validate his feelings and understand that he wanted me to tell him that he was more hurt. Or least he would have when we were married. He might be more even-keel now. It’s hard to tell.)
When my Dad’s new partner is in town, my Mum really enjoys introducing [Partner] to her friends as ‘my ex-husband’s new girlfriend’.
My Mum was the one to leave my Dad. One night the three of us were at a bar together and my Dad’s partner leaned over to my mum and said, ‘you know what [Saffie’s mum]? You and me, we just go to show – one woman’s trash is another woman’s treasure.’
My mum also got a phone call from the Alice Springs Criminal Investigation Division asking her to confirm that a specific man had been at a specific party one night (the man’s 4WD matched the description of a car that had been linked to the Peter Falconio murder). When the cop asked her how she could be sure he was at the party she said, ‘Oh! Well you see, it was my ex-husband’s 50th birthday party, and [suspect] was the ex-husband of my ex-husband’s new girlfriend, and this was the first time we’d all been at the same place since they started dating, so we were all watching to see how that would play out.’
Country towns.
I almost married a guy when I was really young, and really wanted to have a kid with him at the time. Then we broke up by accident, and 4 years later I married his childhood best friend, and we totally had kids. Small towns man!
Wore aviators and a leather bomber at all times. Had vanity plates that said “Fliboy.” Was not a pilot.
That’s criminal.
Yum!
oh man would I be tempted to only call them “fleaboy”.
That’s how I read it the first time, too.
STOP.
The first guy I ever dated (in junior high) I only agreed to go out with because he promised he would stop bullying other kids if I did. We broke up when he beat up his little brother for talking to me without him present.
The most comical (and only comical because I wasn’t that invested in the relationship) was a guy I met on vacation and then tried to do the long distance thing with. Turned out he not only lied about his relationship status but his name and the country he lived in. I only found out when his best friend slipped up and called him by his real name. He ghosted after that, I have to assume he thought lying when we met was all in good fun but then couldn’t find his way out of the lie later.
There was the guy who reached into the medicine cabinet to take and aspirin—while we were physically in the middle of having sex in the bathroom. He also said, another time we weren’t having sex: “I know I already said I loved you, but I don’t really know what love is so if you tell me what love is I’ll tell you if I love. you.” <straight faced>
I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me
ok, so I read this to my 15 year old son, and he choked. As a matter of fact, this whole thread led to an interesting discussion with him today!
Replied with this Darth Ex story on twitter last night (and it is now my most liked tweet EVER), reposting here with more detail.
We went with a group of friends after a long day to a TGI Friday’s in Tampa. It was a Friday during dinner rush. He threw a fit when it took ten minutes to get his soda–like, shouting at the waitress, calling her an incompetent, being generally insulting–then chugged the soda and declared we were leaving.
I put a $20 down under a cup to pay for the soda and also leave like a 400% tip because I felt so bad for the waitress.
As we were all filing out, he PICKED UP THE TIP I’D LEFT, and when we were all in the car heading down the road, pulled it out and gave it back to me, telling me not to waste my money like that.
Younger, stupider lemonack continued to date this winner for another three years because I did not know how to disentangle myself from his gaslighting ass.
I saw this last night and MY JAW. DROPPED.
aaaaauuuuuuggggghhhhhhhhhh
I didn’t think anything could be worse than someone catching you hiding extra tip money, but now I know it can be WAY worse.
My first fiance, you guys.
We were together for three years and lived with his mom and stepfather for kind of a lot of that time. (eta: There was not one single book in that house that wasn’t mine. Not. One.) He took pride in being the only one of his friends who hadn’t been arrested; he was not, however, one of the two of that group who’d graduated high school. About a year into the relationship, he started developing some SERIOUS neo-con tendencies, which I put up with for far too long. I finally ended things when our “relationship” consisted of him getting high and playing video games at his cousin’s house and then coming to my place (I’d moved to care-take my mother’s new house) and passing out on the couch.
It wasn’t abusive, it just… it just sucked.
ETA: AND the fucker stole my leatherbound copy of The More Than Complete HitchHiker’s Guide and I still have not forgiven him for that. It’s been 12 years. AND he tried to get back together with me four years later and ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh. He friended me on FB in 2010 and unfriended me the day I got engaged in 2014. TEN YEARS he held a torch, I do not understand this, as far as I know he still lives with his mom and stepdad AND HE HAS MY FIRST CAT.
GOD DAMMIT
After losing my annotated copy of Hell House and some other personal affects, I concluded that 2gether had it right: the hardest part of breaking up really is getting back your stuff.
(so, so sorry that he still has your first cat. that is some low shit)
What is this pet-stealing fuckery? Someone upthread had their dog confiscated by their ex, and now this. 🙁
My poor Luna. When I moved into my mom’s place to caretake, she would not let me bring my cat with me, so she stayed with my ex. When we finally split up, it was a possession-is-nine-tenths situation.
Ex-husband who even as we were getting married I knew I shouldn’t marry was a man-child who discovered hallucinogens a couple years into our “marriage” and believed he had achieved enlightenment after a few acid trips. I was left behind. Thank goodness.
… I want to hear more?
I know, like, what did he do after “achieving enlightenment”? What kind of hallucinogens? Psilocybin??
Oh, another guy I “dated” briefly was really just using me for cigarette money and the fact that I had a car and he did not. Once he made a date of me driving him 45 minutes to his mom’s house to do laundry. When we came back, he said “Thanks for coming with me.”
Worst ex was a guy who had trouble getting hard — he told me my vagina was too tight, making sex painful for him. His theory on MY vagina problems was that I wasn’t over being sexually assaulted in college five years prior. My theory was that he never attempted foreplay. Different strokes for different folks? (Pun totally intended.)
right. So you were just supposed to be all ready and wet whenever he decided he wanted sex, and when you weren’t, it was your fault. Got it.
This makes me REALLY angry.
Dude lived in a trailer up in the mountains with his mother, who I could not mention to anyone because she was a fugitive from the law. A FEW DAYS after we started officially dating, I heard through the grapevine that he’d cheated on me with his ex. When I confronted him about it, he told me that they’d slept in the same bed together but hadn’t had sex. When I asked him what in the world he was doing sleeping in the same bed with his ex-girlfriend, he shrugged and said “I have a childlike, whimsical nature!”.
I’m going to start using that as an answer to everything! Especially criticism.
“I have a childlike, whimsical nature!”
Isn’t that known to Dickens readers as the Harold Skimpole defense?
**WILD APPLAUSE**
A FUGITIVE FROM THE LAW!
you win the internet!
Oooh, a Manic Pixie Dream Boy!
Oh! Well, the really terrible first ex. But I don’t want to talk about it. He was the actual worst. If I was not feeling like never being alive ever again at the time, I’d have brought up criminal charges. But I didn’t occur to me that it was illegal, so… Oy. Did that terribleness go on for years.
But my next “BF” was my RA, who was also sleeping with my roommate my freshman year who also had a girlfriend back home.
There are few people who know this history, so all they do know that I’ve been partnered for nearly a decade with a super cool feminist amazing awesome caring funny good humored handsome man. So there’s a lot of “oh, you’re so lucky, you don’t know anything about bad boyfriends.” To which I silently think: I earned this rad dude, and paid all of my terrible relationship dues at once. I maybe didn’t kiss a lot of frogs to get here, but the one I did was insanely poisonous. Very happy and very cozy now. I would like to tell my younger self that.
“I maybe didn’t kiss a lot of frogs to get here, but the one I did was insanely poisonous”
I feel that. Sometimes it only takes one!
He was obsessed with the White Stripes, wore stretch turtle necks with dinosaurs on them, and was only nice to me around other people. In private, we would watch youtube videos of him playing music, interspaced with videos of people interviewing him. Worst sex I ever had. Dumped me by saying “we should take a break,” then started dating a girl he had been romancing the entire time we were seeing each other.
I was angry at him, and one night after getting substantially drunk I busted into his dorm room at 3am (with a posse of rowdy frat boys) and vowed to “stab him in his face” if he didn’t treat the next girl “like a princess.” Never had a problem with him again.
whoa you are awesome.
Where do you even FIND a stretch-turtleneck with a dinosaur pattern?
I want to know! Because that sounds like the world’s worst fashion choice on a crummy person, but a great fashion choice on a great person.
Was just thinking that I would love a turtleneck with dinosaurs…
I enjoyed your story extra by pretending that it was actually Jack White, which I think is fairly plausible.
I am strangely thrilled that we all have such shitty exes.
I’m a little jealous. My sis has shitty exes. My bro & his ex are both shitty exes. But I’ve just got a pile of slightly sad folk. Even the weirdest/worst are too mild for this crowd.
I am finding it really comforting, having shared my worst ex who I feel deeply ashamed of having dated, to read these and go “wow he doesn’t even really stand out from the crowd”
I know, right? I feel better about my shitty choices knowing I’m not the only one who makes them.
I reluctantly agreed to open our (lesbian) relationship after 20 years, as she had a guy she wanted to have sex with. Managed for 6 months, then I asked for it to be closed again, as I just couldn’t deal, was too painful. She told me she had ended it with him, but was lying, and kept sleeping with him for another 6 months, while I was wondering why I felt so crazy. In the midst of all that, I supported her through some kind of personal breakdown, as she supported him through his. I felt I couldn’t leave. Wisdom of hindsight, should have gotten out way sooner. Fell on my feet, into love and a much better life. She is still with him.
I dated this guy for about a month who was super into two things: 1) role play, 2) the movie Frozen. I’m not especially passionate about either of those things, but it was the combination that really went too far for me. He begged over and over for us to role play Frozen in bed—he wanted to be Elsa and he wanted me to be Anna. There are not enough words to describe how much I did not want to do this, but he kept trying. One night he went so far as to whisper sexily in my ear, “…do you want to build a snowman?”
He was also in med school at the time, and the first time we kissed (KISSED! nothing more) he asked if he could do a practice pelvic exam on me. Occasionally I’d catch him performing a covert breast exam during foreplay or checking my kidneys or something. It was weird. Now he’s dating a girl with the same name as me, which is much less weird when compared to everything else.
(I feel like I should include a disclaimer: he was actually a pretty sweet guy and not awful at all. Just strange. Very, very strange.)
I’m somehow stuck on the “covert breast exam.” I’ve had guys try to offer breast cancer checks in an attempt to get to sex, but I’ve never had it the other way round.
Between the snowman and the pelvic exam, I’m hearing the “RED ALERT! RED ALERT!” Star Trek klaxon in my head now…
Oh god Frozen will never be the same
um tell me about it. My friends give me crap about it every time we hear a song from that movie now. Also, I know way more about Frozen fanfic than I wish I did.
Did you whisper back, “it doesn’t have to be a snowman?”
I need to know.
I REALLY SHOULD HAVE. Thanks, Olaf.
Oh man, this reminds me of a guy I dated 6 or so years ago for a month-ish, whose next girlfriend was my exact double in almost every way (except that she’s an anti-choice troll and I’m a reasonable human being). They’re engaged now.
Same thing with my sister’s ex. His next girlfriend has her EXACT look…hair, clothes, etc…but is definitely the poor man’s version (my sis is honestly gorgeous). What’s super creepy is that we looked through the girl’s FB and the timing of this “look” is very new, pretty much directly aligned with when she started dating him. We don’t know if she did this on purpose or, even worse, HE encouraged it. I think the latter.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO *jumps directly into scalding hot shower*
Literally ate ONLY the following: Pizza, fries (with a 1:1 ketchup ratio), chicken fingers, bananas, yogurt. Hadn’t discovered the word “supertaster,” but I bet uses it now.
One month into our relationship, went on a weekend trip with me, for which I paid $300 for his flight/share of the room, with an agreement that he’d pay me back later that month. Paid me back in 20’s here and there over the course of SIX months. Wouldn’t have minded all that much, except that during that time I’d watch him drop large sums on comic books, convention passes, and collectibles.
Got drunk at my cousin’s wedding and signed the wrong part of their photo-frame-as-guestbook-thingy (on the inner matte when EVERYONE else had signed on the outer). Signature was HUGE and literally said “Katie’s boyfriend” — not his own name. So years later after everyone forgets him, I can’t even be like “Oh I don’t remember who that was either!”
I worked with a grown woman who would LITERALLY only eat chicken nuggets, fries, and cheese pizza. Worse than that, however, was that she would come in every day and tell me about how furious she was with her dates for taking her to ‘weird’ restaurants that didn’t serve chicken nuggets.
She was my supervisor & it was all I could do to not scream “YOU’RE TWENTY-EIGHT!!!” at her every time.
I worked with someone like that, who would literally only eat five foods (of the burger/ chicken nugget variety). But he was nice enough to donate a kidney to his sister, so I don’t feel like I can make fun of him anymore.
(Re: the dating thing, I knew his fiance, and I think his inflexibility about food was a major factor in the eventual break-up of their engagement).
It’s like, having a restrictive diet must be very hard on dating! But all the sympathy I have for someone with an intolerance or even a moral reason for avoiding certain foods goes right out the window if you’re just a baby! Sorry your mama didn’t make you eat a salad once in a while!
Too true. Once had a houseguest who revealed during the course of his (blessedly short) stay that he ate only burgers, cheeseburgers, fries, pasta, soda, candy and cookies. On the day he arrived, I made simple red-sauce pasta. I used canned diced tomatoes as the sauce base and he PICKED OUT the tomato chunks. Most of his time with us he subsisted on what he could be at the local chain drugstore in the way of candy and snack-aisle crap, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The final night my husband and I took him out for a meal at a good local place, assuring him there was a great burger on the menu. But horrors – it had frizzled onions on it, and the fries were “fancy” (truffle fries? Old Bay fries?). SO glad to see the back end of him.
To be fair, chunks of cooked tomato are literally the worst form of tomato. 😡
I…I think I know this person.
You might! Does she work for The Mouse?
NO! *gasp* There’s more than one of these people??
But seriously, completely identical down to the food items of choice and the complaining about her dates!
No!! The world does not need more than one!!
I admit I wondered if she was related to the infamous s p r i n g s 1 of the ranch dressing.
I dated someone when I was 19 who would only eat like a five-year-old. ‘Plain’ burgers (cheese, meat, bun, nothing else); chicken nuggets; grilled cheese sandwiches; cheese pizza. One time we were having lunch at his mom’s house and he threw a fit because the sweetcorn on his plate was touching the peas. We couldn’t go out for dinner anywhere except greasy takeaway and pizza places. Two long, hungry years…
Ugh this has just reminded me of my ex who told me he was allergic to mushrooms when we first started dating (and yet would take copious amounts of magic mushrooms, this should have been a sign)
Anyway, being the considerate girlfriend I was, I spend three months making sure not to cook with mushrooms, checking sauce jar’s ingredients for mushrooms, and picking mushrooms off his side of pizza and out of spaghetti sauce (Seriously, my brother cooked spaghetti bolegnase for the whole family once, and i forgot to mention the mushroom thing, so of course brother loads it with mushrooms, and I spent ten minuted picking the mushrooms out of BF’s serving in front of everyone.)
And then we were drunk in the back of taxi with friends one night and I overheard him telling someone ‘I tell people I’m allergic to mushrooms but really I just don’t like them’. I so drunk it too awhile for me to comprehend what he was saying, but when it did, sweet jesus did I kick off. I think I literally turned around and said ‘YOU FUCKING WHAT!’ How fucking rude. And he never even thanked me for how considerate I was for all that time.
Seriously. If someone is genuinely allergic I don’t mind making accommodations, but you just don’t like it you can grow the fuck up and pick it out yourself.
wh… why would he expect YOU to pick them out. did he lack hands, eyesight, or both? because those are the only non-sexist reasons I can think of.
and of course people who fake allergies are the fucking WORST.
They are the people responsible for no one believing that I’m allergic to peas! “Oh you’re not allergic. You just don’t like them! I’ve never heard of anyone being allergic to peas!” Umm… do you really want to see my lips swell up to the size of a banana?
My ex ate pretty much literally the same thing for every non-breakfast meal – pasta or rice with ketchup and a slab of meat of some type. Sometimes there was a small amount of vegetables. He would, if pressed, eat other things, but defaulted back to this even if better food was available.
I tweeted this last night, but here’s my ex:
“If you gave up dairy, you’d lose 20 pounds and then you’d be really attractive”
He also had a meltdown when he found out that I took communion with real wine, which was very 19th century of him.
No regrets there.
I’m so glad you traded in that jerk for a lifetime of cheese. <3
AND wine!
I later married his arch-rival, who has no qualms about my consumption of cheese, wine (and other men, but that’s the fun of being poly!)
Wooohoooo!!!
Sweet revenge!
My husband’s complete chillness about my dating other men and women is pretty much one of his best qualities, and he has a lot of awesome qualities. Poly life FTW.
My ex bitterly warned me that my current relationship would end in failure because I was “way too promiscuous” hahahahahahaha
Definitely much more satisfactory to lost however many pounds of him.
I had one ask me, while clothes shopping, “do you have any interest in losing ten pounds? I mean, just because this is such a great sweater and that would make it fit”
GAH!
That’s hilarious. Although I have to admit that I had a similar tantrum as a child when my paternal grandfather (who was very angry that my mother had gone back to the Episcopal Church after the divorce and was raising us as such) took me to his Southern Baptist church one Sunday morning. I had just received my first communion a few months prior and was appalled – appalled! – that when it came time for communion they just passed around little medicine cups of grape juice. I then loudly asked if they were going to hand out animal crackers for the Body. He never took me back.
This is amazing.
was seeing this guy on a casual and open basis, it got somewhat more serious (multiple dates a week), and then I had an autoimmune flare and was like “hey dude, with the whole immunocompromised thing and the my-health-is-in-jeopardy thing I think either we split up so you can keep doing the open dating thing or we make this exclusive, like, I like you and could use the support but I understand if you’d prefer flexibility”
he thought about it for a weekend and came back with “okay yeah I definitely want to date you exclusively, you are great and fun to be with”
“oh, cool”
“but if this one ex” [who one of MY exes was dating] “ever says she wants to hook up w/ me, can I get, like, an exemption? from the exclusivity deal? just for her?”
[slow realization that I have made a grave error in judgment and choice of social circle]
My college boyfriend, who fancied himself a great outdoorsman, insisted on taking me on a really intense desert hike to a waterfall in a canyon. It was summer, and blazingly hot, and after a few hours I began to develop symptoms of heatstroke (almost fainting/vomiting), but he insisted that it would all be worth it when we got to the waterfall. Finally, we got to the waterfall. Except there was no waterfall — just a dried-out hole. Because it was summer in the desert.
Frustrated but undaunted, he suggested we hike back to the car and go on another hike to another waterfall in another canyon. It was getting pretty late in the day at this point, but I agreed, because I really wanted to have a nice day with him. We made it successfully to this next waterfall, though it was pretty crowded with other hikers. He suggested we wait for them all to leave so we could have sex in the wilderness. I agreed.
Well, it took the other hikers a long time to leave; by the time we were alone, it was getting pretty dark in the canyon. I was nervous and kept pointing this out to him, but he repeatedly reassured me with the following explanation: “The sky only LOOKS dark because we’re in the canyon. But it’s actually daytime outside of the walls of the canyon. Once we hike back, you’ll see that it’s actually still daytime.”
I was nineteen and terrified of everything; he was twenty-one and so sure of himself. How could I doubt him?
You can probably guess what happened next, so I won’t go into it, except to say that we were lost in the dark for hours and it was my first encounter with (multiple) rattlesnakes, which really do rattle at you, they’re quite aptly named.
Afterward, he asked, “Are you breaking up with me?” but for some reason we stayed together for three more years and even lived together until he dumped me for accidentally using the bathroom sponge on the kitchen sink after he put fish in the food processor and it splattered everywhere. The End.
Oh my god, you came so close to being in a Death In _________ book!
… there’s so much here… So. Much.
AND HE DUMPED YOU OVER A SPONGE.
There’s a lot to unpack here but the fish in the food processor thing is maybe one of the grossest things I’ve ever heard about in a kitchen.
Ok but the breakup is honestly the best part of this story because who almost kills someone in the desert and then breaks up with them over a sponge?
Oh, honey, oh my God!
When I was 18, I went out a few times with this guy I was working with at a pizza place one summer. We finally had sex and then it was like a switch flipped and he completely ignored me from then on. He would not even talk to me about work stuff. It was like I was not even there. I went off to college at the end of the summer and then around Halloween I went home for the weekend to visit. I went in to the pizza place to talk to my friend there and was telling her about my new boyfriend at school. This guy heard us and got all butt hurt about how could I forget about him so soon. What the what?
I had a boyfriend who broker up with me because I couldn’t provide a satisfactory Five Year Plan. 8 months later, he married an old college classmate for her cooking. They split a year later, and he is happily living with a man in Texas.
HIS FIVE YEAR PLAN DID NOT MENTION ANY OF THAT.
did he by any chance also edit you out of photos afterward?
He wasn’t cheating on me, you see. He was cheating on his girlfriend of seven years with me. He had mentioned her a few times as his long ago ex and I had zero idea they had any contact. I still don’t know how he pulled it off, as we were together all the damn time.
He also turned me into kind of a nightmare ex, in that I dated his estranged twin brother almost immediately afterwards. Not identical twin, for fuck’s sake. I am not a monster. But yeah, shitty thing to do.
9/11 truther with a drug problem LOL.
Some ppl need paragraphs. This is Hemmingwayesque (in the best possible way) in its simplicity. *applauds*
Oh THANKS! Those are really the only interesting parts, tbh.
oh man, same.
I feel like the number of SAME’s on all these posts are making my faith in humanity die
Oh god, I’m so sorry! Did he also drop out of law school to “find himself” or…?
As guys go, I never thought this particular guy was all that bad, though all of my friends continue to hate him years after we broke up. But it was the most entertaining break up of my life. We had, at this point, been dating for maybe a month. We’d seen each other 6 or 7 times total when he calls me up one night for the following conversation:
Him: So, are we dating?
Me: Well we’ve been on multiple dates, so yes, I would say we are dating
Him: No, I mean: are we in a relationship?
Me: Like, monogomous?
Him: Yeah
Me: I guess I could do that. Sure. We can be monogomous
[long pause]
Him: We need to break up
Me: ok.
Him: There’s this other girl
Me: ok
Him: And I just think that we need to stop dating each other
Me: ok
Him: Are you ok?
Me: I’m fine
I was bewildered for about an hour, after which I decided to set up an OK Cupid account, seeing as I was still relatively new in town and suddenly completely single. So I’m polishing up my profile when this same dude who JUST BROKE UP WITH ME messages me all flirty and asks me out. Like, what?
wanted an open relationship, which I was cool with, but apparently to him it meant ignoring me at parties while he made out and went home with other people. didn’t have a job and spent all his time smoking weed and going on the internet to call out other people for being capitalist. broke up with me right after i told him about how something shitty happened to me and I needed support. I was heartbroken lmao.
OMG THE WORST!
Lost my virginity to him, then at 11:30 on New Years Eve he told me we needed to break up so he could spend more time on his kung fu. Had a tattoo of an alien face on his calf. Worked in an Italian deli, constantly smelled of roasted red peppers.
…more time on his kung fu.
His ‘sensei’ told him so. His sensei also worked at the deli and had a lazy eye.
I am fairly confident that most people couldn’t make this shit up if they tried. I certainly know I couldn’t. Wow.
His ‘sensei’ told him so.
Why is this so funny? Is it the scare quotes around sensei? I’m imagining all the possible things this guy could be other than a kung fu instructor.
That last part doesn’t sound so bad. Mmmm, roasted red peppers.
better than the dude I had an insta-crush on once who was a fisherman. Guess what he smelled like?
you say that but i once met someone who smelled like bacon and it AS MUCH AS I LOVE BACON… it gets old fast. and weird.
He started as a PA in LA, got into gardening as a side gig, fell in with some former sci fi producers who believed they were alien walkins sent to earth to give us better weed. They trained him, mostly jump rope and jujitsu, unlocking his inner infinite being – an intergalactic dragon named Azul.
When I moved to LA, it was not to half-ass life.
JUMP ROPE AND JUJITSU
http://i1128.photobucket.com/albums/m493/Stephani…
While on the phone with me to discuss post breakup logistics, she asked me whether it would be considered a booty call to call this guy she met on tinder round for sex.
I told her to go ahead, as it was her fucking life- so she fucked him.
Sold my stuff that I had leant her as it took up too much space.
My actual worst ex isn’t funny so I’ll submit my 2nd to worst ex:
Both of were in high school, he was a senior and either a year or 2 older than me? We went on maybe 4 or 5 dates and one day I started talking about how I wanted to go out of state for college. He very calmly said, “I figured, that’s why I’ve decided I won’t be going to college in a few months so that I can make enough money to support both of us and go with you wherever you go until we can move back home and build a house next to my mother’s.” Reader, I ghosted that man.
You earned your username.
*full body shudder*
He should be dating some of the other Worst Exes! They could have huge epic fights about complementarity and who was REALLY the selfish one, leaving the rest of us to do whatever the hell we pleased with our lives.
This is basically what happens in Say Anything.
After a trip to his parents’ house, where they met my parents for the first time while celebrating my birthday, we returned to our shared apartment, and he said “I feel like I could marry you tomorrow.” The next day, he informed that, not only had he been having an affair for several months, but she was pregnant and he wanted to be dad. Oh, and then i found out we had bedbugs. We moved out of our bedbug-infested apartment (after it was determined to be bedbug-free, naturally) on Christmas day.
Put up our wedding picture (with me cropped out) as the profile photo on OKCupid before I had even moved out.
This one made me GASP in horror. Jesus.
Seriously. I hope a lot of angry OKC users wrote to them like “uh, this is obviously a WEDDING PICTURE, are you MARRIED???”
She was wearing a beige suit and a matching pinstriped fedora (which I picked out, of course) and had never looked better in her life, but still.
Oh my GOD.
oh, god, mine did this, but at least it wasn’t the wedding picture, just a vacation picture my sister took. 5 years after the divorce, it’s STILL his damn facebook picture!!!!!!
WOW.
Oh no.
REN
This is just part of the reason why when people who hadn’t seen me in a while tried to express condolences over my failed marriage I would say, “No, I’m happily divorced”.
I was dating this “writer” when I was diagnosed with cancer a few years back. When he wasn’t talking about himself, he took notes about things that I said and often asked me “Can I use that?” when I told him about what happened at my doctor’s appointments. On several occasions, I caught him stroking my biopsy scar before a major surgery. I’m sure while thinking about his great American novel about the brave, average white man who stood by his poor, sick girlfriend. Unfortunately for him, I pulled through with little complications, was declared cancer free, and stopped returning his calls. I don’t think he’s published anything of note.
Oh my god, this is horrific.
So glad you pulled through! And that he is basking in his insignificance.
John green?
I dated a male ob-gyn that sent me dick pics.
A male women’s health doctor. Sending women pictures of his dick. Wonderful.
He sounds like a character on The Mindy Project! Like they would get a new ob-gyn and he would be sending everyone dick pics, and Mindy and Morgan and Tamara would have to sit him down and Have A Talk.
HAHAHA yes!!
I am reading every single one of these responses to make sure I’m not being described.
Yep. Once I broke up with a boyfriend at 6 am after a raucous party and he was still drunk. He was like…clinging to my arm begging me to leave and I physically ran from the house to Tim Hortons and got a bagel and took the bus home. I’m confident that he still thinks I’m his worst ex for doing that but….I had never liked him all that much to begin with. Sorry, bud.
sorry bud
ilu
Lived with the mother of his child (and his child) while dating me, swore up and down they weren’t together anymore, suddenly ghosted on me after a year and married her a year later. they now have a second kid. it’s just gross and i don’t know why i tolerated it, except to say that i just believed him.
Worst ex stories are so embarrassing because what does it say about me that I stayed with a (white, wealthy) man who: 1. stormed out of a restaurant because he thought that the (70ish, African American lady) was being racist towards him (because our food/service was slow) 2. accused me of cheating on him not with another man, but with my best girl friend – because she got drunk one night and slept over my house (a note: obviously being gay is not a bad thing but hearing your opposite sex partner ask you if you’re straight is pretty jarring//a double accusation of lying//extremely paranoid) 3. subtweeted that I was a “brainwashed waste of talent” because I work for a corporation (unlike he – who was an entrepreneur but worked at one of those crazy coworking spaces with rules like you can’t eat lunch at your desk because that’s too “corporate”) 4. complained that I was a wrench in his day when I showed up to a lunch date he asked for, but because I was (at the time, though I didn’t know it) dying of a blood clot, I was “too complainy” about the pain I was in. His mood swings were so chaotic, his behavior so self-destructive (he would also eat and drink himself into states of day/night-ruining physical pain) that to this day I’m having trouble trusting my instincts in relationships.
Feel free to ask the toast in the comments!!! 🙂 Seriously, that dude sounds legit awful. But we all grow up and learn more about ourselves and how we perceive others. Don’t feel down on yourself, be glad that you learned… I mean, that’s hard. Don’t be too down on yourself.
to this day I’m having trouble trusting my instincts in relationships.
solidarity fist bump. it is hard to look back at all of the ridiculous shit that i’ve both done AND put up with in the past and not then wonder if my current relationship is also terrible and i just don’t know it.
i find that using the metric of “are we each spending the vast majority of our time, together and apart, happy?” helps put things in perspective. it’s also very reassuring that i’ve talked about my partner here and my fellow Toasties have not been like, “oooooh gooooood no RUN!”.
I very briefly dated a dude who slept on what was basically a yoga mat BY CHOICE. Like, he had owned a bed previously, but he got rid of it because he thought the mat was “better for his back.” Also he talked all the time about how all of his exes were crazy, and whenever I put on makeup, he’d be like, “You don’t need to wear makeup” and 24-year-old me didn’t say anything, but 28-year-old me can think of a LOT of things I should have said. The worst thing, however, was that he ONLY WORE VIBRAM TOE SHOES.
Somehow, I knew all of the things you wrote would lead to toe shoes eventually… (rocks back and forth, hugging knees)
TOE SHOES UGH
This sounds like a version of my terrible college ex!
He wouldn’t sleep in his dorm bed–he slept on the floor underneath it (it was lofted) and he shamed me for using a pillow. He said the same thing as yours about makeup but instead of Vibrams, my ex went around our college barefoot (jfc what was I thinking). He also occasionally carried a “quarterstaff” (a big ass stick) and referred to himself as a lycanthrope.
What did he do on full moons, lock himself in the bathroom?
A lycanthrope! I must admit–I did not see that one coming.
…did you go to Oberlin?
I think you dated this article’s brother
http://the-toast.net/2015/01/26/leather-golf-guy/
“The Leather Golf Hat almost certainly majored in Gender Studies and did not notice how often he interrupted his female professors.” SOUNDS CORRECT.
whenever they say all their exes are crazy: run.
Dated a guy, found out a few months in that he was not just a convicted felon, but a sex offender, and not just a sex offender, but HAD MOLESTED HIS YOUNGER SISTER. Stayed with him for almost a year after that, because I had no self-esteem.
Lord almighty.
My coworker’s best friend is currently dating a guy who was convicted of a felony for beating up his mother. I mean.
His mother??
hooooly shit. Well I’m glad you eventually got out!
Not my worst ex (there are several in line ahead of him), but:
Years ago, I broke up with this guy after some few weeks of dating. Anything more than 3 dates was already too long–he was clingy and pushy, and wanted to dub me his official gf ASAP so we could skip to the part where I functioned as his mommy-nurturer with (bad) sex benefits. I tried breaking up with him before, but he was clingy and pushy, and I had a hard time saying no like I meant it.
The final break-up went poorly, since I had to ramp up my bluntness from “Sorry, this just isn’t working out for me” to “Actually, I don’t like you at all and this needs to end right now.” Which started out being really painful to say, but really started to grow on me after a few repetitions. I finally unstick him from the couch and push him out the door, repeating “NO” and its variations on loop. Five minutes later, he comes back for his “forgotten” cell phone. “Are you sure?” he says, as he turns to leave. “YES. I. AM.”
Changing my mind–this was my best ex. This is how I learned to say “no” for reals.
You are excellent.
Irish exboyfriend announced to my entire extended family at Christmas that he was ‘Yet to find an Australian’ he could ‘have an intelligent conversation with’. My family is Australian.
Same boyfriend tried to guilt trip me about not wanting to have sex with him the day I’d had an IUD inserted and I was still recovering from the minor surgery. Three weeks later he wet the bed.
THE LAST PART
Of all the horrible things I’ve seen, the IUD story fills me with the most terror.
That shit is PAINFUL, and the risk of infection from sex just after… egads no, I think I was told to not even shove a clean finger up there for at least 48 hours, if not a week.
I just
my god
noooooooooooooo
My Big Ex dumped me two days after we found out my sister had cancer, told me he would always love me, and then told me about the sex he had with his Starbucks co-worker on the steps of a church in the rain.
We were 18, and still living with our parents, and he invited me to spend the night at his house. I assumed he’d cleared it with his parents, because that’s what you DO, right? When you share living space? You let people know about overnight guests? It sounded fun! So I waded through my parents’ feelings about the matter, and went over there and spent the night. Next morning I woke up to find that his car wasn’t working and that he’d need to call his dad at work! to give me a ride to work! and that his dad didn’t know I was there! and when he found out he was super angry! and threatened to call my parents and tell them where I was! and also demanded our birth control details! And his dad screamed at us in the car for the whole ride to my job, which seriously, I have other friends, I could have gotten a ride from someone else.
And then about four days later -four days of no contact – during lunch break, he explained that while I thought we were dating casually until we went to college, in fact I was planning to lure him into marriage because women can’t have sex without falling in love.
And then he was pretty sketchy about condom use and was always pressuring me to take birth control so we could stop using condoms. And then I had a pregnancy scare, and he was… pretty bad at handling that? Like some anti-abortion stuff, and also a lot of how a baby would ruin his plans to go to college. And when I got my period like a week late, he shared that he had been making out with one of his co-workers and offered either that we could break up because she was much hotter, or that we could have a three-way.
Oh and then a week after we broke up he called me to see if I could get him some weed.
This was very therapeutic for me – at the time, the only sympathy I could get was “Sorry he used you for sex” and like, I was also enjoying the sex? No one cared that he lied and was generally a boundaries trash fire, they were just sad for me that I’d had sex with someone who didn’t want to be with me foreeeever.
That’s so crap! You are definitely right to be annoyed about those things
I would be devastated if my fiancé broke up with me, because you know fiancé, but would still feel less used if that happened than I do about my ex, who I did *not* have sex with, because he effectively used his relationship with me to, like, figure out how to relate to humans and then dumped me when he realized my depression was not a “quirk” or something he could fix. (I’m not super mad about it, because we were both 18 and didn’t know what we were doing and he was actually a fairly nice person, but yeah.)
That is a man who should be shot into the sun.
Uh high school boys/young men. I feel like they should all be corralled somewhere, and only let out at about 25 when they can prove they’re of any use to the world.
I think you said “when” when in fact you meant to say “IF.” 😉
But seriously. I totally agree. Most guys that age are just total trashfires.
This reminded me of my ex who dumped me to bang someone else and then texted to ask if he could borrow my Buffy DVDs because we hadn’t gotten through the whole series in the 4 months we were together. This was pre-Netflix and I laughed for a long time and then told him buy his own.
He came to visit me (we were long distance) and stayed for a month. During that time he played video games on my roommate’s system all day (while I was at work/school), ate only processed meat, bought me a wildly inappropriate birthday gift (a $400 guitar – he was unemployed, tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and we’d been dating less than a year), and got blackout drunk by himself, twice (with extremely unpleasant bodily fluid consequences that I got to clean up).
I did not break up with him until the following year when he was practicing throwing knives in his mom’s backyard, barefoot, and a knife ricocheted off the tree and sliced open a toe. He called in sick to his part-time Walmart job the first day and then never again – and was enraged when they fired him several weeks later.
Best of all, when I broke up with him he said “It’s because I got fired, isn’t it? I can’t believe you just wanted me for my money.”
Right…your ten thousand dollars of negative money…
So, I don’t know if you watch that new sitcom Superstore (you should! it’s quite good!) but this guy reminds me so, so much of one of the supporting characters.
I only have one ex. He was pretty bad in most of the usual, unfunny ways a high school boyfriend could be—he told me constantly how terrible and annoying all his friends thought I was, implied he was the only person who would ever like me, and was disappointed with everything I thought, did, or was. He was always guilting me into doing things I didn’t really want to do. Plus, he was just awful at sex stuff but thought he was AMAZING.
I put up with all of it for eons, in high school time—over a year and a half!—probably because he had me convinced I was unlikable. But there were a couple things that, 15 years later, STILL get me for how ridiculously insulting they were, namely:
1) He was disappointed by THE SPELLING OF MY NAME. “Oh, that’s how you spell it? I thought you would have it spelled more interesting than that, like with an ‘i’.” (said as dismissively as humanly possible)
2) Possibly due to this perceived insufficiency, he pretty much never learned how to spell my full name. Like, after a YEAR of dating, he still couldn’t be bothered to learn how my last name was spelled! I still can’t figure out if he was completely oblivious, or if he was doing it on purpose as just one more way to undermine my confidence and self-esteem.
After HE eventually dumped ME (I knoooowww) he strung me along with promises we’d get back together for a couple months. I finally realized he was actually dating someone else while still trying to sleep with me on the side, and moved on. Then OF COURSE, he kept trying to corner me alone and talk me into getting back together with him! I believe his exact words once were “I forgot how cute you could be when you’re happy”
Oh god the more of these I read the more memories of this guy come back to me. He accidentally set his own pubic hair on fire, more than once, and bragged about it to people! He was always trying to lick my belly button (?!?) and tried to get me to carefully clean it with a q-tip (I was like “no… thanks? I don’t really want your tongue in there, actually?”). He wanted to do sexual things in very public places (more than once, literally in front of a friend) and when I did not want to, would make me feel terrible for making him feel like “a monster”. He told insane stories about me to all our mutual friends for YEARS, that I had to repeatedly debunk. He thought Ayn Rand was amazing. His parents treated me like garbage, because they were rich compared to my family; years later when I was graduating college, and he was bumming around trying to deal drugs, his mom ran into me in a grocery store and very clearly regretted it. What was teenage me thinking?!
>He accidentally set his own pubic hair on fire,
more than once
More information, please.
>He thought Ayn Rand was amazing.
Of course.
That does seem to be a character flaw of many douchebags, doesn’t it?
1. I can go around to businesses in my neighborhood and say “stank face bitch” and they’ll know who she is, because she never had a nice word or gesture for anybody in my life
2. I said oral was giving me TMJ pains. Her solution was to give me an Ativan. I fell asleep and drooled on her. No oral for you, hon.
2.5 and she only reciprocated once
3. Accused me of flaunting my wealth when I posted about joining a new gym
4. Told me I was too emotionally unstable to adopt a second cat
5. Started dating my best friend of 17 years 7 months after the breakup
6. When I asked for space, was told I was being selfish and why couldn’t I be happy for her?
7. Last contact was when she signed me up for a diaper fetishist mailing list.
wow you also win the prize for having the worst best friend, I’m sorry
My high school boyfriend followed me to New York where we split a tiny Brooklyn studio. We were both in college, he went to an art school and would use that as an excuse to be up at all hours of the night “working” (see also: playing TF2 and chatting up his best friend from home who he was in love with and gaslighted me into thinking I was crazy for thinking such might be the case) which would keep me from getting any sleep.
I worked two part time jobs while going to school full time, he went to class maybe twice a week if he was so inclined and hardly ever contributed to the cleaning, cooking, etc. with all of that free time I was envious of. Eventually, he dropped out because he couldn’t cope with the stress (to be fair, he had a major death in the family, so that I don’t blame him for.)
A few weeks before our 3 year anniversary, I found out that he had attempted to reach out to an escort on backpages.com (had to google what that was at the time) and I moved out immediately after he agreed to take over our lease. A year later, I’m hit with a lawsuit and a $4,000 fine in my name because he stopped paying rent so he could move back to our hometown to date his aforementioned best friend. I’m still paying off the loan I took out to pay that off.
TL;DR: Self-proclaimed “aRtIsTS~~” will typically use their title to justify their vices, create nothing, and take advantage of anyone naive enough to care for them.
Mentioned this in the link roundup, actually, but worst ex (“doucheasaurus ex”, if you will) was an all around heinous person and left me mostly with unfunny stories, but he did tell me I should read American Psycho because Patrick Bateman was his idol. And I was naive and completely unfamiliar with every facet of the story so I was just like “lol sure, whatevsies!”
Nooooooooooooope.
Oh nooooo, I had an obnoxious housemate who loved that movie and acted like Patrick Bateman all the time. I’ve still never seen the whole movie, because it was really really uncomfortable to be in the room with him and his girlfriend while they were watching the sex scenes.
Regularly told me I was “allergic to fun” because I didn’t like the loud/annoying activities he liked; had me almost believing it. Manipulatively told me he felt “penciled into the margins” of my calendar during my busiest season (well SORRY he was just EXPRESSING HIS EMOTION), and loathed that I wouldn’t bail on contractual obligations, which obviously meant I couldn’t be ~sPoNtAnEoUs~.
Unwittingly, assisted with 0 orgasms in the 8 years we were together (I set a really dumb precedent as a garbage 18 year old, and proceeded to stick to my guns to spare his feeling.) ((Just the one.))
Also: had a weekly sex quota (which: if I didn’t meet it, then I was responsible for his shitty attitude). Also also: was basically a pizzatarian but tried to tell me it was reasonably healthy despite having taken a godforsaken NUTRITION CLASS.
Took the College Boyfriend home to meet my parents. He complained that my family and everyone else in my rural hometown “looked poor,” like they bought all their clothes at Walmart. (This from the boy who wore cargo shorts and sportsball sweatshirts every day.)
NOT COOL
Yeah, no matter what he personally was wearing that’s a pretty shitty thing to complain about
My awesomest ex not only routinely lectured me on all the ways in which I was not wife material (I drank! I laughed! I knew other men and talked to them and everything!) but also AND WOTHOUT ANY ADVANCE WARNING had a semi-automatic rifle mailed to my apartment because he was living at home at the time and didn’t want his parents to know.
Saddest truth: that wasn’t the deal breaker.
…well?
The first time I met my worst ex’s family was his sister’s wedding. It was a small wedding but they were having a whole long weekend thing. After the first night people started acting kind of weird towards me. On the drive home ex tells me he told his sister’s best friend that I wanted her to have a threesome with us. This…. was not a thing that we had ever discussed plus she was monogamously married. She of course told the sister who told literally everyone except me. So everyone at this party thought I was a sexually-deviant homewrecker.
Just popping my head in to say that I love-hate that it’s been an hour or so and the comments are chock-a-block full. We deserve so much better ya’ll.
We deserve so much better and I have to wonder…..not even sarcastically…..is it out there?
yes! I have only anecdotal data to prove it, but better is out there! And we can get it! We will get it!
The college ex who moved into my room in my student co-op after getting fired as an RA for buying his underage residents alcohol.
Sharing a bedroom made it really obvious that he had flirty, sexually explicit relationships with female internet friends all over the country. To whom he complained about how terrible I was.
Shortly after I dumped him, I took a summer research internship out of state. Came back in the fall and he had MOVED INTO MY CO-OP, refused to leave and there was nothing in his lease or the co-op association rules that allowed us to throw him out.
Spent the whole year living in my house, during which time he became notorious to women living in the dorm across the street as the creepy neighbor dude who sends them dick pics, would follow me around the house whenever I had a dude over, got really into InfoWars and the 9/11 conspiracy theories, got my NEXT boyfriend really into InfoWars and 9/11 conspiracy theories, threatened to send naked pictures of me in his possession to my friends and family until my friend’s attorney father sent him a cease and desist, and failed to get into medical school. He is now a neurologist. Be warned, Michigan Toasties.
Like Michigan hasn’t suffered enough.
He was older than me and made about two times more money than me, yet he would always run out and ask me to pay for stuff. Once he didn’t pay the electricity bill and we didn’t have electricity for like 2 months. In a drunken argument he actually argued that it was better that way. Oh yeah and he was a drunk, but maybe that’s obvious from all of the above… That said I loved him more than I’ve ever loved anyone and we’re still good friends. But I’ll never date a drunk again.
I didn’t ever date him, but the first dude I was in love with was the first person to bring up the “gay island” theory to me. As in “Being gay is unnatural, because if you put them all on an island and left them, they’d die out.”
I remember arguing with him, but Tumblr has since taken his reasoning to its logical conclusion in a much more entertaining way: http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/this-homophobi…
Oh hahah I also dated this boy in highschool at the tender age of 16 – my first boyf ever. I was a virgin, and scared of a lot of shit. He gave me this speech when he broke up with me, and I quote:
“Sex was one of the goals of this relationship for me, and since you won’t have sex with me, I just don’t see the point.”
Nearly 10 years later we’re still friends and I laugh about this delivery.
goals eh? Should have told him that sex was somewhere in your “5 year plan”
To put it briefly: he left the country without telling me. To spend time with another girl who had a yacht. We had been dating for more than 6 years at this point.
Anyway, he got yacht girl pregnant shortly after our breakup and their son has the same very unusual name as my brother.
My worst ex was my first real relationship out of high school. I had only been in college for a few months and was looking desperately for something to cling to (at least that’s how I justify it). I take pride in the fact that he was working at Walmart before he got his degree and once he paid the 40,000 dollars to get his degree, he still ended up working at the same Walmart in the same department. He was awful in the following ways:
1. He had a sex addiction. Doesn’t sound like it might be that awful right? Well this meant he needed it all the time. The friction became a real problem. He yelled at me once because I wouldn’t give him head, saying that since I wouldn’t have sex with him, I at least owed him that.
2. On Valentine’s Day he left me in a skating rink after having a fit because he wasn’t having any fun and the skates hurt. I then had to get myself home at one in the morning to find him huddled in bed crying his eyes out because I didn’t care about him.
3. He refused to buy me flowers because I “asked for them.” Indeed I said “I love flowers, wouldn’t flowers be a nice gift?” Apparently that meant that it was no longer original or a valid gift option.
4. He told me this story about how his father cheated on and left his mother and he didn’t speak to him for like 6 years because he had messed up his life. The first visit down to stay with his mom we went out to meet his dad (now back in his life) at a local state park, and I was apprehensive and didn’t really talk to him all that much. I didn’t think it was that strange though because it was the first time meeting him and this was supposedly the man that ruined my boyfriend’s life, so I kept to introductory small talk. Well after we got home he started to yell at me for not being nicer and taking an interest in what his dad had to say.
5. I found out later that he had been investigated in a child pornography case. The investigation was on another individual, but he had made internet friends with him and met him in his car during the raid, so he ended up becoming part of the investigation. His hatred of cops made a lot of sense after that.
6. After I dumped him he tried to get back together with me while simultaneously trying to get in the pants of both of my lesbian friends. Both of which were open about the fact that they only liked girls and explained that to him, but he continued to try to convince them anyway.
The only good thing about this relationship is that I discovered a lot about myself, about what I wanted and what I didn’t, and gained a lot of respect for myself in future relationships.
Soooo did he buy non-flower gifts, or was nothing up to his gifting standards?
He did buy non-flower gifts, but it was usually gift cards because he either got things last minute or claimed I was “difficult to buy for.”
1) My mom died, my dad bought me a new car to try to make up for it, and she almost dumped me because of it.
2) Creeped on me for years after I cut it off to the point where I started the process of getting a restraining order, eventually got his new girlfriend in on the game, and then proceeded to creep on her in the exact same manner.
I was hooking up with my college roommate who voted for the most right-wing/racist party in the country (which he sometimes claims was a joke, sometimes claims wasn’t, but gets mad at me for not keeping it a secret from his friends anyway), told our African American roommates he didn’t believe their parents should have been let in the country (despite being of immigrant parents himself — but, y’know, White), then called me a slut a year after I ghosted him when he saw me hooking up with someone at a party, and drunkenly hit me quite hard. Ugh. Can’t tell anyone about it for various reasons (mainly that he is considered the Friendly Racist by all).
Oh no, that’s awful. Can you cultivate a new group of friends, who don’t believe in myths like friendly racists?
My worst ex was my high school boyfriend. The description of the relationship is mostly sad so I’ll just let you know that for the past two years almost every single time I have seen him he has been wearing this Spiderman hoodie that zips across the head to make you look like you are actually spider man. I do not know if he owns other clothing.
I kept having issues posting, but I think I have it working now.
Okay omg. I have a lot of weird shit I can choose from but I’ll just pick my two favorites.
So I had a bf that would gaslight me and try and convince me I had worse mental health issues than he did and that things he said I had misheard or misremembered etc. Anyway when we broke up he had to return my stuff and with my stuff he gave me a “gift” which was an Alan Watts self-help book “the taboo against knowing who you are,” I think. In it was this long handwritten apology and something about how he hopes my mental health issues will get better.
I was floored. I didn’t know what to do. I ended up burning it and dancing around the flames while another friend clapped.
Oh and this guy also was a part of a forum and said such messed up shit about me that the forum banned him for being a douche. And a guy on there felt bad for me and reached out and we became close friends (It’s been almost three years now), and he sent me my ex’s posts. Apart from lies there were degrading comments and I was called “Sandwich Girl,” and made out to be a suppressed ignorant girl who was sex crazy for him. So after we broke up he kept sending me apology emails I would never reply to, and eventually I got really sick of it and wanted to send him a message. So I started to reveal everything about that relationship to my now friend, who then asked my permission to post it on that same forum to get “my side” of the story. And I was candid as fuck and said all the embarrassing things (like the fact he had a fake marriage to his ex gf and would bring their wedding book to my house and try and make me look at it, or he had souvenir duct tape from a sex act). It got published in conjunction with his lies, he apparently heard about it and got mad and started blocking everyone that was friends with me over him, and I never heard from the bastard again. The end.
I ended up burning it and dancing around the flames while another friend clapped.
YAS QUEEN
I even think Alan Watts would approve!
Ugh, my worst ex was the same way with my mental health. He was constantly telling me that I was too crazy to have kids, had severe mental health issues, had anger problems etc. etc. etc. When discussing our property settlement (together 11 years and bought a house together) he said he needed compensation for years of living with someone with a severe undiagnosed mental health problem.
…I was being treated for mild anxiety and depression. Despite treatment allowing me to have two degrees, a good job, supportive family, great friends, and multiple fulfilling hobbies, I was begging my therapist to tell me what else was wrong with me since obviously there was something only he could see. He had so many issues that I don’t even know where to start with them.
Plot twist: my mental health DID improve a lot after we broke up. What could that have been.
No exactly. He knew the bf before him had been abusive and kept telling me all my issues with him was me projecting. I felt like I was going nuts.
And yes, oddly enough after we broke up my mental health got SO much better.
Plot twist: he’s getting an MA in Psychology. Second plot twist: it’s at this shit school where you probably come out only qualified to hug people for money.
Sent via the Samsung Galaxy S® 5 ACTIVE™, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone
——– Original message ——–
Hailed from my very pro-gun hometown and was an alcoholic. Once, during a party, I had sex with him on his bed and mid-way through discovered a LOADED GUN hidden under the pillow. He’d forgotten about it and had thought, in his blackout state, that under the pillow was a great place to hide it.
Every time I think about that one, I feel very lucky to be alive and far, far away from him!
j! f! c!
HOLY SHIT
I have one really bad ex which like a lot of people I will not describe because it was not funny. But
But I also had one who dutch-ovened me about a week after we started dating. He also owned a complete set of He-Man Action Figures…as a 23-year-old.
We had terrible sex during which he never came (because of??? masturbating?? unclear) and I never came (because I was a lesbian)
The former I’ve had happen to a guy I dated- about 5 months of dating, never came without er, his own manual stimulation coming into play. Sex was pretty good though because at least he never came before I did. He didn’t seem to mind, so I count it as successful.
Even though I asked him not to do any serious drugs, did 2 types of drugs behind my back. One was right before we hung out, another was regularly to help him “write” as if it would improve his writing. Nothing was going to help tbqh.
I’ve blocked a lot of crap but I also feel like he confessed to cheating on me after we broke up. Wouldn’t surprise me. I mostly regret dating for just over a year because I could have done so so so much better, or at least enjoyed myself so much more.
We were in our 30’s and had been dating for a year. I found out via a Facebook comment one of his friends left that he was going to grad school in another country. I didn’t even know he had applied.
At least I finally got to spill the beans to my friends that he thought :
-the moon landing was a hoax
-9/11 was an inside job
-AIDS doesn’t exist/is a gov’t conspiracy
I’d kept all of that on the DL so my friends would like him. Oy.
C&Ping from a post a couple of months ago:
I was long-distance with my most horrible ex for the last couple of months of our relationship, where he accused me of cheating on him at least once a day. Then, after I broke up with him, he MADE UP A STORY about how he found someone he wanted to date when we were still together, so decided to act like an asshole (cheating accusations, stonewalling me, etc.) so I’d break up with him and he could see this other girl without being the bad guy. He confessed this all to me, tearfully, because he believed if I knew the truth about what he did, it would make me realize how much I loved him and want to be back with him and ‘try harder’ at the relationship so he wouldn’t stray (??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!!!!?????!!!)
The last I heard of him was from a storage company where he had rented a unit, and put me as the emergency contact. I received a call from them about a year after we broke up, trying to locate him due to six months’ nonpayment of rent. I didn’t have any responsibility to pay them if he didn’t, so I told them I had no idea where he was. I still don’t.
He also spent part of out relationship in jail. I broke up with him via text in a Burger King drive-thru and then celebrated with BOGO chicken sandwiches.
Addendum: he very often veered into controlling territory, and he’d go through phases where he was sure I was cheating on him and I was thus made to as his permission (via text) to use the restroom, shower, and hang out with my family so it was acceptable for me to be away from my phone for more than one minute at a time. He worked second shift, and after I got out of my own job at 10 at night, I would then drive to his workplace (a Domino’s pizza) and sit and watch him work for at least an hour. I never really spoke, because he didn’t like me talking to his coworkers.
He rarely showered (he claimed he didn’t have time, also his apartment was filthy and the shower drain was always clogged) and smelled vaguely of cornstarch and dough all the time. Every conversation centered around how much smarter, cooler, funnier, better-looking, or harder-working he was then everyone around him. I was ‘not like any other girl’ and every other female in his life was a whore, bitch, stupid, fatass, or some other derogatory term.
Holy shit. I’ve never gotten that all out before. BOGO chicken sandwiches are still my forever fave tho <3<3<3
Holy shit is right. Happy you got out!
+1 for BOGO chicken sandwiches +274693746761736897 for triumphing over awful dudes
Admitted that he jerked off to a voicemail I left him. This was on our second date.
I’m a lurker here, and have never commented before but I actually kind of want to talk about this.
I’m still healing from this one. I dated someone who told me that they had a past drug problem. However, the problem wasn’t SO “past”. I, unfortunately, didn’t know this until I fell in love with him and he moved in with me. He lost his job quickly after moving in with me (warning sign I should have seen a little clearer) and stole all of my jewelry and my guitar. He cheated on me several times- and when I found evidence of drugs and women or brought up my stuff disappearing, he would convince me that I was crazy and paranoid. (and I convinced myself that I actually was crazy) The final straw was when he stole and pawned my parents original wedding ring set when we were visiting them. It broke my heart that my poor choices ended up hurting my family. But I’m thankful that I have a family who is understanding and at the very least it was a wakeup call from my year long nightmare.
*hug*
my worst ex wasn’t even an ex, just some guy who mistook my enthusiasm for life in general for enthusiasm for him. When his friends informed me that the only reason I was being included was because he wanted to bone me, I informed them that he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. I stopped getting invitations to hang with him and his friends immediately after. The funny part is that, shortly after GentlemanX and I met, i ran into him with this other dude at the campus pub, and dude tried to warn GentlemanX away with a “stay away from her, she’s crazy”. Yes. Because I would have to be crazy to not want to bone YOU, buddy.
Ah yes, the “she’s crazy” gambit. I’m familiar with that one.
No truly horrible ex stories, mostly due to long term singleness, but the same dude I mentioned this morning who lent me American Psycho…I’m not sure I can even elevate him to “ex” status because it was so casual, but whatever. When he was flirting, he invited me to a weekly friend-hangout at this one bar, and I went a couple times and had fun before we actually hooked up. When he’d ghosted (this was in landline days, so there was no way to know if he’d actually ghosted or was just not home, or at least a lady could tell herself that) I decided to show up, figured I’d straight-up ask did he still want to hang out. He immediately took me aside and said this was his guys’ night out, I should know better than to crash it!
I would like to say my reaction was NOT to get sloppy drunk and loud and pointedly chatty with everyone else, but it was. He then insisted that one of the other dudes give us both a (very awkwardly silent) ride home, and drop me off first even though it was out of the way. The upside to that part was that I was co-workers with the driver, but on different shifts, so I felt very classy for buying him and his shiftmates thank you pizza.
i dunno, that whole thing was a lesson in how much crap I could will myself to put up with for sex, even though I could see the totally cliched “girl thinks she wants to hook up casually, but it’s her first time, now she’s getting all attached” thing happening, so even though he was a dick about ending it I’m glad he did before I froze to death waiting for the dang bus to his place one more time!
Was grossed out by vaginas — literally wouldn’t look at it or touch it with anything other than his dick. Also refused to use condoms. Also the most arrogant person I’ve spent any amount of time with.
We started hooking up because I was young and didn’t want a relationship and he’d just gotten out of one, and would go on at length how it was stupid that people couldn’t separate sex and emotion. I agreed wholeheartedly. After about 4 months of this I decided I wasn’t into him anymore, and wanted to spend some time apart and see other people. He freaked out and declared that I couldn’t leave him because I’d ruined his life (somewhat true; he’d lied about seeing me to his previous gf while they were breaking up, and his best friend was super into me and he lied to him about it for several months, so basically alienated everybody over me). When I checked in on him a few months later, he declared that he couldn’t find anybody else to have sex with so I owed it to him to find a girl that would sleep with him from my new social circle. Sent me an email about once a year for the next 4 years telling me how much he hates me for ruining him for other women and not taking responsibility or giving him another chance.
When GamerGate became a thing, my first thought was “wow, there are more people just like X.”
This one isn’t a true ex but more of a dodged-a-bullet almost-ex.
He was in my DnD group. Super cute, when we talked he seemed very emotionally vulnerable. I was suckered in; he was like a sad puppy that just wanted to be loved. Also he was a good kisser. Then he promptly lost interest when I didn’t want him spending the night (on a work night!) the very first time I invited him to my apartment. Apparently the wounded puppy thing was just a schtick and he’s a run-of-the-mill fuckboy. Oh well. Such a waste of a pretty face.
Relatable.
Apparently all the other women in my DnD group had similar experiences with him! I really should have paid more attention.
Told me that he would “go Jack Bauer on me” and break my fingers if I didn’t stay and watch TV with him longer because he was sad. I got the fuck out of there (literally, I fought him and ran for the door which was inefficient because he was about 150 lbs heavier than me) and dumped his ass.
Bonus: We were undergrads at a religious university and the dean of students sand campus security did not believe me about what happened and refused to help at all. A couple months later, after much nagging on my part, the dean sent ex an email and told him he was not to contact me. This did nothing at all.
My worst ex spent my 20th birthday on holiday in Rome with another girl.
AND I DIDN’T BREAK UP WITH HIM TILL I WAS 25.
WHAT.
Oh, and the small matter of his narcissism, entitlement, controlling behaviour and violent temper.
BYE FELICIA.
(eta: he was also a racist homophobe who sponged off me for three years because he didn’t get a job after attending one of the best universities in the world – he’d put in zero effort to get internships or put together a plan, and none of the available jobs were ‘good enough’ for him.)
ALSO. Not a proper ex – we went on a handful of dates and did the sexings a few times – but one guy ghosted on me, then eventually replied to my ‘wtf?’ email with an apology for ending things because I was ‘charming and pretty and relatively [!!!!!!] bright’.
The week before my PhD defence.
Which I aced.
MEN.
Notallmen obv
but MEN
I’ve had some horror story exes but this is my favorite look-back-and-laugh one.
Picture if you will, a highschool boyfriend gives me a tape of “his band” for which he “played drums” and “occasionally sang.” “It sounds so weird to hear your voice recorded and played back,” he would muse. “I’m so sad I had to leave my drums with my mom when I moved in with my dad,” he would lament.
The tape? Was a bad dub of Dead Kennedys Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables. Every song. in order. Which I discovered later that year when I started listening to them.
My laughter is verging on screaming, oh my god.
This is AMAZING
He believed in magic. Not in the Lovin’ Spoonful sense. He thought the music of the spheres could be conducted, and by him, through play of the board game Go, only when he played alone versus himself. When we talked about spirituality (remarkably often) I couldn’t keep myself from laughing every time it was his turn. And I mean low, rumbling guffaws that rippled from my throat like tidal waves.
He never, ever cleaned his house. Or anything. I’m lucky he showered. I once saw mold growing inside his chemex brewer. Trash would pile up in cascading mountains of pizza boxes and bags that sat in his front room / kitchen / dining area. He claimed the presence of trash comforted him.
He didn’t like being around other people. Any other people. I played a lot of Diablo III with him.
is it bad that my first thought was “lolololololol of COURSE he would have a chemex”?
I mean, I sure do love me come coffee snob coffee, but yeah, right?
Dude, I bought him his chemex. It was one of the nice ones with a wooden handle around the neck.
And he just let the coffee sit there until strange bluegreen mold began to manifest.
THE PRESENCE OF TRASH COMFORTED HIM
Literal garbage person?
Not to make this even more depressing and awful, but some of that sounds like possible symptoms of schizophrenia.
OH MAN LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE TIME I TOLD HIM HIS VISIONS AND SPIRIT QUESTS WERE LIKELY DRUG-ENHANCED SCHIZOPHRENIC SYMPTOMS AND THEN HE TOLD ME HE WAS KICKED OUT OF A CULT FOR BEING A BAD INFLUENCE DESPITE HIS “STRONG POWERS OF SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION”
KICKED OUT OF A CULT FOR BEING A BAD INFLUENCE…
On the plus side you got to play a lot of Diablo III, which you have to admit is a highly addictive and entertaining game
Not mine, but my mom was gangpressed by family to date a friend of the family in high school. She went on one date with him and hightailed it after he creeped her out. He stalked her for a while but eventually grew bored.
Fast forward and the next time she hears about him is because he was arrested for being the South Hills Rapist.
I am so sorry for your mom. I just looked that guy up in Wikipedia and I am horrified. Thank goodness she got away from him uninjured.
I don’t fully understand the legal status of his case but it looks like he’s never going to get out.
Yeah. I only found out she went on a date with him when I was watching a detective show about his capture. I was already keyed in because it was about my hometown, in a time when all my relatives definitely lived there. She saw it, paused, and said “Oh‥. did I ever tell you I went on a date with him?”
My mother is a very undramatic person, so it was the most blase telling of ‘I once was bullied into going on a date with the most infamous, violent rapist in the Northwest’ you can imagine. But even then I could tell she was still shaken up by knowing him (and his mother, who was also terrible).
Oh shit.
I believe that I can “win” this in terms of both severity and volume.
1. Shouted “that’s a violation” at anything he didn’t like. Irrationally jealous (e.g., if I didn’t text him to note any change in my own personal plans, no matter how trivial, he would label this as “suspicious.”). Broke up because he was angry that I did not include him in a family emergency. Proceeded to stalk and harass me for six months (masturbating into my voicemail, etc.) until I had him arrested.
2. Secretly married Navy SEAL with four children who dated me under a completely fake identity, including a fake name. When I found this out through some sleuthing and confronted him via email, he deleted that email address and disappeared into the wind.
3. Turned out to have a girlfriend and prison time. Found out because the girlfriend called me.
4. Anytime I questioned his cheater-y suspicious behavior, he would tell me that I was projecting my past romantic failures on him. Gave me an STI. Then confessed that he actually had another girlfriend the entire time. Sent me weird and sometimes pornographic emails for YEARS after we broke up.
5. Got up in the middle of a makeout with no explanation to make himself a hot dog. Returned to the bedroom, ate the hot dog, came back to bed as if nothing had happened.
Are these the same person or 5 different douchebags?
either way, wow, that’s a horrible run of idiocy.
How on earth can you be a Navy SEAL with a prison record?? Super yikes.
All told, I spent 6 years (starting in high school) with a guy who – among other really quality traits – was so protective he would get angry with me if I wore a slightly low-cut shirt. He had the same reaction to large earrings? So of course I would wear those things more often etc etc.
I broke it off when I went away for college, but we got back together after 1) he defriended me on facebook 2) he started dating a younger girl from our HS and posted all sorts of sappy things 3) we became “friends” again and I saw the girlfriend on facebook 4) we had a big chat and he broke up with her. Later, he gleefully explained that his whole relationship with other girl was to win me back!
I had one who said it was “harder to love me” when I wore revealing clothing. In retrospect, the fact that I gleefully wore more revealing stuff every time he wasn’t around was a sign of the approaching end. Also didn’t like me taking my glasses off in public because he associated me not wearing them with nudity/sex.
Here’s my time to shine. Some facts about my college boyfriend:
– Would pout and give me the silent treatment while we were hanging out if…something bothered him. When I asked what was up, he’d shrug and say, “I’m grumpy.”
– Once became furiously mad at me because, direct quote, “You swallowed your water AFTER I unplugged my ears!”
– Regularly yelled at me in public and/or while I was driving. Regularly expected me to be instantly attracted to him when we got back home.
– In response to me being too tired for sex, I heard more than once, “ALL you have to do is lay there.”
– Was super judgmental of pretty much everyone, particularly those whose interests/spending habits greatly differed from his own.
Yikes. What was the water and ears thing about? Did he just not like the sound of swallowing?
He didn’t like the sound of swallowing, and we were sitting on the couch, and he was already in one of his “grumpy” states (pissed off through the entire movie even though we hadn’t seen each other in a week). I went to take a sip of water, and he literally glared at me and plugged his ears. He seemed really angry when I walked him out to his truck a while later, so I asked him what was bothering him so much. Every time I remember that response and his tone, I wish I had walked back into the house without saying anything else. Fortunately, we broke up later that year.
Ooh ooh I got another one! An ex broke up with me in a TCBY parking lot, after ghosting for two weeks. It was most definitely for the best (so many reasons), but I was totally devastated, having not previously chosen to show actual feelings for a dude until this one. The TCBY break-up was bad enough, but then!
We agreed to not discuss the break-up with anyone since we were both part of a not-that-big, gossipy Master’s program. I didn’t even discuss it with my friends in the department, since most of them were also his friends. After maintaining a long, lonely summer of silence, I went to the department office on the first day of class to run copies of my syllabuses. The copier was in the back room, but nobody saw me come in, I guess. But halfway through, I hear his bestie gabbing with the office administrators about all the nitty gritty details of the relationship and the breakup. I just stood there, listening, in shock, until my copies finished running. But then I just stood there, with my syllabuses clutched to my chest, trying to convince myself that I really did have to leave this room (like, really, I had to go teach). I remember walking out and hearing a gasp. I must have walked out, but I swear I have no memory of it. I hope I was dignified.
I’m conflicted about chiming in, because I’m sure I am at least one person’s Worst Ex, too. In fact, I made myself write out a Mine/His version of worsts for each of my relationships before coming back here to share one case on which my conscience is perfectly clear.
So. The following are just a few facets of a magnificently sparkly, crystalline shitshow of a relationship/too-long breakup with a writer/drunk:
He lost his job* and took to drinking all day, lying on the living room floor and watching Withnail and I until he passed out. Then when he woke up he’d spend half the night chain-smoking, playing video games, and shouting at himself and me—aka “writing.” Over and over and over again. This went on for weeks, if not months.
By the time I went out and bought cardboard boxes and started packing his stuff, he owed me >$8K in rent, groceries, and other expenses. I continued to lend him small amounts for a couple of months after I kicked him out, and I paid to UPS him all the stuff he’d left at my apartment (and, yes, I packed it properly, so things wouldn’t break).
It has been almost sixteen years, and though he has found Jesus and worked in the administration of a church for many years, he has never paid me back even one token cent. Clearly, I’m supposed to count myself lucky for having been allowed to support his brilliance for a while.
* Totally deservedly, in my retrospective opinion, though of course I was sympathetic at the time.
This song is for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkH5JGEkjYk
Thank you. I feel fortified.
Ugh, I hate that he liked Withnail and I (which I love), though he sounds like a Withnail himself.
Yes, I love it, too, and it was years before I could watch it again. He wished he were as together as Withnail.
Ultimately I had to hide the video so he couldn’t abuse it anymore. I also had to hide the disk for Civilization II and then pretend I didn’t know what had happened to it. Of course, the thing with drunks is you can always say, “How the hell should I know where it is? You were drunk; you probably threw it out the window.”
Ha, I love that he wasn’t even as together as Withnail, a trained actor reduced to the status of a bum.
That’s an excellent retort too, almost like dealing with a small child.
writers are insane. I dated one, too, and the drinking – yup.
– This guy was actually not bad overall, but I dated him for a summer and he wore bright purple Crocs EXCLUSIVELY, every day. I don’t even know if he owned other shoes, I have no idea what he would have done if he’d had to, say, attend a funeral.
– Dated another guy who had done a small amount of jail time for selling weed, then FLED THE STATE WHILE STILL ON PAROLE because he just had to get away from his ex. Also had tremendous amounts of debt, suspended driver’s license (and no hope of reinstating because, you know, broken parole) and god knows what else. I stayed with him for far too long and loaned his ass way too much money, and only came to my senses when, after planning a move across country with him (his idea, of course), my otherwise easygoing mom palmed me an envelope full of cash “if you ever need to escape.”
– Dated another winner who, after we broke up, stalked my Reddit account (I had never told him my Reddit name, no idea how he got it) and texted me to apologize after I posted something rant-y about him in a thread. What the fuck, dude, you are NOT HELPING YOUR CASE.
Your mom is as amazing as your exes are not.
Seriously. Go Mama Thesarahgirl!
100% accurate – the exes are all gone but she has stuck around 🙂
I brought my then-boyfriend home to meet my family over Christmas when we were together. When my mom was hugging me goodbye, she whispered “I want you to remember that you deserve to be happy.” I thought she was talking about my job at the time, which I also hated. Nope, totally about the boyfriend.
I started dating him when I was 18 and he was 22. We decided to do the long distance thing when I went to college the next year, he made out with a 16-year-old coworker, I didn’t dump him, we mutually broke up at the beginning of the next school year. Now he’s a therapist working on a self-help book.
So I broke up with a guy. As one does. It happens. I wasn’t horrible or psycho about it.
After two days of normal life, during which I spent many moments in my apartment thinking to myself, “I don’t remember putting that there…” I realized that someone was coming into my place when I wasn’t home and REARRANGING THINGS.
And then it was a very tiny leap to realize that, oh, hey, it was probably my Ex, to whom I had once lent my key, because he’d left something at my place, and he was driving me to work, and I didn’t have time to go back for it with him.
So. While we were still a happy couple, mind you, he had a copy of my key made. Without my knowledge or consent. Just in case… he’d need it later? To get revenge? After my inevitable dumping of him?
Jesus Christ, it is creepy as hell to think that that’s where his mind was WHILE WE WERE STILL TOGETHER.
Happy ending — my landlord was very sympathetic and changed my lock right away, free of charge. And my things stayed in their places forevermore.
AHHHHH
that’s terrifying
Oh man you are braver than me; I’d have moved
holy crap!
That’s some early parts of a horror movie shit. Right before the part where you wake up and he’s standing over your bed staring at you.
i actually got *chills* just now. aaaah! AAAHHHHHH!!!!
OH. Oh. I forgot this one:
There was a girl I went out with who cried during our first date, and unilaterally decided we were in a relationship thereafter, which included doing such things as sending me good morning texts and asking about our “future.” We never went on a second date.
She is in a new relationship and looks happy and I wish her well. It wasn’t her fault I’m not compatible with Cancers, after all.
I have no truly terrible ex story, but I treasure the memory of my grandmother getting so mad at how my cousin’s boyfriend treated her she took him outside and called him on his “shitty” behavior then confessed adorably to the swear word in front of the rest of the family.
I don’t think it had much of an impact on the boyfriend (who was so terrible we were relieved when she married someone else at 18,because he was not an asshole) but it made a huge impression on me.
Gave me a 6 part cassette tape documentary that explained how aliens have periodically visiting Earth and influenced all of mankind.
Caveat by saying I was 18 when we dated
-Would only ever tip $2, no matter where we were or how much we spent.
-Enjoyed talking exclusively in an Irish accent
-Cried after my sister beat him at the game Sorry
-Worked at Abercrombie and told everyone he was a “model.”
-Years later, he got engaged a week after I did, then eloped a month later and invited me and my fiance to the elopement by sending us an email with the wedding invitation crafted in microsoft word. We were not friends at this time.
-He is now divorced, sells boats and posts photos that are hashtagged “lumbersexual”
Was he actually Irish???
NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST. He was German. But he really liked Boondock Saints.
My worst ex: 17 years older than me, my first ever “move in together” relationship. He cheated on me 3 times, the third being with my own stepmother (who was already my stepmother at that point and still is)
I can’t even imagine this. What do you and the parent your stepmother is married to talk about?!
my first boyfriend gave me head lice when i was 16
He was a brony. And, well, male. This was before I figured out that whole gay thing. When I broke up with him he had his fanfiction My Little Pony date someone else’s fanfiction My Little Pony in a move that he clearly intended to make me jealous but just made me glad to have gotten out of that relationship. Oh Jeff. Oh High School weirdness.
after 3 1/2 pages of cracy cray, this is refreshingly adorbale.
A pompous douche who has since gone down the dark road to being a full on men’s rights activist. Told all his friends and the internet at large that I was a a verbally abusive sex addict because I suggested that only craving sex once a month was maybe a sign of a sluggish libido or an indicator of other stresses in his life. Had the gall to physically attack me and call me a whore after finding out I’d slept with someone else after we broke up.
This isn’t my worst ex, but funnier and shorter.
Dated Sad Guy With Trenchcoat for approx 3 months in high school after his sister and her best friend nagged me into it because “we were perfect for each other”. Entire relationship completely awkward. On our first date we went to see Lord of the Rings (for Idon’tknow, the fifth time?). He grabbed onto my hand and did not let go for two hours. I couldn’t feel my hand at the end of the movie.
Ran into him a couple of years later in a comic book store and attempted to do some polite chitchat. He answered normally except that he kept pausing to perform an EXTREME FULL-BODY cringe in between sentences. Had to excuse myself and beg the (female) store clerk to get what I was looking for in the movie section because he was still there.
I have not dated many people, and they’re mostly a good group, but the worst of the lot was definitely not very compatible with me. He didn’t quite *get* sarcasm, and that…is a communication problem for me, it turns out.
He also once objected to The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver as “just a strident woman complaining,” which, yes, red flag. But he was also fairly good about listening to me and sincerely trying to understand when I talked to him about feminist things. He was describing his reaction to the book when he was assigned it in high school, and I certainly believed a lot of dumb shit when I was 16.
There may be valid reasons to object to Barbara Kingsolver; that is not one of them.
I met a guy online in college whom I “dated” for a good 6 months (I was young and stupid ok) before driving across several states with a friend whose parents lived near him to visit, with the understanding that he was purchasing me a plane ticket home. The visit consisted of really bad sex, fights about why I wasn’t looking for jobs in his home state (I still wasn’t out of school but also KNEW NO ONE THERE BUT HIM) and the revelation that he ACTUALLY NEVER BOUGHT ME A TICKET HOME. I had to have my friend come rescue me during the day while he was at work and call my dad to get him to buy me a ticket home because I didn’t have a credit card because I was a child. SO YEAH that’s the story of when an older man I met on the internet tried to kidnap me? Fast forward like 4 years and I met my now-spouse on OkCupid, though, so at least it didn’t ruin internet dating for me.
I have two – one was a 25 year old cop-in-training who thought dating 15 year old me was a totally appropriate and cool adult move. I thought he was awesome, and our relationship was seemed okay at the time, but as an adult now, a lot of his behaviour was super creepy, controlling and Not Okay. I dumped him when I was 16 because I fell in love with a girl at my youth group, he said it was cool if I slept with chicks “because that’s hot”, and I thought that was a gross double standard. Teenage me was correct!
My other gross ex slowly morphed from a garden variety misogynist into a Reddit loving MRA, just as I was discovering feminism. I knew him as a teenager and he was actually kinda cool, and when we started dating at 18, he was just starting down the road to being shitty. We went to uni together – he was first chair trumpet and I was second chair and he held it over my head. He liked to mainsplain to me about how to play our mutual instrument, which we had been studying together for 6 years, and constantly condescended about how of course I was only second chair and he as the only male trumpet in our year was clearly meant to be first chair cause he’s naturally more logical. His crap opinions actually kind of fortified mine, but I put up with him shouting terrible sexist abuse at me every time I mentioned anything remotely related to feminism because I had terrible self-esteem and no other friends. I was going to come out as genderqueer and trans but then went back in the closet because he thought it wasn’t a real gender and I was a stupid hipster if I insisted. He also like to say I was a “converted lesbian” in public, I guess because he liked to think that dick was that powerful? And used me as proof in conversations with other people, including arguments with lesbians, that all lesbians actually just need to meet the right man. I’m bisexual and always identified that way. We moved in together and then it really got abusive and terrible. He ended up breaking up with me because I was a “pathetic feminazi bitch who’s gay for attention”. As far as I know, he’s still absolutely the worst.
Oh my god, that sounds awful. Because nothing says “i love you” like telling your GF that her experiences and desires are all wrong!
Yeah. He also thought he was super cool and special because he knew about the McDonald’s “secret menu” and how to get free McChicken sauce packets. Dude. Not special.
There is something so heartbreaking about having to watch someone you once cared about turn into a shitty person. One of my good friends from high school went to an uber conservative college and started spouting really hateful anti-gay stuff on Facebook and it broke my heart.
We dated during my freshman year of college/his senior year of high school, while I still lived at home and commuted to school. I had been pretty sure we were a couple right up until his BEST FRIEND (who we both spent quite a bit of time hanging out with) ASKED ME IF WE WERE DATING. 6 MONTHS IN. Continuing the trend of being extremely strange and refusing to ever speak about our relationship directly, he asked one of our mutual friends to prom instead of breaking up with me. The strangest parts of this entire experience were:
1. On our very first date (at an Alamo Drafthouse) the ceiling, not the roof, literally caved down and fell on some people sitting in the middle of the theater, which I probably should have taken as symbolic foreshadowing.
2. After the breakup my parents became convinced that he had dumped me because my class rank was embarrassingly low??????
Not me, but my mother had a longtime boyfriend (while I was a kid, which is relevant later) who was super creepy. He was fine when they first started dating, but over time he got gradually weirder and more controlling. (Or, alternatively, I got older and noticed weird behavior more?) Near the end, he would have weird outbursts or suddenly not talk to her for a month and then it would abruptly be fine with no explanation.
But, the reason this is post-worthy is because he eventually started hiding multiple tape recorders all over her bedroom because he was convinced she was cheating on him. Some of them were in pretty noticeable places, so I think it was supposed to be a scare tactic? After he started doing this, my mom had me sneak into his car and steal our house keys off of his key ring before she broke up with him because she was worried he would retaliate if she asked for the keys back. At the time, (remember, I was a kid) I remember being super excited about it because I was helping my mom with an important thing in a way that also made me feel like a spy, but thinking about it now as an adult I’m like AAAH WTF AAAAAH
My very first high school boyfriend was expelled for pushing an elderly hall monitor DOWN A FLIGHT OF STAIRS.
You can just imagine how nice he was to me. There was a bunch of unfunny emotional and physical abuse, but I really loved when he whined to me that a girl he was at school with just REALLY wanted to give him a blowjob, and he felt SO BAD for turning her down every day. I was pretty gullible back then but even I didn’t believe that one.
We were only 15, so a lot of this relationship was a bad combo of mental illness and immaturity, but it lasted 2 years. Messed me up a bit but mostly grateful I learned a bunch of hard lessons early on.
I once dated a guy who was extremely and overtly concerned with the state of his masculinity. EVERYTHING came back to that. There are about a million stories I could tell, but this one illustrates his general personality nicely:
I was forbidden from ever earning more money than he did, because then he “wouldn’t feel like a real man.” He wanted to be a high school teacher, and they’re not exactly known for getting paid very well. I asked him what this meant for my ambitious career plans if I could only earn less than a high school teacher’s paycheck. He said that I could just be a part-time secretary or receptionist, and then spend the rest of my time at home raising our kids.
I was 20 years old at the point of this conversation, and he informed me that as soon as I graduated, we’d be getting married within the month and have our first child within the year. He didn’t ASK me to do any of this, he informed me. When I told him I was weirded out by the idea of pregnancy, especially so young, he told me that I “had trouble being a real woman and I should seek help.”
I eventually dumped him, moved abroad, and am now a doctor (as had been my plan all along). As far as I’ve heard from mutual friends, he hasn’t been able to keep a girlfriend since we broke up almost a decade ago, hates his job as a teacher, moved back in to his parents’ basement, and continually whines about how no one but him knows what “real suffering” is.
wow, almost makes you think that, for certain people, freud was right.
Oh, you have NO idea. I have so many more stories about him that illustrate this. He had some weird sexual kinks that you’d find if you looked up “Freud” in an encyclopedia.
Another quick story which cracks me up: he REALLY wanted other men to admire him, and he once burst into a flood of tears because some anonymous guy on an online game called him a “noob”. He cried as hard as if someone had just died.
“moved back in to his parents’ basement, and continually whines about how no one but him knows what “real suffering” is.
I bet his parents do.
This legit made me laugh so hard I spit out what I was drinking.
aaaand I just died.
“real women aren’t weirded out by pregnancy,” says a guy who has never had a conversation with pregnant women.
He had me honestly convinced that there was something wrong with me because I didn’t fancy bearing children at 20. I didn’t realize it was his way to “claim territory”, as it were, so I could never escape. When we broke up, he looked at me sadly with tears streaming down his cheeks, put his hand on my stomach, and said, “I so wish I could have seen you with a pregnant belly.”
I fucking FLED the car where we were having this talk. It was a ‘throw open the door, tuck-and-roll while it’s still moving’ situation.
he didn’t want a partner, he wanted a broodmare! So glad for you that you got out!
“I was forbidden from ever earning more money than he did, because then he “wouldn’t feel like a real man.””
No, no, you see, he just didn’t want you to make more money than him because he knew that with all of that extra income you would be able to save up enough money to buy your own Space X rocket and LAUNCH. HIS. ASS. INTO. THE. SUN.
Yeah, I want to be like, “So, how’s that bread-winning domestic dream working out for you nowadays? Is it everything you dreamed it would be and more?”
Not a proper ex, but went on a few dates with a guy who ghosted after a few dates but had added me on Facebook after one date for whatever reason. He later posted some professional photos of him with his dog that looked exactly like engagement photos, but with a dog in place of a fiancee. It was hilarious and made me glad in retrospect that he disappeared before we had a chance to have sex because he definitely wouldn’t have seen any problem with the dog watching us.
The one who responded to my “I love you” with “I am pretty ambivalent about your love…you love everyone. And I have plenty of love.” And then was all “I hope you prefer my honesty over a lie” when I didn’t automatically make him feel better about being shitty to me.
I had one tell me he loved me for the first time right after he’d told me that he’d tried to hit on my friend in the hot tub ten minutes earlier, then cried, a lot. Then he took back the “I love you” the next morning.
TOOK BACK I LOVE YOU?? I didn’t know you could do that.
He had some convoluted explanation for why he hadn’t really been ready to say it. I managed to interpret this as “he really does love me but he’s just afraid, since obviously he said it so he meant it”. Why are 22-year-olds even allowed to try and form relationships with other people?*
*no offense meant if you are 22. I can imagine there are many 22 year olds who are much, much less stupid than 22-year-old me.
OH MY GOD, this just made me remember that the terrible dude I dated in high school gave me a big speech as I was breaking up with him (for cheating-related reasons, obviously) about how he actually loved everyone, he didn’t understand how other people could put limits on feeling love, as soon as he meets someone he feels such an overwhelming love for them and etc. etc. HOT TAKE: dudes with grand philosophical ideas about how they feel love ~differently~ are terrible.
Omygod, SO TERRIBLE.
Oh yeah, they now call themselves “poly” and use their moral righteousness to screw every chick who crosses their path, while telling their supposed girlfriends that any discomfort she feels is because she’s fucked up. Yep.
I mean, being fair, that actually was a poly relationship, he was just poly and also kind of a dick.
(Also, as always happens when I talk about this dude, I feel compelled to say that he’s probably grown out of it by now, and also that I cherry-pick the stories that make him look like an asshole but in actuality there was plenty of asshole to go around in that relationship and I’m sure he’s out there telling equally truthful horrible stories about me.)
Guys like that give poly a bad name – it can actually be really lovely and freeing, but only if BOTH people are actively interested in/ok with the arrangement, rules have been set, communication is frequent, honest, and without shaming, and everything is consensual. I am married and have two other partners, and my husband has another serious partner and dates others casually, and it’s worked out exceptionally well for us – but if it’s one sided and/or coerced, that’s not poly, that’s General Assholery.
my ex insulted, gaslighted, lied to me for 20 years, and had a secret child the entire time we were married.
Once tried to get me to make friends with “this nice woman from work named Debra whose kids are the same age as ours”. I went over to her house (we were neighbors) with the kids. She was spooked the entire time. Later, we moved, and she mysteriously moved closer, too. Guess why. She still won’t look at me when I see her at school functions.
Had a ‘poor little rich girl’ fuckbuddy/druggie friend from hs that leached off her rich parents and married (to their horror) a no-college driveway asphalter. 15 years later she is still struggling with drugs and found dead from an overdose in her vintage Willys in the local metroparks. He cried for weeks. When I said, it sucks, people from high school die, but this isn’t the first friend of yours that died? why are you so upset? he yelled, “You’ll never understand, she was my soulmate” and stomped out of the room like a teenager. I still suspected nothing. I was stupid.
told me it was more important to take the kids to chinese new year than stay with me in the hospital when 3 days of iv antibiotics weren’t helping after a miscarriage and I was septic and they weren’t sure I would live.
but the BEST was his plan at the very end. He pretended to have just discovered, miraculously, on facebook, the woman who I’d thought he hadn’t seen in 20 years, that he dumped for me. Apparently their long goodbye produced a child he’d kept secret that entire time. (he denied it). Told me that his plan for our breakup was as follows: He’d move the teenager into the “big” bedroom of our century home. Then he and slut would move into the dining room and live there, since it had doors (big glass ones) and who needs a dining room, anyway (that was the only room with furniture that I’d picked out in it). Then, I would go live at my mother’s. But, since I’d sponged off of him for 20 years, I’d have to get a night job. I couldn’t get a day job because he didn’t want anything to change for the kids and he knew I wanted to *stay* a stay at home mom and keep house, so I could do all the child care and house chores during the day, work at night, and he’d make me live at my mom’s the rest of the time. The kids would still have a mom and a dad, just not me. What could be better??
I am so sorry this happened to you, and I hope things are better now.
Oh, they are. Not my finances or sex life, but who I am? That’s much better.
Now the only money I have to panic about not having is my own, and my time away from my kids is my own, and I am much, much smarter.
When I think of that last bit…seriously, even when he proposed that to me, it was like, Wow, I have no idea who you are. But if you think that is something I’d even consider doing, you obviously haven’t been paying attention for the last 20 years. It was so over-the-top ridiculous I will never, ever doubt that leaving him was the right thing to do. Never. You wouldn’t write a fictional character that stupid! Every time I tell that story I get a light, airy feeling of blessed relief. And I laugh.
I read this with all the feelz and psychic strength pointed in your direction.
-lived at home and had a hand-painted star wars mural on his wall (this was 1999, he should have know better after ep1), kept ferrets in a shed and a pot plant in his closet.
-dumped me on easter for a girl he knew online, telling me their relationship was like Casablanca. I met her, and she was no Ingrid and you were NEVER Bogey.
-refused to take his shirt off during sex, got weirder until one day I went to his dorm room and he’d plastered his walls with graphic photos of old car accident victims (like in the wrecks) and wore makeup and a black lace mantilla.
By contrast to these terrible humans, Mr Ipo was just married (separated), unemployed, and living in his mom’s basement when we started dating and that’s been good for 15 years!
My worst was three hours late picking me up at a train station in the rain (natch) and then left me stranded in a motel in a strange city with no car and no money.
So… I’m thoroughly enjoying the thread. But I’m the villain in my own Worst Ex story.
We started dating at 17 and divorced at 24. I was a stupid and inexperienced kid for most of the relationship, with some very strange and naive ideas about what relationships and commitment meant. And for most of that time I was trying to find ways to deal with an anxiety disorder that didn’t actually involve, y’know, acknowledging it. Oh, and I was periodically unemployed. Oh, and while I was technically faithful, I was also in love with my best friend for pretty much our entire marriage.
I’m pretty sure signing the divorce papers amicably was the best thing either of us ever did for the other.
I’m certain that I was several people’s Worst Ex. I really did not know how to Human for a while, and I can only hang my head in shame.
I personally was quite a late bloomer when it comes to emotional responsibility and regulation, so… yeah. It’s nice to be on the other side of it though!
Probably a good 50% of it was that I kept trying to force it with people who were just not at all compatible with me, because I really didn’t think that there was anybody else who shared my subset of values and interests. I was kind of just resigned to the fact that everybody else was going to believe stuff I thought was immoral and silly, and that really informed the way that I selected partners.
hi. my name is pretty_monster and i am someone’s terrible ex *hides face*
Dude’s mom left a nasty comment on my blog after the breakup (which happened after he cheated on me). My blog was pseudonymous, so the only way she could have found out about it was from him.
My worst ex’s parents read my blog for TWO YEARS after we broke up. And it wasn’t like I’d been the one to dump him. TWO. YEARS.
Oh my god the Twitter thread is such a gift and I haven’t even started on the Toast thread
I have had the weird good fortune to have no exes, as my partner and I got together when I was 19 and have stayed together ever since; on the one hand, reading this makes me feel like I dodged a bullet, but on the other, I worry that if we do break up I will discover that he was actually terrible all along.
Said “I love you” on our third date while drunk, most of our “dates” consisted of me watching TV on his couch while he cleaned his apartment, dumped me on Valentine’s Day. For context, we were both over 30.
This couldn’t be more timely, because a week-ish ago, my new boyfriend was spitting nails about the possibility of gay couples (“disgusting” “there are no gay animals” etc) I told him that I am bi, and if he could deal with that, the relationship could continue. As of TODAY, his homophobic ideals are his relationship
Good for you!!!!! Pour yourself a drink to celebrate!
Yeah! DTMF!
Hell yeah! You deserve way better than the homophobia asshole.
Unrelated, but I adore your username!
….but there are lots of gay animals??? There’s an entire species of lesbian lizards, and homosexual behavior is ALL. OVER. the animal kingdom.
I mean, in any case he sounds awful, but he’s also just….WRONG.
I once dated a guy for three months who completely could not handle it when I broke up with him and wrote me a lot of creepy emails about how he had wanted to have kids with me. After he calmed down with the creepy emails, I agreed to meet him in the parking lot of a bookstore so that he could give me my Christmas present. It was a Neti pot.
Ok, it’s hard to write about this in summary, cause what I’m saying here lacks a lot of context (and even so is long). But I dated a guy on and off for a year who was also dating other people in that time. A few weeks before things ended he told me he was thinking about getting more serious with another girl he was seeing and I was like “cool” and talked a lot about what would work for me to be ok with that and still happy in the relationship. One of those things was meeting her so that we’d see each other as people and I wouldn’t be some stranger she saw as competition.
Two days before I met with her he said “we’re thinking about her moving in” and I was like “that’s big. I’d rather you hold off on things for now until we get more used to things” and he said “that’s fair.” Then the next day invited her to move in with him. Which I heard from her when we met. When I insisted we have a convo about it to make sure we could all get on the same page and figure out how our relationship could continue without the whole other-partner-living-with-him thing becoming a problem, he got pissed.
Cue the hardcore gaslighting. For asking for a conversation I was “unreasonable,” “immature,” “making things complicated that weren’t complicated” and being unreasonably demanding. Amongst other things, I was told, “I don’t know what made you think you got to decide when it was time to talk” which, just WTF.
Three years with this dude and he’d never talked to me like this and out of nowhere I was a petulant child for wanting to have a convo about a significant relationship transition. He’s convinced some day I’ll grow up and realize how wrong I was. I’m convinced I will forever be confused by his behavior.
Rich tapestry, I guess?
Broke up with me (the first time) in a hotel room the last day of a long weekend getaway before a four hour car ride home. The journey was as silent and tense as you would imagine, except for our brief detour to a casino, where he played poker while I quietly wept in front of a bank of slot machines as animatronic wolves blinked somberly at me from the corners.
Remember that whole “go make me a sandwich” thing that was so popular with guys a few years ago? Well, my ex, who I started dating in high school, was super into it. I made him some awesome grilled cheeses, grilled pb&j, tomato & cheese, and so on but he said they didn’t count because they weren’t MAN sandwiches. So finally after we’d been dating for around a year I made him a “man” sandwich, plenty of meat, cheese, an egg, avocado, etc, carefully toasted at various stages so everything was the right temp. It was an awesome sandwich, and he said so himself! BUT, he said he was still unhappy because we’d been dating too long before I made it for him, and so far “I’d only made him one!” I continued dating this man for two years after this.
I cooked for him multiple times a week, and I mean really cooked, making meals tailored to his tastes from scratch. He did not reciprocate with anything even remotely close to this. (He tried to make Kraft Mac & Cheese a few times but he didn’t understand how pasta worked so I usually had to step in.) Sometimes he’d pitch in for groceries, which was nice, I guess.
i dated a guy for five years like this! i cooked every meal for the both of us for FIVE YEARS and i think once he attempted to reciprocate but every time i’d complain he’d use how he bought dinner out for us once in a while as leverage for why i “had to” cook for him. anyway, since we broke up he is finally learning to cook and every time he sends me a picture of the food i’m afraid i’m going to barehanded crack my phone in half.
what a dick!
didn’t understand how pasta worked.
i’m also picturing some new friend asking him “what are your hobbies?” and he’s like “oh, yknow, video games, going to the gym, having a woman make me sandwiches.” (and then I bummed myself out thinking a certain type of new friend would be like “BRO! Sandwiches? High-five!”)
when we were separated but still living together, the ex and i would go for Taco Tuesdays and talk about how our relationship went wrong. i once said that i felt that he never appreciated all of the cooking & cleaning i did. his response was, “i never asked you to cook for me. i like sandwiches just fine. and i don’t mind a messy house. YOU are the one that needs everything tidy.” i’m pretty sure i would have choked that man to death if we weren’t eating in public.
his statement… technically? true. BUT
i need food that isn’t pizza or ramen noodles and i’m not going to cook full meals for me and leave my partner unfed so, yes, i cooked for *us*. and i’m not going to live in squalor because i happen to cohabitate with a human who doesn’t think he should have to do any cleaning beyond what he would do if he lived alone.
i still get mad thinking about the self-righteous look on his face when he said it. THAT WAS OVER 5 YEARS AGO.
Went on a few dates with a guy I had known for about 2 weeks. One day in the lift line in close proximity to many strangers:
Him: I don’t think your that into me
Me: oh well I’ve been having fun hanging out and making out. Recently broke up with someone and not really looking to jump into bed I guess.
Him: well my friends think your a pretty rippin skier….I think it’s cool you can keep up and I don’t have to wait for you that long. But I think your just using me for a tour guide
Me: if you don’t enjoy skiing with me…by all means don’t
Him: well, I’m 30 and my sperm will be good forever but…your 30 and your biological clock must be ticking…so I guess I just need to know where this is going
Nowhere. Fast.
It was all downhill from there, I guess
HEYO!
I was scheduled to go into hospital at 9am, and he was driving me. The night before he got wasted and didn’t come home. Arrived 3 hours late and insisted I couldn’t go until we watched the last of my Game of Thrones DVD. Dropped me at hospital. Rang me an hour later to break up with me – ostensibly because he was afraid of hospitals. 3 days later got a new girlfriend. 2 weeks later I was out of hospital and new girlfriend got admitted because of a meth overdose and psychosis. He visited her every day and rang me asking for legal advice because she was being held under the mental health act.
Though definitely hilarious at times, this might be the most disturbing comment section on this site. Like, I am legitimately upset reading most of these stories. My heart goes out to all of you who have survived abusive relationships. <3 <3 <3
I’m constantly torn between “this would make amazing movie material” and “let’s find and kill this person”. Truly relieved I’m not the dating type. Also I want to give everybody a hug.
Same. And I’m now realizing I’ve led a very charmed life, in many ways.
I feel like we need to have a “hilarious and awesome stories about exes and current partners” thread to balance it out
Was seeing this woman for several years, not too intense, but there was, I thought, a deep emotional connection; I really felt like we were the closest and truest of friends (she used the term “soulmates”) and that there was a potential future there. Then, in the course of two weeks she:
Came to my place for dinner (which I made) and sex.
Suggested and arranged to meet me to celebrate our “anniversary”
Canceled said date because of a severe “headache” (left message, didn’t respond to calls)
Married someone 30 years older.
not MY worst ex, but my friend’s: guy moved here to NYC to be with her, they moved in to an apartment and adopted one of those wrinkly big dogs together and named it Charlie. Charlie will be relevant later. While in the throes of what must have been some huge but ultimately stupid passion, they decide they will be together forever and get wedding bands tattooed on. Guy gets hit by a semi truck while on his route as a bike messenger, about six months in to their relationship, and while recovering from breaking like every bone in his body, gets addicted to his medically necessary oxy. He gets something like 1 million in settlement money.
Anyway, they broke up about a year later because he was still addicted to drugs and had spent EVERY LAST CENT OF THAT MILLION DOLLARS, mainly on drugs and partying. He moves back to his hometown, broke as hell. She keeps Charlie the dog.
That’s not even the worst part, though, because about six months after they broke up he started dating a girl with THE SAME NAME AS HER, adopted another dog of the same breed and also named it Charlie, then convinced the new gf to get a wedding band tattooed too. Every time I think about this my mouth just hangs open.
So like. . .did he get the old wedding band removed? Or edited to be special for the new girl? Or was he just like ‘hey so I was gonna be with this other chick forever and we got matching tattoos, so I’ll look stupid unless you match with me instead?’
i’m like 99% sure that it was the latter. he’s also one of those psuedo intellectual hippies who read “be here now” on acid once and now spews dubiously spiritual shit at anyone who will listen, so i can totally see him spinning some bullshit about how “sure, at the time i got it for her, but now that i’ve met you… i realize it was for YOU all along!”
my favorite terrible ex-boyfriend:
1) insisted I a) get blonde highlights, b) start shopping at Brooks Brothers c) learn to play golf and d) never get a tattoo 2) after harrassing me into always finishing what was on my plate complained that I had gained too much weight 3) was a borderline alcoholic and
4) dumped me at 3 am the morning I was supposed to join his family on a trip to the Bahamas for a week. I had no way of going anywhere or a return plane ticket (his parents had them). Then proceeded to dump me twice more during the vacation while at the same time allowing his parents to introduce me as his girlfriend and sleep with me.
Was dumped by an ex after telling him I had been raped by my best friend the day after it happened while we were together. Said darth best friend had told him that I had cheated on him while I was literally chewing on my fingers having a nervous break down. Said ex believed this and told all his friends. After getting dirty looks in the middle of the street,, I found out that his friends knew some of my friends. All of these people didn’t want to believe I had been raped and assumed this version. When I found out what the ex had done and asked him about it his only reply was “I don’t want to fight about it” and I let it go.
Guy after that was an unholy trinity of emotional, physical and sexual abuse. At the very least with that one his friends liked me more and they believed me when I told them what was going on.
I’m sorry this is so long and a two parter
THIS IS HORRIBLE AND I AM SO SORRY
I am heartbroken both at your comment, but also that you ended it with an apology. You have nothing to apologize for! Sending you lots of positive thoughts in the hopes that the next person you get involved with is so amazingly perfect for you that it helps make up for the trash you had to deal with.
Thank you very much. I have dated decent men after both those horror-fests though there’s usually been a talk about emotional baggage involved
In college I had an idiot roommate who always got drunk and brought home guys but “was a virgin”, so they’d be drunk and mad. Found one on top of me because she’d left the bedroom unlocked. Managed to get the guy off by biting his lips and sweet talk him into the hallway by promising him action. the next morning after crying all night, all 16 of my roommates accused me of being a slut for “sleeping with r’s date”. I can still feel their accusations and the shame and that was 1989. I hope that you have good friends you can trust to believe you now, no matter WHO you date.
Your roommates are terrible people and I’m so sorry you had to go through that. I do have better friends who I can trust. I hope that you do too.
This is awful, and I am so sorry you went through this, but so glad you were able to get away. You deserve so much better than these awful people. <3
This is not very long, and there are plenty of two, three, four parters here. Please don’t feel you need to apologize. It was actually quite succinct, and completely heartbreaking.
Um. . .the guy who told me via oblique livejournaling that I made him consider giving up philosophical celibacy and then dropped out of school.
–the guy who told me I was leading him on for not going to sleep at his apartment the second night in a row when I had to turn in my thesis proposal and bibliography the next morning.
What I lack in experience I sublimate in half-assed parody:
For Toast’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of exes of the worst:
How some were philosoph’d, some lived in filth,
Some haunting yet the betters they have ghost’d,
Some that creep’d out the rest, some schadenfreuded;
All mock’d: for within the smug fedora
That rounds the douchesaurus ex
Keeps Scorn her court.
Not half assed but brilliant.
My Worst Ex refused to bother trying to remember the names of my immediate family members, and also refused to bother pronouncing names correctly even when corrected. He called my sister “Dinah” for months (her name — Dayna). He had a Ph.D.
This is the same ex who was mildly famous on that amazing metafilter thread about emotional labor for not once but TWICE coming home and telling me “I thought about getting you flowers, but then I didn’t,” and honestly expecting some kind of gratitude from me.
OH I HAVE COME PREPARED. After my last breakup I wrote out a series of Warning Signs I Ignored So You Don’t Have To. BEHOLD:
1. Invites you to dinner with his parents, rescinds invitation two days later!
2. He says he’s trying to be “an ethical bro”.
3. He makes it clear that he knows it’s your birthday, but fails to wish you a happy birthday.
4. Declares in reference to his own penis that “The D is so bomb”. Means it.
5. In the course of a year-long relationship, you give him presents for his birthday, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and just because. He gives you “I’m sorry, baby, I’m just bad at presents!” followed by pouting until you comfort him.
6. “It’s not that I don’t think about you, baby, it’s just that when I do, it’s just a nice thought and then I do something else!”
7. While you are visiting after a month and a half without seeing him, his bandleader repeatedly offers him time off so he can be with you. He says “No, I’m good.”
8. His New Year’s Resolution is not to smoke marijuana until 4:20 every day. He can’t keep it.
9. The first time we showered together, he asked me to get out so that he could take a pee. It was my shower.
10. He says “I’m not really dating people anymore. I’m dating personas.”
11. He won’t let you post any evidence of your relationship on Facebook, because he doesn’t want his mom to find out about it. He’s 27.
12. After you ask if there’s anything you’re not doing that he would enjoy, says “If I was gonna be a dick, I’d say you’re not doing enough to turn me on.” Then insists that since he’s not a dick, he wouldn’t say that. Has, at that point in your relationship, never ever given you an orgasm.
13. When asked about why he doesn’t try to get you off, tells you he’s noticed you can do it yourself, and he’s about “whatever works”. PSA for my cis-het dudes: a 1:6 orgasm ratio in your favour is not working.
14. Says his last long-distance relationship was a total train wreck and now he hates long-distance relationships. You are in a long-distance relationship. When you ask him about what went wrong and how you can work together to avoid those things in your relationship, he says “Aw, baby, you don’t have to worry about that.”
15. Literally says “I’m a bit of a narcissist.”
16. Refers to a former partner’s response to his rather cavalier rejection of her as a “face full of scorned woman venom.” Apparently “that shit stings, bro.”
17. Calls you “bro.”
18. You ask him if you can go out in a field together with a blanket when the weather is nice because you miss the stars so much living in the city. He refuses on the grounds that “I hate mosquitos.”
19. The first time you go to visit him in his city, you tell him you can be there for two nights. After a couple of days, he writes to you and asks “Which night did you want to spend with me?”
20. Getting brunch together early in the relationship. You say “Oh, let me get my half.” He tells you “any girl who won’t split with me goes in the trash.” You had just travelled to a different city to visit him.
21. He requires daily reminders to eat and stretch, like he’s a fucking tamagotchi. Oops, you died!
22. He’s incredibly confused by your bra. You explain that it just pulls over your head, like a shirt. He’s still confused.
23. It takes him two months to remember that you’re vegetarian.
My eyebrows rose and rose while I read this, until they reached the upper limit of my physical face, and then I think their spiritual essence continued to ascend. This is amazing.
>Oops, you died!
He may not have, but I did! I am glad for you that he is now ex-.
2. He says he’s trying to be “an ethical bro”.
Dead. I am actually dead.
He meant it so seriously!
everything is gravy after #2. “ethical bro” hahaHAHAAAAA!
The incredible part of this is that he is the one who did the breaking up, two days before our one year anniversary, in a three day breakup extravaganza that led to the worst panic attack of my life. HE WAS THE WORST.
I dated another frosh who lived in my (mixed-gender) dorm my first year in school – I was his first girlfriend – and we both ended up staying at school over the summer for our jobs. When the new class of first-years arrived on campus, he suddenly went “missing” a lot of the time, was “really busy with work” (I had a heavier class load than he did) – and then I walked past the dorm lounge early one morning (chronic insomniac) and found him spooning a frosh girl on the couch. He had the grace to break up with me when prompted, but half the floor knew he had cheated on me, while he had strategically left this out of his breakup speech.
A few weeks later, while I was studying for an exam, six people from my class poured into my room and didn’t stop talking over each other until I got up and went with them.
They had barricaded my ex and his new girlfriend into his room (a single), using 2x4s, huge quantities of parachute cording, and whatever else they could find. Half the rest of the floor was sitting outside the door, PASSING POPCORN AROUND, and listening to him trying to be authoritative. The barricade stood for four hours.
Months later, he and his new girlfriend disappeared. For a week. To Japan. On their own! In her case, as a legal minor. Without telling anyone’s parents, RAs, or any other figures of authority. HIS MOTHER ends up calling every number in her phone that could possibly relate to him, and while she doesn’t catch me, she DOES make contact with MY mother, to whom SHE APOLOGIZES with utmost sincerity for the hideous behavior of her son towards me, exclaiming that she had NEVER raised HER child to treat a woman like THAT.
Man as a former RA that’s the type of shit I would have verrrrrry subtly but full-heartedly supported. I wish my floors had been that awesome.
Oh I have another one!!! I was a music major in college and after my senior recital, my college boyfriend was strangely mopey. When I asked him what was wrong he told me he was upset because everybody was paying so much attention to me the whole time and not to him. MAYBE IT IS BECAUSE I JUST WAS ON STAGE BY MYSELF PLAYING AN HOUR OF MUSIC YA DINGUS
‘I am uncomfortable when we are not about me?’
Definitely old enough to know better… I was 26 he was 31. We dated for about a year. He was an artist (see also: unemployed) and talked me into moving in with him after two months (his father’s house); of course, he lived off of my pay checks the entire time. We would get into huge fights about responsibility (or lack thereof) and he would rip up my favorite clothes in retaliation. I finally wised up and moved out after he spit in my face, literally. Of course, stupidly, I went back for post breakup sex and, wait for it… Got pregnant. I thought I would give it one more go, considering I was carrying our child, but ended it again when I found out he was cheating on me with my 20 year old brother’s 18 year old ex girlfriend. There is nothing quite like being six months pregnant, huge as a house, and finding out you’ve been cheated on with someone half your age and weight. He went on to demand I give him half of everything I received in the baby shower, which my mother and I had worked so hard on (I refused), as well as demanding I give the child his name despite a lack of involvement in all fronts of the pregnancy (I refused).
Now I have full custody of my child but on an up note – he is a decent enough dad (if you don’t mind not receiving child support).
I had one that when i was breaking up with him i confirmed with certainty that he never even told his parents we were dating.
We were together for 6 years.
HOLY SHIT
God, I know this too. His parents lived overseas and in the whole 7 years we were together did not even know I existed.
I was dating this one dude for two years and found out he hadn’t told his mom I existed. She lived across the country and, quite frankly, was a really terrible person*, but he did still speak to her on occasion, and as I pointed out, “If something horrible happens to you and I have to call her, I want her to at least know who I am.”
(*no but really, when he called his mom and said, “I live with a girlfriend now, her name is April,” the very first thing she said was, “What race is she?”)
I realised six months in that my ex was George Costanza.
Horrifically enough, I continued to date him for another six months. ::hangs head in shame::
My ex was a sleepwalker with nocturnal enuresis. He would cruise around the bedroom pissing on everything. Also, he wouldn’t shut up about Pink Floyd. And he never shared his french fries. Douchebag.
My ex once woke up in the middle of the night, walked calmly to the end of the bed, pulled down his boxer shorts and started pissing on my feet. When I told him why the sheets were in a pile in the corner of his room the next morning, instead of apologising, he laughed so hard he hyperventilated.
I stayed with him another 10 years.
I had a sort of ex who woke up (very hungover) and tried to piss out my bedroom window (on to a main road), I shouted at him enough that he realized what he was doing and then fell down the stairs and into a cactus. Naked.
It was fucking hilarious.
Thank you for making me laugh really hard for the first time today, as I was just dumped by my boyfriend who moved in with me two months ago and is now trying to force me out of our apartment.
Whaaaaaat
That sounds pretty awful, I’m glad I could help a little bit! Luckily I lived alone at the time so there were no roommates to witness it, unfortunately I lived alone at the time so no one witnessed it!
Consolation prize for you; you’re definitely on the short list of shitest Toast exes?
That really is the best of all possible outcomes, i think.
Man, what is it with exes and drunk pissing? I awoke in the middle of the night once to my ex pissing into his dresser drawer full of his own shirts! He at least had the wherewithal to be thoroughly embarrassed the next morning.
My boyfriend, when blackout drunk, took out the recycling. When he found out the next day he raced down to the trash room to make sure there wasn’t broken glass everywhere. There was not. He had neatly and carefully separated it all out, while too drunk to stand up without wobbling. I think we were both impressed.
Definitely mentioned this on here before (and Toasties were so helpful!) But my worst ex asked me to move to Boston with her and lete spend months applying for jobs. Let give notice at my job and apartment. Waited until I had only a month until my contract job was ending.
AND THEN ENDED OUR FIVE YEAR RELATIONSHIP WITH A PHONE CALL.
Reader, I got sole custody of the cat.
UGH HOW ARE MEN SO GOOD AT THIS
I may have a Worse Ex, but this one still rattles around in my brain. To be fair, I was fresh off of a day treatment program for my recently diagnosed mental illness. And during this time I also finalized my divorce.
Part 1 of 2)
Met guy on dating site, we got along wonderfully. We wound up dating for a little over 2 years. He was never super warm or romantic, but I believed he was trying to be a “good” boyfriend and was just still kind of bad at it. I loved flowers. In those 2 years he brought me flowers once. A “bouquet” consisting of 3 carnations. Christmas or birthday gifts were random things that had nothing to do with me or my interests.
I always said “I love you” first. When I slept over on his proudly crafted milk crate and cinder block bed, I almost always went to sleep alone. When I gave him thoughtful little gifts or mailed him handmade cards, he usually “forgot” to say thank you or acknowledge them at all. I pretended I didn’t mind. After all, I didn’t give them so I could be appreciated, right? I did it because I wanted to make him happy. Except I never made him happy, not fully. Gradually I came to feel sadder and more neglected. He convinced me that it was my problem. After all, he was busy and I was collecting unemployment. What did I have to complain about?
At the time in my life when I most needed emotional support, something felt better than nothing. And on the rare occasions where I did something that pleased him or made him take notice, he wouldn’t praise or encourage me, he would tell me he was proud of me. As though my sole purpose in the world was to give him something to brag about. I didn’t see it at the time, but this left me forever hanging on his approval, forever trying to do something that would delight him.
(Part 2 of 2)
It took an ER visit to make me see his lack of emotional response for what it was. I had been developing pain in my lower back. I thought it was a muscle strain, but it just kept getting worse, not better. Finally I decided I needed to be seen, that something weird was going on. One afternoon I called the boy and left him a voicemail. I knew he wouldn’t get it until later because he didn’t have any connection when he was inside at work. He usually checked the phone when he came out for a cigarette and at lunch. I said, “Hey, this pain in my back is getting worse. It’s really bad, I think I’m going to head over to the emergency room.” I walked the 3 blocks to the hospital, went through check in and waited in triage for an hour or so, then waited behind a curtain, sitting on a gurney, to be seen. I peed in a cup. I was examined. It was a serious kidney infection. They gave me antibiotics and a prescription for more. They told me to just rest. To try to stay off my feet.
Did I have someone who would be able to assist me? I was so lucky that I did. I figured the boy would just stay at my place for a day or so. Walk the dog for me, bring me food. By this time it was 5:30, I knew my man would be arriving in mere minutes to take me home, so I stayed there. 6:00 rolled around, and they had to discharge me. They needed the bed.
I walked home, feeling neglected and unloved. But surely he would be there soon? I lay down on my bed, trying to rest as I watched the sun get lower and lower. I admit I shed a few tears wondering what I had done to be considered so unimportant. The sky turned orange. The sky faded to purple. The night sky was black. Still no boy. Not even a phone call. Nothing.
I tried his phone again, and he answered. I asked him why he hadn’t come to the hospital, or the apartment. I asked him where he was and why he hadn’t called to see if I was okay. After all, my last message said I was going to the ER. That should at least be serious enough for him to call? He said he was at home, and hadn’t come because he figured I would call him if there was anything to worry about. (WTF?) I reminded him that if something had been wrong, I might not have been able to call him for several reasons.
But he was going to come over now, right? No, that seemed unnecessary. It would be a long subway ride, and by the time he got to me, it would be late. There wasn’t much point. He’d come by after work tomorrow.
That was the beginning of the end. I realized that he would never be able to express the kind of caring that I needed. That he was not someone I could count on. A few months later I behaved rashly and posted a sort of rant on Friendster (oh yes, children. We’re talking about the aughts. When I was still convinced that 35 was the new 28). I basically laid out my problem. I love this guy. I’d been with him for years. But he just didn’t seem to care. I was lonely and felt unloved. I knew he’d had a (by my standards) kind of f’ed up childhood, that maybe he just never learned how to care but didn’t want to change. I don’t remember what else I said, but I’m sure it was more of the same. Then I posted it, publicly. I knew that his friends would read it. I wanted them to know, but I’m not sure what purpose I thought it would serve.
That got his attention. He called me up yelling and angry. He came to my apartment, still angry, and still completely missing the point. Never once acknowledging that his behavior was the reason I said I was unhappy. He shouted my words back at me, like he thought he was expressing his feelings. He was too angry to be there. He was leaving. As he reached the door I caught up to him and said “Wait!”. He turned to me, expecting an apology. Instead I held out my hand, palm up, so he could give me his key to my apartment. He dropped the key in my hand and scoffed. We were broken up.
Holy SHIT I am so sorry this guy was ever in your life. You are a boss for that last move.
I once taught an all-Bronte course to a very small, chummy group of undergrads, and one evening we got into a discussion of how our various exes lined up against various Bronte characters. Many students had dated Heathcliffs and Cathys and Rochesters, but I stopped the room dead when I told them “dudes…I dated a St. John Rivers. FOR 5 YEARS.” There was stunned silence, and then someone in the back said, quietly, “okay, she wins.”
But were you Rosamond or Jane?
Jane. Rosamond was smarter, got out way earlier.
Literally smoked gauloises, wore black turtlenecks, recited Ferlinghetti unprovoked.
In my early years of being a lesbian, I learned that hell is being in a relationship with a closeted woman and (a) hanging out with her and her jackass ex-boyfriend who is still in love with her, and (b) watching her continue stringing him along since she likes the attention and doesn’t want anyone to realize she’s gay.
This ex, by the way, also left all of her shit in our shared apartment once we broke up, leaving me to get rid of it. AND, she’s the one who broke up with me. Oh how I wish I could go back in time just to say, “NO! I break up with YOU, asshole!”
Also, this comment thread! People are awful.
I dated a guy with only one testicle. That in itself wasn’t so bad; it was the fact that we were together and having a healthy sex life for THREE MONTHS before I realized it.
This happened to me too once
When I was a freshman in college, my girlfriend was secretly sleeping with my roommate the whole time.
Whenever I would say, “Hey! It sure does seem like you’ve been secretly sleeping with my roommate this whole time,” she’d lay on a thick layer of “I can’t believe you’re such a jealous and suspicious person!”
Fun year!
Cheated on me during a monthlong artist residency, she got pregnant and had the baby. Only confessed because she was about to tell me herself. Was amazed that I broke up with him! Finally moved out after I agreed to pay him off for “his” share of “our” house (that I bought entirely with my money less than a year earlier. Protip: get a Real Estate Attorney before you buy property, committed unwed couples!!). Stole a bunch of my shit when he moved out, including all of my (deceased) father’s tools and every piece of silver change in the change jar. Released several mopey albums with press releases alluding to “emotionally challenging events.” A year later, a random Google search revealed that he was selling stolen nude photos of me online (Protip #2: don’t kick his ass, have a lawyer do it for you).
We were together for 15 years. I’ve been blissfully single ever since!
jfc
Long distance ex did a lot of drugs, wouldn’t take off when I flew to see him, decided he wanted to start a cult, got laid off in part for coming to work high, stopped sleeping and then had to be hospitalized because lots of drugs + no sleep might make you literally crazy. Drove off all his friends because he mooched off them so much and didn’t take care of said crazy (by staying away from alcohol and drugs and not staying up), and when he finally got better, never apologized to any of us for his behavior.
Also claimed that my depression wasn’t that bad, despite my serious suicidal ideations and the fact that I was seeing a psychiatrist and a therapist at the time for my crippling depression and anxiety.
Anyway, if a dude ever starts saying he wants to start a cult, leave before it gets weirder. He now has white boy dreads. I feel better about my life.
A CULT.
You should have started your own cult after that.
The cult of “JESUS CHRIST GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER.”
HAHAHA WELL:
1: the dude who broke up with me after I made him noodles and then kept eating them while I cried
2: the guy who helped me bring a desk home and then dumped me at dinner after
3: the boyfriend I lived with who kicked me out for five days after I broke up with him because his friend was staying with him and seeing me was “too hard” for him
4: the girl who literally said “it’s not you, it’s me” and then started dating her coworker a few weeks later
5: the girl who broke up with me the day of my graduation ceremony
These are all of my exes in chronological order, sadly
We were “polyamorous” from the start, so a week after he and I met and hit it off, he met someone else who he also hit it off with, so from then on, she and I were both his “primaries”, which doesn’t even make any sense. He gave us identical keys to his place one night when we were all three over there, because every woman likes to feel like she’s part of a harem! She and I shared access to his Google calendar so that we could schedule ourselves into his date calendar, because he was also dating – no joke- about 5 other women at the time and was on the constant hunt for more. He couldn’t be bothered to make dates with us, we were just supposed to go in and add ourselves to his roster. Almost every time I’d go over to his place, he’d have another woman’s Facebook profile up on his screen, and every event or party we went to together, he would look around for women to hit on. I once brought him to a Thanksgiving gathering of friends, because I wanted him to meet my friends and to be involved in my life, and within half an hour, he and the hostess of the party ( a married woman in an open relationship) were flirting in the kitchen, which they pretty much did all night while i sat alone by the fire. When I would get upset about such things, he would tell me I was being unreasonable (of course).
Meanwhile, he was telling me we were going to get married and grow old together and that all those other women meant nothing. I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t OK with all the other women, so I would say “maybe we just don’t want to same things out of a relationship”, but he’d get really upset if I ever suggested that we should end it. I stayed for a year (while trying to change myself so I’d be OK with this ‘lifestyle’, including seeking therapy where the (poly-friendly) therapist actually told me she didn’t think we should be together) and it took another year for me to end it, after three attempts where he would come back telling me how much he loved me. Oddly, despite being so charming sometimes, he could also he incredibly critical and mean, and if I opened up to him, he’d eventually use whatever I shared against me. He had no interest in getting to know my friends or family. When I invited him to a Thanksgiving family weekend, he barely spoke to anyone, and spent most of the time on his phone. He’d inevitably make a negative remark every time I mentioned a friend of mine – “Oh, that’s the one who doesn’t have a job?”, “Oh, the fat girl, right?” Our first fight was me telling him to stop insulting my friends.
He was obsessed with being approved of by a particular community of people, and he even threatened me once or twice when he thought I was going to ‘damage’ his reputation with them.
Each time I had an emotional reaction to any of this, he accused me of ‘bringing drama’.
In the two years we knew one another, he never once bought me a gift, not even a meal. I’d buy him presents every time I went out of town (a few times a year), and bought him meals every once in awhile ‘just because’. He would sometimes give me hand-me-downs from his other lovers. I think he wrote me a sweet note once in 2 years. Once, when I was really sick, he brought over some soup before he went on a weekend trip with one of his lovers (to place he always said we’d visit). I ended up having to go to the hospital (my dad took me), and when I texted him an (I thought) funny text about being in the hospital, he texted back “stop guilting me”.
Once, I texted him on Father’s Day, offering support because he was separated from his kids, and he responded that he was surprised I cared (even though I had spent hours talking to him when he was going through the custody battle). This was apropos of nothing. We hadn’t been fighting.
Eventually, I realized the connection was toxic and i went no-contact, but I’m still working through a lot of self-doubt about the things he said and did. I’ve been needing to vent about this, so thank you for the opportunity!
Throughout this comment section, and not least here, I keep finding myself wondering, how do so many absolutely shitty people even survive to (nominal) adulthood? I’m so sorry you went through this.
The up side to every single one of these stories is that the person is now an ex — one way or another. Like, I want to raise glasses with so many people here and just toast to no longer being involved with these garbage humans. That simple fact is a victory.
Yes, totally. I have NO IDEA why this fucktard had such a hold on me, but when I finally got up the strength (and self protection) to truly walk away, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and I was very proud of myself. So yay all of us for not being with these shitbags anymore!
Hear, hear!
Raise a glass to freedom (for real and also because Hamilton)
I’m so sorry you went through this! Awful.
Reading this, I saw so many strategies used by self-described Pick Up Artists (PUAs). From describing their relationships as “open” to the obsessive hitting on women to never spending money on dates to chastising you for your “drama”, it all sounds familiar to me after reading the PUAs “literature”. You would have been in a Multiple Long Term Relationship (MLR) with one of these douchbags.
It seriously may help you to read about this stuff, because I can only imagine how much you struggle with self-blame. But these guys spend an inordinate amount of energy learning, teaching each other, and practicing how to manipulate women. They make use of NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) too.
And how do I even know about this crap? I dated a PUA guru – that’s right, one of the best in the world! I’m not going to go into details (but they are humiliating) & thankfully it didn’t last long. He actually lied to me about … everything, including the other women …. and so came across like a bizarrely. I only discovered his status as a PUA guru afterwards & by accident. It went a long way though towards letting me forgive myself for dating such an asshole.
He was definitely my worst ex, and I was reading these wondering if mine was going to be the worst … haha … but your stories (sadly) resonated.
Oh man, I’m so late to the party!
My worst ex, who was physically, emotionally, verbally, and financial abusive while we were together, still emails me regularly to tell me that I’m horrible, implies that I’ve been trying to wrong her in some way, and makes veiled threats about teaching me a lesson about being horrible. I literally have not thought about this person in YEARS, except for briefly once every couple of months when I get her emails.
I honestly *want* to wrong her in some way at this point, just so she can justify this vendetta somehow. It seems like it would almost be a kindness.
The best revenge is not giving two shits about her. Don’t give in to the drama!
Yo- block that juicebox. You don’t need quarterly reminders of her existence!
Block her ass. Then take her email address and subscribe her to the weirdest shit on the internet you can find.
Tried to argue that Tolstoy was better at writing female characters than any actual female writers. Then he suggested that I do planks more often.
the first time i *dated* this person was when we were screwing around while she was still in a relationship, albeit a very dysfunctional one, with her girlfriend of two years. then they broke up because turns out everyone was cheating on everyone but since i was in another country i didn’t really care.
then we dated exclusively but that was such a mess of insecurity and “apply to the same colleges as me!!!!” and making me feel weird about being too independent. things came to a head when i got into my college and she was like “college or me” and i was like college and that was that BUT AS IT TURNS OUT SHE’S GOING TO A COLLEGE IN THE SAME AREA AS ME.
we still screw around from time to time but she’s cheating on her amazing absolutely wonderful girlfriend with a really good friend from my college. i’m just here for the drama and good sex tbh.
We were in, ostensibly, an open relationship. Which was fine with me, but while we lived together, he started dating an 18 year old (he was in his early 30s), who thought we were just roommates and not having sex. Which pretty much destroyed me with jealousy, because I was very much in love with him. Because I wasn’t to tell her about our relationship.
I told her after she went away to university and came back for Thanksgiving. She is no longer friends with him, but she is with me. I still talk to him on facebook, but I’m just there to remind him he’s being a dick.
Another ex was a traditional violent bipolar alcoholic. We never fought when he was sober, but he’d drink and be evil. Turned out that cocaine and alcohol combined made him the best boyfriend because it made him even-tempered. It was also the only time other people wanted to be around him, too, so it wasn’t just my own co-dependent observation. Too bad cocaine is and was illegal and expensive.
Dated a guy for a few weeks and broke up with him because he was cheap. Point proved? Two weeks later he emailed me a billing statement of our dates.
holy shit!
I hope you returned it with a bill for your time at approximately $800,000 per hour. Because JHFC, thank the lord you sniffed it out so early.
oh my god.
So I’ve been reading this thread for a good two hours now (its quiet in work…) and it has reminded me of a story where, if you asked him I’m probably the terrible ex. even though we never actually dated. Sorry, this is going to get long.
When i was in 2nd year of college I had just broken up (properly and for the last time) with my ex and I went to a party and met a boy. He was about a year younger than me and in 1st year in a different college, and he was mad as a box of frogs. Seriously. In a good way like, he was just the strangest human being and an absolute sweetheart (He was a skinny white Irish boy who wanted to be a rapper, so dressed in clothes 5 times to big for him and that was the most normal thing about him).
Anyway, we started texting, and since I lived alone he came over and we’d hang out; smoke, drink, watch movies, talk shit, all things I like doing with people. After the first time we hung out, and he hadn’t made a move, I figured he just wanted to be friends and I was kinda happy about that because I was just out of a big relationship and I didn’t really fancy him like that. Turns out he was just super shy, and after hanging out at my house 3 or 4 times, we got super drunk and he finally kissed me.
Now I’ll make out with pretty much anyone, ditto letting friends sleep in my bed if I’m comfortable with them; so that’s what we did, and I continued to believe we were just friends. And I didn’t want to sleep with him, because he was a terrible kisser and I didn’t want to have to teach him how to have sex (Like TERRIBLE kisser, he was a washing machine who would try to eat my face.).
One time he did ask me to be his girlfriend and I said no (nicely!), cause ‘I didn’t want to be anyones girlfriend right now’ and various other (awful kisser) reasons. We continued to hang out for another month or two.
Then one time he came over and my ex was there (because of course he was) and it all got awkward as hell and my ex is a total dick bag who was a passive aggressive asshole to him. And then I didn’t hear much from him for awhile until he called me and asked me if it was ok if he started seeing another girl (I of course said yeah go for it, we’re just friend, cause that’s what I thought we were!), after that I never saw him again.
Ok, so I knew he had a bit of a crush on me, but I was always very clear that we were just friends and I liked hanging out with him.
TWO YEARS LATER, I went out for coffee with a mutual friend (who I’ve known since primary school) who proceeded to tell me his side of the story:
Turns out, he spent the few months we were hanging out telling everyone (including my friend who’s known me for years) he had a girlfriend, and talking about her and how much he loved her, but he didn’t say my name for ages and when he did my friend lost her shit and couldn’t believe we were dating and quizzed him about it, and the conversation went something like:
‘OMG you’re dating Selma? like she’s actually your girlfriend?’
Him: ‘yeah’
‘Like you actually asked her out?’
Him: ‘Yeah’
‘And what did she say?’
Him: ‘well she said no, but she’s still my girlfriend’ (bless his little innocent heart.)
And then after that night he came over and my ex was there, he told my friend about it and said I broke his heart.
Toast, honestly I had no idea he was so in to me, and now I feel so bad!
Feeling bad not required. I am sure he learned from this. Totally great stories, though, and extra points for saying *both* “mad as a box of frogs” and “washing machine who would try to eat my face.”
Doesn’t even begin to describe him. When my friend found out she literally texted me and was like ‘how can you hang out with him, he’s a fucking alien’ (in a nice way)
I do hope he learned something; he was so clueless about everything in life. He bleached his hair not long after we met and was then shocked and appalled that it wasn’t going to wash out!
He has made for some brilliant anecdotes though, and I continue to get mileage out of it
I don’t think you should feel bad. You did tell him you wanted to just be friends and he chose to ignore it. That’s on him.
And I’m SO using “mad as a box of frogs” for when “crazy as a bag of squirrels” isn’t appropriate 🙂
I use “crazy as a shithouse rat”, but “mad as a box of frogs” is glorious.
I’ve been reading all your stories with glee, so glad I don’t have similar experiences… but it just dawned on me I HAD similar experiences. One.
Once, when I was travelling to my family for Christmas, I met this guy on the train, travelling the same direction. He was quirky, and charming, and funny, looked a bit like Heath Ledger, and I was instantly comfortable around him. We spent most of the 6 hour train ride together, and agreed to meet up for cinema after Christmas, in the big town we were both staying close to. We exchanged phone numbers, and I warned him repeatedly that a) my cellphone is emergencies only, and mostly not even turned on and b) I’m only interested in friendship, nothing else, due to sexual orientation confusions. He was open and totally agreeable.
When I boarded train no.2, he called me on the cell and wanted to talk for two hours. In the evening, he called again. In between, he texted about six times. Over the next four days (remember, Christmas, staying with my family, busy with family stuff, already agreed on a day and movie to see him again) he called me daily, and when I told him to stop calling me, switched to bombarding me with text messages. I tried to get him to use email instead (no smartphone, bound to stationary PC!), he wrote several pages of emails. I answered… sparsely. I was already regretting to having agreed to meet him for cinema, but was feeling guilty for not replying to his enthusiasm, so we met up for cinema. He TALKED through the whole movie. Afterwards, he complained that I was so DIFFERENT from when we first met on the train. He was also looking for a job at the time, and talked about finding a job in my town.
I stopped replying to his emails, Facebook messages, calls, and texts after Christmas and just wrote him, once, in February, to explain why I wasn’t replying anymore, and wouldn’t in the future.
He called me to ask what’s wrong in March.
I want Mallory to show some of the deleted comments for this thread.
1) Ghosted on me during band camp between my sophomore and junior year, and then I stayed dating him anyways. My friends hated him, my family hated him…and after I dumped him for #2 on this list, his mom, who was in charge of the band uniforms, made my life as a uniform officer SO MUCH FUN. He was obsessed with Linkin Park, and is probably a GamerGate now.
2) Stoner kid in my physics class who had long hair and played the guitar. He meant to date my twin sister instead of me, but didn’t have the guts to say it. After our breakup, a mutual friend told me the “real reason”. As far as I know, he’s not doing anything with his life.
3) Shy nerdy boy who I met in anime club while dating #2. He apparently hated #2 because I always made out with #2 at lunch, and ??? whatever. We dated for almost five years, from my senior year of high school to my 5th year of college. We broke up because I realized that we were just incompatible. Video games and anime were always more important to him, he basically hadn’t changed since high school, and I was with him because of the good old sunk cost fallacy. On Valentine’s Day after we broke up, he called me and told me he loved me, and I told him I had to go. Oh! And he told me his ideal girlfriend would be me but skinnier, and while I was in my worst depressive episode, he asked why I wasn’t happy like I used to be. Like, a week or so later I was literally institutionalized because I’d tried to overdose. The relationship had been on its last legs before that, but a month after I hit the one year anniversary of my suicide attempt, I dumped him.
I have now been single for almost two years, and while I do get lonely sometimes I try to remind myself that being with a manchild is worse than being alone.
RE: “why I wasn’t happy like I used to be.”
WHY do men (and maybe other people, idk) do this. Just why. Even men who genuinely love me, and seem to want me to be happy for legitimate reasons, how can they not get that comparing me to an earlier me in a way that minimizes my current state of mind (or what he perceives to be less happiness) is not the way to make me happy?
My father does it too! I just don’t get it. It is one of the least helpful things I can think about, and I’m sure if I said that to him (or to my ex), I’d get a wonderful dressing down about how it isn’t that simple. Ugh.
I had a very close platonic female friend say it to me too, when I was depressed. She told me to straighten my emotions out. Then she dumped me as a friend. So it’s not just men. (Years later she apologized and admitted she had been horrible, and we’ve been friends ever since, just not as close as we were.)
(Also, I really wish more people wrote songs about friends breaking up.)
I dated a guy in 2003/2004 who broke up with me, got back together with me a few days later, only to have sex with me and then dump me immediately afterwards because the 16-year-old girl (we were 19/20) he had been talking to online had driven to his dorm and was crying outside in the hall to his roommate.
A few days later, he told me he had an inoperable, malignant brain tumor.
12 years later, he’s pretty much pulling the same antics on everyone woman he dates and very much alive.
I have actually been very lucky in the ex department, but my last girlfriend broke up with me out of the blue because “I just don’t want to be in a relationship anymore and I don’t want to cheat on you to create a reason to break up” which….????
I broke up with someone for exactly that reason a while ago, but I was smart enough not to tell him that.
Yeah, some thoughts are allowed to stay inside your head.
I have had two different guys say, while breaking up with me, a variation of “I’m actually really proud of myself for breaking up with you so directly. Normally I would just have started acting like an asshole until you broke up with me”. Like they deserved the WORLD’S BIGGEST MEDAL.
Aspiring writer being paid to live, resentfully, in his parents’ country house. Told me (workaday schmoe) I was not ambitious enough, but of course not the traditional definition of “ambitious” that might include employment and self-sufficiency but rather CREATIVELY ambitious. Broke up with me because he “[needed] to be alone for a long, long time to remember how terrible it is”; was newly partnered within the week! 😀
I woke up at 9am my freshman year of college to a boyfriend –who had gone on a drug/drink bender the night before– standing over me as I slept, shaving his head with one of my dull disposable leg razors and bleeding chunks of hacked up head onto my duvet.
We promptly broke up after he had sobered and I’d done as much as I could to fix the mess on his head (I’m not heartless).
“standing over me as I slept, shaving his head with one of my dull disposable leg razors and bleeding chunks of hacked up head onto my duvet. ”
You are a saint for trying to fix his head. I would have run screaming.
This is the most instantly horrifying one yet.
Ooo, there is something very cathartic and “thank dog I am not the only one” about reading these comments. Here’s mine:
I fell for a recently-out-of-prison felon working hard to turn his life around. He was basically total chaos and unresolved issues, attempting to make everything better by doing enough yoga and personal growth workshops. He needed high stimulation in everything, so fighting was preferable to just having a boring peaceful evening. Frequent fight topics: subtleties of my sexual response (“you made a face…”), and my lack of interest in certain sexual acts and what that indicated about how evolved I was.
I took care of him when he nearly died after having a rare serious reaction to anabolic steroids (after he decided getting fit and ripped was The Answer). When he got better, he joined a cult and moved to Hawaii.
At least by that point I was getting wise. He was all, “I want to go be with The Master, but I don’t want to lose you.” And I was like, “You better just go be with The Master because if you stay here you have to move out of my house.” (Because of course he was living in my place without paying rent the whole time…)
One delightful ex began trying to make me insecure as soon as we began dating, insulting everything from my weight and intelligence and even ridiculous things such as the way I typed or tied my shoes. The issues came to a head on a camping trip in which he was practically in tears about the rain, his inability to start a fire, the fact that he was slower than me heading down the mountain, and the cold. I would have made a run for it in the night if my car hadn’t been locked inside the campsite’s gate. Morning, and my escape, couldn’t come soon enough.
My most recent “ex” can’t technically be called an ex as we never really dated. We worked together, and after pursuing me for months, I decided to give the (dreaded) relationship with a coworker a try as he seemed serious in his interest in me and I had developed feelings for him. I confessed my feelings, to which he replied that he didn’t want anything serious, and would never date a coworker, but would remain friends. Although confused and a bit hurt, I agreed. After a bumpy “friendship” in which he changed little about his behavior, still flirting with me and even inviting me on long weekend trips with him (which I turned down), but all the while hurtfully dallying with other coworkers. After I got a new job, a considerable step up, I heard he immediately (day after I left) started seriously dating a coworker…but still tried to meet me for drinks. Naturally I said no to that offer. Found out later from a friend he had confessed that he thought I was too good for him. I’d say I have to agree.
This is my favorite thread.
I dated this Dutch dude (I thought he was much cooler than he was because he had an accent, of course) when I was 20 who was an admitted drug dealer and former speed addict (because I had a thing for major red flags, apparently). He was seeing/sleeping with three other women at the time, which I did not find out from him, but from our friends who were understandably concerned about my well-being. Despite the fact that he semi-openly was fooling around with four women and would invite all of us over to the same parties without ever speaking to me about the situation in any way, I thought the situation was fine and lauded myself on my openmindedness. Ha! We never actually had sex — he would initiate foreplay, could never get hard, and then would become frustrated and chastise me for always wanting sex. At his birthday party (which included, of course, all three other girls), I spent most of the evening hanging out with his roommates because he was being pissy. I followed him outside at one point to ask what the hell was wrong with him, and he shoved me across the driveway, called me a c**t, and accused me of “cheating” on him with his roommate. Then got in bed with me that night after I had passed out drunk and whispered, “I love you.”
I told him I would call the next day, and we have never spoken again. I do give him credit for vastly speeding up the process of me realizing I was a lesbian.
Final sentence for the win
😉 the part I failed to mention is that the -female- roommate he accused me of messing around with became my first girlfriend two months later after we bonded over what a shitheel he was. So good.
My ex-husband:
Told me “neither of us are happy” in a voicemail, while I was staying overnight by myself at my in-laws.
Told me that he wanted to separate in an email.
The day he moved out of the house we were renting in a new town, four months after we moved there (on the East Coast), he told me he was moving to Colorado.
Told me he wanted a divorce in a text message.
I found out he got remarried on his sister’s Facebook page.
I found out from a friend he had twin girls. He had a vasectomy when we were together because (I thought, I guess I was wrong) we didn’t want kids.
All I can say is I know I’m lucky to have been treated so badly by him. Some people don’t get that clear-cut an answer as to if they are better off divorcing someone.
Wow. Your ex husband and mine must have been advising each other.
My kid (13) told me I was gettting a divorce because dad said so on facebook.
Told the kids (after lying and going to counseling about it) flat out that he didn’t love mommy, then left…on valentine’s day.
Pushed me to move to a semi-rural location with two toddlers and while pregnant, then came home 2 months later saying he was taking a job in Colorado Springs. (I wish he would already).
Found out he had a secret child—but only admitted to her after she was 18 and the mom couldn’t claim support. (that mom was cool with it, apparently that had been the plan).
and yes, it’s pretty obvious sometimes, but boy, I wish I’d gotten the message sooner. When I hear about women trying to reconcile for 4,5,6 years, and then divorcing anyway…I’m grateful.
He told me sometimes he’d be cruel to me “just to see how far he could push me.”
D:
I’m so sorry.
Nice.
I’m usually the Worst Ex (I was a treasure from age 16 to 21, let me tell you) but then there was the guy I “met cute” and was really excited about. Then he flirted with my roommate when he came to pick me up, he condescendingly lectured me about cigarettes (yeah, I know, but come the fuck on, guy), he dropped me off the next day at like 6am because he “had some shit to do”, turned out he had a long-term girlfriend on another floor of my dorm, and to top it all off, he called me three days later (when I asked him to return some CDs, how did I even let him borrow the damn things in the first place) and hinted that I owed him money because his landlords (he rented a room) charged him for having an overnight guest. (Me: “Huh. Sucks to be you.”)
But for fuckin real. Bro, even if the sex had been *good* I wouldn’t have paid for it.
THE SLAPSTICK HILARITY
This Guy:
1. Loved shitty cartoons from the ‘80s and earlier with a deep, abiding passion, but loved “The Last Unicorn” most deeply, abidingly, and passionately of all
a.) Would stare me in the eyes and quote Schmendrick’s lines to the unicorn (“I know you. Even if I’d been blind,” etc.) when he wanted to be romantic, which was often
b.) Sang along to the soundtrack, crying because it was all so powerful, even when it was Mia Farrow singing out of tune about how strange it all was “now that I’m a woman”
2. Said the shape of my eyes and my pierced bellybutton made me “exotic” to him
a.) I’m white
3. Had given himself a secret name, being dissatisfied with his commonplace given name
a.) This secret name included a “the,” as in Gandalf the Grey or Vlad the Impaler
4. Liked to capitalize words he considered important
5. Ate like a boa constrictor, fasting for days and then binging afterward
a.) Offered, by way of justification, “I don’t start to get weak until the third or fourth day”
b.) Claimed to have started this habit as a way to save money in grad school
6. Carried around a little black notebook in which he’d write deep thoughts, mostly quotes from video games, and attempts at haiku
a.) Dressed almost entirely in black, too, now that I think of it
a1.) Including a black trenchcoat
7. Had his long, Tommy Wiseau-like hair trimmed once but cringed the entire time
8. Appeared to actually believe that, as a 19-year-old, I could “make [him] young again”
a.) Would say those words, along with exhortations to “make [him] beautiful,” in bed
b.) Was 27
c.) Nonetheless insisted that our age gap was irrelevant, as we were such kindred spirits/destined lovers/meant to be/you guys I was 19 and still kind of sheltered okay
Unfunny fuckery to come in a comment.
THE UNFUNNY FUCKERY (here be triggers)
This Guy also:
1. Was married
a.) Wrote her a letter (which he showed me) in which he explained all the reasons it was her fault he was contemplating an affair
a1.) Astoundingly, succeeded in getting me to focus on his unmet “needs,” rather than his massive douchery
b.) Was my first serious test of the so-called open relationship I was in, and the big scarlet letter that resulted served nicely to keep me from talking too much about what was happening
b1.) I also came to believe that the best way to atone for what I was doing was to try to make both This Guy and my boyfriend as happy as possible
2. Gave no fucks about proclaiming our forbidden love to the world/our small, socially isolated university program
a.) Mostly with drunken sexual innuendo
b.) But then he serenaded me in front of the entire program
b1.) With “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles,)” at half tempo
b2.) Berated me after this performance, in a hallway where the others had to walk around us, for being insufficiently impressed with “the most romantic thing [he’d] ever done”
b3.) Bragged years later on a dating profile that he’d “been known to serenade a lover,” leaving out all this pesky context
3. Would often lunge at me to kiss me, literally throw his arms around me, etc.
a.) Such was his unbridled passion
b.) I never let him top again after he acted this way in bed
4. Used his phone to record video of classmates hanging out in their bras, without their knowledge
a.) Got intensely butthurt that they were angry about this
5. Kept his hooks in with suicide threats once the thrill of unrelenting attention had worn off
a.) Carried a laptop around, writing a will
a1.) The one bit I saw over his shoulder referred to “having found the love of [his] life in the final days of [his] life”
b.) Showed me another document he purported to be a sort of memo to himself, in which he’d written, verbatim, “if she doesn’t Choose me, my life is forfeit” (see The Slapstick Hilarity, 4.)
b1.) Berated me for bringing this up later
c.) Talked about being on a forum for suicidal people
d.) Started sleeping with kitchen knives under his pillow, saying they comforted him
6. Flashed me in a semi-public place, twice
a.) Smiled sweetly as he was doing it
b.) Said he’d always wanted to
7. Repeatedly attempted to logic me into being with him exclusively
a.) ‘Splained and ‘splained that, out of four possible outcomes for me – being with just my first boyfriend, being single, being with both men, or being with just This Guy – the fourth was the one scenario I hadn’t yet experienced
b.) Could not understand why I was so reluctant to try that (see entirety of preceding list.)
8. Knew why I was there when I finally came to his newly-bachelor apartment to break up with him
a.) I accomplished this in one attempt by
a1.) Mangling quotations (“If you love me, you’ve got to let me go,” etc)
a2.) Declaring that I wasn’t ready for his brand of love (true)
a3.) Swearing that someday I’d find him again (false)
a4.) Fucking him one last time
a5.) Changing majors
a6.) Having to walk past the apartment every day afterward en route to class
9. Turned out to resemble an awful lot of strangers when seen from behind
a.) I’d nearly swallow my tongue every time
b.) Almost a decade later, I still get hyper-focused and clammy if someone looks like him
10. Mailed me only one envelope of photos and terrible poetry after I got out
a.) Did not otherwise stalk me or kill himself
b.) Last I googled, he’d been in a choral performance in my metro area a few years ago
WOW. Amazing throughout, but for some reason 500 miles at half tempo is the thing that stuck out first.
I’ve said it before on this thread, but I am so, so sorry you went through this.
You’ve written it up beautifully, though, which is something else!
Thanks! Jesus, after not being able to speak of it for like two years, it’s nice to know that all the rumination has finally turned it into something entertaining.
I’m glad that you’re okay now and safe.
He sounds like he believed that he was the second coming of Lord Byron.
Lord Byron would have been way less needy.
So many horrible stories from this one, but here’s the kicker. This is after almost 2.5 years of bizarre hot & cold, controlling behavior, and I finally thought I had gotten out of the relationship.
I was so distraught and damaged from the stress of the relationship, that I decided to take some time off of work and live in a different, favorite city for a month. He decided (without asking) that he would go with me to ‘make sure I got situated safely’, and bought a plane ticket. While he was there, we would write together during the day. One morning, we were walking around looking for a cafe to write in, and he suggested one but I said they didn’t have wifi, so I didn’t want to write there. We found another place, but he got really weirdly pissy, including, when we were ordering our food, ordering for me and telling me that it was “the man’s role” to order breakfast for his woman (so bizarre; he had never been that way before). After we sat down, he called me a bitch loud enough that the people in the tables around us looked shocked. I was just trying to get through the day and not anger him, because he was obviously growing more and more unstable (he was apparently angry that I hadn’t wanted to go to the other cafe). By the evening we were both super tense and weird with each other. We went back to the apartment, and were writing on our laptops in the living room, talking casually, when he repeated something a friend had said about internet censorship, and I said that I thought it was a bit more complicated than that. He FLIPPED out, saying I was always contradicting him, demanded that I delete the draft of his book from my computer, and even after I did, got in my face yelling about how I had better have deleted it or else he was going to throw my laptop out the window. I was so afraid of him, I had to go to the bathroom, and brought my laptop with me. He followed me into the bathroom, trying to grab the laptop from me, and when I wouldn’t give it to him, he hit me in the face and split my lip. In the aftermath of that, he told me I had turned him into a “wife beater”.
He stayed for two more days and we pretended things were OK, but they weren’t and I was completely terrified of him. He’d get mad at me for being quiet and freaked out at having been hit by him. While he packed to go, he was screaming at me about how fucked up I was, and how I should throw myself out the window of the apartment. I surreptitiously filmed his tirade with my phone in case he attacked me again, so I’d have proof. He never once apologized for this incident, but that was the last straw, and I never spoke to him again.I was so ashamed that I didn’t tell anyone about this behavior for months. When I did, my mom cried.
No likes because that is awful, just hugs being sent your way.
isn’t this horrible? Thanks; it feels kinda freeing to talk about now.
Jeeeeeezus. I’m glad you’re out.
Meeeeee too!!
I think you should congratulate yourself on not speaking to him again. Internet hugs.
Thanks – I can put up with a lot – but not physical abuse!
What a monster. I’m glad you’re rid of him, and safe.
Ok I’ve read five pages of comments, and you win. How absolutely terrifying. So glad you lived to tell about it.
Cheated on me on Valentine’s Day… Ouch.
Two quickies, neither of which are mine (I’ve been relatively lucky) — one of them hilarious, one of them sad/fucked up.
My best friend and I lived together for 4 years and she enjoyed dating a lot more than I do. One day she came home all excited about a barista she’d met at our coffee shop around the corner. They went on a couple dates and then she was over it – but he wasn’t ready for it to be over. So he wrote her a very long letter about how he was a “ninja, filmmaker, and lover.” (We scream-laughed over that one for a long time.) But unfortunately he worked right around the corner from us, so he would often walk by after work to see if our lights were on. She picked me up from work early one day and said “We’re going to Wal-Mart right now and buying curtains.” But she got a copy of one of his “films,” which I use with the HEAVIEST of quotations marks, and it was the most awful, dudebro, amateur thing we’d ever seen… think a variety show with a hint of Jackass thrown in. I think we hosted a viewing party one night just to make fun of it.
Aaaaand then there’s my dad – obviously it is more involved than this quick summary, but basically after 34 years of marriage, the last 4 of which he’d been on a 5-week-on/3-week-off job in the Middle East, he comes home one day and tells my mother he thinks the Bible says he can have two wives at the same time. (We were a VERY religious household – church 3-4x/week, conservative evangelicals.) Even better yet – he’s already met her, overseas where he works, and he’s been with her for 6 months, and they’re getting married soon, and when he retires he’s moving to the Philippines where her family is from and my mom isn’t invited, but he will keep sending her money and also he needs to use her address to teach his University of Phoenix classes so she can mail him all his classwork every month, right?
After a year of crying and praying about it, she realized he was never leaving her and coming back, so they got divorced. (The divorce came about 15 years too late in my opinion, largely because she’s a very difficult woman, but whatever, not the point.) (Oh and when all of the fallout was happening, he said he’d always resented my mother for not being able to have biological children. Thanks, said me, his adopted daughter who came home to him at 11 days old, and also my brother, who came home at 7 days, it’s not like you raised us like we were your own, or anything.)
Oh my god. That’s just awful.
At first I thought my Worst Ex wasn’t so bad, but maybe, maybe he was. A few bullet points:
– We dated for most of the time that this other girl we knew was back home for the summer (she was in undergrad and he was in his late 20s at the time.) He often mentioned her in conversation for no reason at all. He once asked me to stop texting him because he was trying to take a nap, then proceeded to keep tweeting her for like 45 minutes. Also once showed up to a group hang with her (we had been dating for months by this point), when I had been waiting for him for a while.
– Actual quote: “Look at your wrists. They’re so small and frail, they look like I could snap them.”
– Once got mad at me because my phone was malfunctioning and re-sending the same texts over more than once. Then got mad at me when I apologized and offered to call my service provider about it. Then got mad at me again when I got a bunch of blank text messages from him and was worried.
– Didn’t read.
– Got mad at me if he had to wait while I worked 10 minutes of overtime. Also regularly got mad at me for being lactose intolerant. (This happened when I would order something without cheese; when I would take a Lactaid; and the one time that I unknowingly ate dairy and had stomach cramps on the way home even though he wasn’t even there with me.)
– Never gave me gifts unless you count a T-shirt that his mom got at work for free.
– During our conversations about sports, would usually repeat, word-for-word, what certain beat reporters tweeted a few days earlier, but passed it off as his own opinion.
– Ignored my warnings about a mutual friend* who was beginning to reveal herself as a sociopath, and didn’t think it was weird that this girl he just met was making plans with us and only running them by him, then once when I tried to change our plans (because he didn’t like them but was too shy to say anything), she, A SELF-PROCLAIMED FEMINIST, told me “If your boyfriend wants to go somewhere, you should go with him.”
– Would get mad at me for leaving a party or a bar before he did, when usually I would leave around 1 AM to take public transit home because cabs are expensive. Once tried to get me a ride home from a pub crawl with an unidentified stranger of unknown drunkenness level, thought this was a good idea.
– Tried to get me to break up with him, one day long after our relationship had hit the rocks. How, you ask? Casual sexism (the old “women aren’t funny” thing) and racism (about my own culture.) When that didn’t work because I somehow didn’t want to argue with this guy I was in love with (WHY?), he broke up with me over the phone the next day. At midnight, on Thanksgiving. (I remind you that Canadian Thanksgiving is a Monday, so I had to go to work the next morning.) He said he chose to break up with me over the phone so that I’d be at home, and comfortable, and then told me about the other locations he’d considered for a breakup. Never has the old “It’s not you, it’s me” been so true. He then asked if I wanted to be friends and ignored my request for space for a few days.
*He made his way through half our mutual female friends before actually dating this sociopath for a while, and you can guess how well that went. He is currently dating a younger, blonder, more obedient version of me. She makes him leave parties at 10 PM.
Two things: “Look at your wrists. They’re so small and frail, they look like I could snap them.” AAAAAAAAAH
and “then told me about the other locations he’d considered for a breakup” . . . . . . . ????????
Re: the wrists thing, he had at another point in our relationship, been very romantic and sincere about telling me that he would never, ever physically harm me. I was younger and more naive at the time, but even then, kind of thought that like isn’t that kind of obvious?
oh right, I forgot about what he did every time he saw an Asian restaurant. (He’s not racist, unless he doesn’t have any friends belonging to that particular race. Oh no wait he was very racist lol)
(I’m not going to get into his internalized anti-feminism)
My ex let my fish starve to death. He had moved into my apartment about 6 months before I was planning on selling it and moving out at the end of my degree program because he didn’t like his crappy apartment. He was flaky and never did any housework but I mostly let that slide. We were moving to a different town, and the plan was that I was going to pack up all of my stuff, then visit my family for 3 weeks while he quit his job and spent those three weeks packing up his stuff, then I’d come back for three days to pack up any of my stuff I overlooked beforehand, clean the place up for sale, then leave. I back after those 3 weeks to find: 1) he had only packed a few boxes of stuff and just piled the rest in big heaps 2) he had not cleaned for three weeks and by “cleaned” I mean he hadn’t even wiped spilled liquids off the kitchen counters and 3) my fish had run out of fish food about a week into this period and he had watched the poor guy slowly starve to death because he “hadn’t gotten around to” buying more food or even telling me when I asked how my fish was doing.
This made me realize how truly terrible he was as a life partner, so I broke up with him later, which he told me months later was a sign of my cruel and heartless nature.
Other “highs” of the relationship: he once flipped out at me because I had agreed to be the breadwinner once I finished my degree and got a job so that he could work part time and finish his BA, but wouldn’t agree to the same a few months later when he decided that he wanted to work part time so he could write a novel instead; our first argument was over me asking him not to chew with his mouth open and him declaring that it was “class oppression”; and when I met him he was using a sleeping bag as a duvet and a rolled up towel as a pillow. He was also 13 years older than me.
>our first argument was over me asking him not to chew with his mouth open and him declaring that it was “class oppression”
Oh my Goddddd
He let your fish starve to death! WHO are these atrocious facsimiles of human beings?!?
>I broke up with him … which he told me months later was a sign of my cruel and heartless nature.
OF COURSE. Not possibly a problem with him, the disgusting fish-murderer.
I am with you on the fish train! WHO DOES THAT? Who lets another creature starve just because they are lazy?
College boyfriend told me I was “secretly happy” about 9/11 because I’m a Democrat, therefore I “hate America.”
That, right there, was the icing on the increasingly right-leaning crazycake. He went on the next year to start a gun club at our (notoriously liberal) university. It was an offshoot of the existing Objectivist Society. Not like that when I found him! I swear!
It’s a tie between 1) the guy who complained all the time that he didn’t want to be in a relationship who then married a girl he’d just met three months after I dumped him and 2) the guy who told me he loved me for the first time while we were having sex and then broke up with me immediately after.
Constantly told me I was loved and was his king, and we were to have a future together.
Called me one day to tell me that he slept with his bff, revealed that they were fwb for years, and that I had to get tested and probably treated for gonorreah. If it was anything permanent, he would surely be six feet under.
Hoo boy. Basically-but-not-officially lived with a dude for a few years who literally had enough room in his 1BR to come in the door, and get to the bathroom, kitchen sink, and bed. Single file. Everything else was boxes stacked to the ceiling. Carefully organized and indexed boxes. What broke my camel’s back was his temper, though. He never hit me, just shouted when I did something like climb out of bed to go to the bathroom, but other people were less lucky. One standout was on a flight where a guy leaned his seat back into the dude’s lap, dude told the guy to sit back up, guy declined to do so, so dude punched him in the head. Then called the stewardess to tattle when guy seemed like he was going to retaliate. We subsequently got airport security to see us out because the guy and two of his friends were pursuing us with expressions of ill will.
Dude was pushing 50; I was in my 20s.
First and only boyfriend, when I was 15:
– told me he loved me at the end of our first date
– kissed like a washing machine
– got sulky about my “not making an effort” whenever I failed to wear makeup (I’m sure it will come as no surprise that he was not exactly gods gift himself)
– told me all his friends agreed he could do better
– lied all the time about stupid little things
– tried to throw my favourite pair of boots out the window because he thought they were ugly and embarrassing
– loathed his mother, constantly called her a bitch/whore etc
– was always skint, could never get a lift so my poor parents had to drive us everywhere (rural area with no buses)
– bought me one present – a piece of rose quartz, which he gave me because the card next to it said it had some kind of crystal healing shit for the skin (he indicated my teenage-spotty face as he explained this)
– talked me into giving him a blowjob and then said I was shit at it (apparently I was teasing too much – that was me hesitating because I didn’t really want to do it)
I broke up with him after 4 months because I was tired of the bullshit, at which point he began alternating between sobbing pleas/nonstop phone calls/threatening suicide and venomous rage/namecalling/threatening to “fucking break me in two” if he ever saw me again. I think he genuinely thought he’d be able to guilt/bully me into taking him back, and after a few weeks with no success he sent me a goodbye text saying he’d just taken an overdose. I was well past the point of believing him or caring, tbh, so i just replied “OK then, bye”. He is of course still alive and well, and moved on to some poor girl who was engaged to him last I heard.
I feel quite lucky to have learned at quite a young age that being alone is faaaar preferable to settling for a dickhead like that.
Can I just say, please do not read this thread right before going to bed. I did, and then I had a vivid nightmare that my worst ex (who was of the gaslighting variety) came to my workplace and enlisted his father and my mother to bully me into forgiving him.
yikes!! I hope you’ve shaken that dream and settled down some – I hate that nightmares always feel so intimate and real.
My worst ex was my first bf in HS. My mother would talk to him for hours when I’d try to break up with him. We were the couple who broke up every 3 months or so, for 3 years on and off! She would try to get me to listen to him and take him back. Finally, I told her, “You like him so much, YOU date him!” That shut her up, and I finally was rid of the mama’s boy!
Ick, ick, ick. I’m sorry, that just sounds horrible. Of your mother. I hope you had reasonable friends who were supportive.
Not an ex story, but a guy I had a crush on for like, 3 years in secondary school: *after* finding out about my crush, not reciprocating, and me getting over it, started sending me messages that would not be out of place on the Straight White Boys Texting tumblr, including coercing me into sending him pictures of my bra and underwear. This continued after he started dating one of my best friends.
Ex from when I was 15 did some much worse stuff that I’m not in the mood to talk about, but this bit really stands out.
A few weeks after we broke up, he started telling me that all my friends secretly wanted to sleep with him and that he bet me he could hook up with one of them. 15-year-old me was like ‘haha, okay, you’re so funny’ (especially when he suggested that the forfeit if I lost should be ‘sexual favours’).
He then proceeded to get one of my best friends barely-upright drunk, and by ‘got her drunk’ I mean ‘pushed the vodka at her at every possible opportunity’, and like the gentleman he was, offered to walk us back to the station. Friend could barely walk so he oh-so-chivalrously held her up. I walked ahead, turned around two minutes later and there they were making out.
I burst into tears and ran on ahead, at which point drunk friend came staggering after me asking what was wrong, apparently so drunk that she didn’t realise what had just happened. He caught up with us, told me it was a ‘pleasure betting with me’, winked at me and walked away, leaving me in tears, supporting someone on the verge of blacking out, in a part of London I did not know. I had to half-carry my friend to the Tube (which took some time to find) and make sure she got home, still sobbing all the way.
He called me later that evening to tell me I had no right to be upset because ‘You always knew I was an asshole.’ And then about a week after that he told me that said friend had got blackout drunk deliberately to have an ‘excuse’ to make out with him.
The next time I spoke to him after that he tried to rope me into a petty theft racket.
Even in this thread full of awful stories, this one’s particularly vile. Ugh, I’m so sorry.
Kinda late to the party, but I wasted over five years of my life on this festering douchecanoe… not that I was a peach then, either, but y’know. Youth and stupidity and such.
Note: This might get long.
Some highlights:
1) Broke up with me because I didn’t want children at the time and he was looking for the long haul. …I was 17. Broke up with me a different time because I was a vegetarian and he could never date/marry someone who couldn’t enjoy meat. Would frequently compare me to other girls and his ex who were not vegetarian.
2) Dressed me down in a Quizno’s for asking a meaty knife to be changed because “my vegetarianism wasn’t medical, I was being an asshole and picky for something that doesn’t matter to anyone else”. This fight continued en route across town to his lab, in the lab, and then back across town to my place.
3) He looked like an ostrich, yet had aspirations to become an actor. Or a model. He became a scientist. 😛
4) Disliked feminists. Profoundly. IDOLIZED a professor that hated women because they never wanted him (hmm, wonder why…). Also thought labels like “African-American/Latino-American/etc.” was dumb because guys, we’re all Americans, why are you pointing our your differences?”
5) Left me for THREE different people over 5 years, but when he was (always) rejected, came crawling back. Into my bed. Note – towards the end, we were in an open relationship. Well, he was, at any rate. He was ‘uncomfortable’ with my seeing other people.
6) Left me in graduate school after MOVING IN TOGETHER, then tried to sleep with me after I’d gotten together with a grad student in a related department. Lied to our faces about him being cool with it for over a year until he confronted me at Christmas about how he’d always loved me and I owed him another chance because his family had helped out mine during some rough times.
7) Called me into COUPLES counseling 6 months after I told him to fuck off – after Christmas – and then, when I refused to talk and left, told his therapist he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t do something drastic to me.
8) Told ex I was leaving program when he came to my door about 6 months after to ‘talk’ and to fall into a hole and die and never contact me again. He told me I was throwing away my future by walking away from my degree program and life there.
As I understand it now, he’s a failed professor and going through (another) large life crisis and wanting to work in the field I just left (education); I’m working on advanced degrees in adult ed, am awesome at it, and have a great job and family. So, you know, progress!
In our defense: high school, early college, a wretched excess of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, but yeah. Two years of on-again, off-again, “you are the one” in letters and not speaking to me when i am in the room, “if you really loved me you’d…” know what to wear, know what find me for a present, know I wanted/did not want sex now, then, ever.
He also wooed, and dated another woman from college (yeah, simultaneously) (I traveled a lot, she stayed put, and was a better bet for long term sex) and really really REALLY wanted two woman to adore him. We (the other woman and I) actually adored each other, and after a lot of emotional thrashing he ended up with neither or us and I have a treasured friend…. I win.
Super late to the party, as usual.
1. Kissed me for the first time during the 9/11 attacks. I somehow didn’t understand the warning from the universe. He proceeded to date me, but not really because he had a real girlfriend, for months (we were in a theatre magnet high school together, which is no surprise). He mostly wanted someone to touch his dick, and I was a naive autistic kid, so I believed him when he said he’d dump her eventually. It ended when he sexually assaulted me and I refused to interact with him for the last 4 months of the school year.
2. Not an ex, who is lovely, but her sister. Two years after we broke up, said sister ratted our lack of relationship out to immigration, ending in me leaving my home so I wouldn’t be deported. Fun! Ex was PISSED.
After 2 years, tearfully told me he didn’t love me anymore, then when I said “well I guess this is it and we’re breaking up” or whatever said “what, why?”
Constantly monitored my activity online and WAS NOT SHY ABOUT IT. When I would talk about someone in my life, it would go something like this: “Oh, do you mean Sarah Smith or Sarah Johnson? Wait, the one who worked at Company A or Company B? Oh, you mean with the crazy orange cat? She liked your photo of the tree last week.” (I had shared none of these details with him.) Finally I blocked him after our breakup and within minutes, he texted to asked why I would do such a thing.
Also talked down to me constantly because he truly thought of himself as a genius. On occasion, he would actually pet my hand and say “aw, it’s okay” if he didn’t agree with me. He also paused House of Cards several times…to explain to me how Congress worked (I work in a newsroom in DC…knowing such things is a job requirement). He just couldn’t stand that I was smarter than he was. I wanted to strangle him.
Oh, just remembered this one: he was rude to every waiter/cashier/customer service person we ever encountered because, I quote: “I worked at a bar for a couple of weeks in college and trust me, every single one of these people is looking to screw you over. You gotta let ’em know you’re too smart for it.”
O_o THAT is the life lesson he took from industry work? This person may not process information in the same way as you and me.
Possibly the most charming offer of sex I ever had was, when thoroughly esconced in the wheel of power and control of domestic violence at the hands of my ex-h, except he missed the part about apologising profusely after an outburst, & instead of “I’m sorry” it was “I’ll forgive you if you [do x,y,z]” the most inviting of which was give him a blowjob. Strange that I turned down that opportunity.
To be fair to him he had waved a red flag the size of a small country at me when I questioned a few months into our relationship, whilst staying at his house, meeting his father, why he thought it appropriate to go onto an online dating site and message other people. It’s like reading a newspaper he said, I just happened to glance at their profiles just like flicking past an advert in a paper. No amount of ‘Just…..NO’ lead to any enlightenment on either side (mine in leaving right there and then).
So continuing gamely on, I encountered an early menopause that a) left me crippled on the floor in pain for months whilst I battled to get doctors and specialists to agree on any sort of effective help and b) bleeding so heavily it looked like a crime scene in the bedroom every morning…my delightful husband-to-be insisted upon regular, daily sex and scoffed at the introduction of the word “grief” for the children I would no longer be able to have.
I particularly enjoyed being told by friends (not any more I might add) that they had all been expecting him to hit me one day, having done it to previous women. And neither were they prepared to share this information with the gf he lined up after I finally saw sense and dumped his sorry ass, who he wined and dined and had sex with whilst begging me to come back, threatening to kill himself blah blah blah. A few months later, after I had had a brief life-affirming fling with someone else, he told me he couldn’t possibly take me back because I had been an unfaithful whore, and that the fact that he was seeing someone was irrelevant and ‘not the same’, and that if I wanted him back I would have to wait several months while he decided what was ‘best for him’ and continued to date her, but if I told her that he had said this to me then there would be no future for us. Reader, I told her. She’s still with him, but at least if he starts to pull this sort of stunt on her she might be able to join the dots quicker than I did.
I got a shit-hot barrister and the house 🙂 And a wonderful new chapter of my life.
My to-be ex-husband of 17 years ghosted on me. We went to a (one!) marriage counseling session, he took off after it, left me no money, broke in and took our PC (will all my transcripts and resume and pictures) and served me with divorce papers. He would not take my calls. Fortunately, I filed for legal separation (thinking we could work things out) one day before he filed, so the venue is here, I borrowed money from my parents for a kickass experienced lawyer who is going to wipe the courtroom floor with his yappy little inexperienced lawyer’s destroyed pride and I’m taking half of everything.
Strength to you and your lawyer, and a lifetime of stepping on thumbtacks to the to-be-ex!
I got pregnant in college and decided to have an abortion. Boyfriend told me he’d pay for it and pick me up since he hadn’t realized the condom had broke. Day of the procedure, he hadn’t shown up to take me from the boonies of east Texas into Houston. He had decided to take the cash for the procedure and go to New Orleans for the weekend.
holy shit! What a scumbag!
Not a literal ex, but an ex-friend who spent the entire 3ish years of that emotionally abusive friendship being bitter about the fact that I didn’t love him (among other things). Close enough to count?
-Met me through an online game. Convinced 19 year old, impressionable, relatively fresh out of depression and struggling to find friends in college me to be friends with him because he thought I was “interesting” and “special”. I agreed to this in spite of knowing that a mutual friend had sort-of-dated him and he’d been an asshole to said friend, and in spite realizing from the get-go that he could be “kind of a jerk”.
-Was a libertarian of the most crazy conspiracy theorist variety in spite of not having a really good understanding of how government or politics worked.
-Told me I was perfect because (at the time) I’d never had sex or tried any drugs.
-Told me he had feelings for me a few months after we met each other. After I told him I just wanted to be friends, seemed to be cool with it. Spent the entire rest of the time we knew each other acting like I belonged to him. Never got over his “feelings” for me.
-Expected me to spend every waking hour that I wasn’t in classes hanging out with him, because watching shows/movies/playing games with him was vitally important to saving my soul.
-Thought all of my classes (even the ones I really liked) were “bullshit” because you couldn’t trust anything a school was teaching you.
-Got mad when I wanted to do homework or study ahead of time for tests instead of doing things with him.
-Got mad when, after no longer doing anything above the bare minimum of homework and never preparing for anything, I needed to spend the last few days before every test cramming 24/7 and was too busy with “more bullshit” to spend time with him. This continued for the rest of the time I was in college.
-Complained when I went out with friends more than once every couple of weeks, so I stopped doing that almost entirely.
-Was sad and bitter when I never really wanted to introduce him to my sister or any other friends. This was clearly because I was a terrible person who didn’t appreciate him, and not because he was an asshole and I didn’t want to expose any of them to him.
-Wanted to be Skyping or talking on voicechat constantly because seeing me was “the only thing that made him happy”.
-Tried multiple times to convince me to set up my webcam and leave Skype on such that he could watch me while I slept because he was sure I was “really cute when I was asleep”.
-Got mad and mopey whenever I went home to visit my family for the holidays and wasn’t constantly online to do things with him. Didn’t understand why I didn’t just want to spend that time doing important things with him instead of “wasting my time” hanging out with friends and family doing “nonessential shit”.
-Was constitutionally incapable of being wrong and treated any disagreements with him as betrayal because, apparently, in healthy friendships people agree on everything all the time.
-The 5-6 month long implosion of our friendship finally started when I got back from a camping trip with friends/coworkers to find a bunch of passive-aggressive IMs about how he’d found out through a mutual friend (who I was friends with on Facebook) that I had a ton of pictures of myself on Facebook. Pictures which I hadn’t given him on any of the numerous times he asked me to send him more pictures of me. When I explained that a) he already had a ton of pictures of me (ones which I had, reluctantly, given him and who knows how many screencaps he’d taken of me while we were on Skype) and, b) that I was uncomfortable sending him pictures since I knew he still had feelings for me and that felt like encouraging him, he flipped out.
18) When we didn’t talk for the next week, finally gave me a tirade about how fucked up it was that our friendship clearly meant nothing to me and that I was a garbage friend and was “blatantly disrespecting” him.
-After several months of him trying to get me to “fix” our friendship (go back to being his personal entertainment), had several breakdowns. I mistakenly kept talking to him because I thought we could maybe work our way to something more normal.
-Thought it was a sign of just how much our friendship had “devolved” when I didn’t think it was funny that he joked about killing me for being slow to watch a YouTube video, because now he had to “watch what he said” around me.
-Eventually told me, when he finally realized we weren’t going to be “best friends” any more, that he hoped my sister would “get shot or stabbed or hit by a bus so I would know what it felt like to lose someone.”
-I mostly cut off contact with him about a month later. For good a few months after that. It was one of the best feelings I’ve ever experienced.
Not nearly as bad, but the only other friend I’ve ever cut off contact with (cousin of original friend, and the source of all his conspiracy theory beliefs, which was not a good sign) was also of the “we’re friends and friends share EVERYTHING and have no boundaries with each other” variety. When I eventually realized I didn’t want to be nearly as close friends with him as he wanted to be with me, didn’t understand what it meant when I told him I was “uncomfortable” with him asking certain personal questions or sharing certain things. He was “uncomfortable” almost all of his life and he just had to deal with it, so I could too. Told me way too much about his sex life with…himself and asked me way too much about mine (in retrospect, anything would’ve been too much). Told me that gamers were “more oppressed” than women and feminists were trying to ruin gaming (not the conversation I was expecting when he said to me that GamerGate was stupid. I agreed – for the complete opposite reasons!). Denied having feelings for me, but talked at least once in a “theoretical” way about us being in a relationship and asked if I thought that could ever happen. Uncomfortable younger me said she didn’t know. Fast forward several years later to me telling him I was in a relationship: he had a huge breakdown. Asked me for way too many personal details about that and shared way too many personal details about himself (including questions like “could you be attracted to me if I looked like X?” after I came out to him as queer). After I got fed up and had a fight with him about his being anti-feminist, refused to agree to set boundaries about what kinds of things we would talk about. Thought it was a betrayal that I didn’t want to spend my time and emotional energy trying to change his political beliefs, because if I was really in the right, I would have.
I haven’t talked to him in just over a year, and I’m also pretty happy about it.
This is awkward for those of us who could otherwise participate if not for the fact that we are still in those relationships (I type awaiting to find out if he is going to jail, which I almost hope he does because it’s the easiest way to extricate myself.)
I’m so sorry you’re still in that situation. Please, reach out if you want to talk to any of us. My email is my username at gmail
I hope, for your sake, he goes to jail.
i sincerely hope that for those who have not yet managed to extricate themselves, the stories told thus far show that getting out is possible and that there is a light & life & air beyond The Worst (not-quite-yet) Ex. i, personally, am here if support, encouragement, and/or hugs are needed.
***HUGS***
I have multiple exes, but only one worthy of this thread. First, the stuff that’s not exactly bad, just signs we were not going to be good together:
* Got a free trip to Venice and Rome as part of his college’s choir, proceeded to never leave the hotel room for anything but performances and once to buy me a souvenir.
* Wanted to get married immediately on graduation, then move back to Fresno and buy a house, wherein he and his wife would have two children. Two, because he liked his older sister but not his younger sister, so clearly two was the right number for child harmony.
* Offered, when I pointed out I was not into this plan, to fund a summer of the two of us backpacking across Europe. When I pointed out he hated travel and didn’t like seeing new places anyway, said it’d be fine because it’d make me happy. This was both sweet and worrisome, given context above.
* In fact, he was generally willing to go to great expense and lengths to do things I was into to give me company, despite having no interest in those things himself. This was, again, both sweet and not a lot of fun for either of us.
The actually bad:
* Would tell me about his Struggles With Porn Addiction, with implication that if I made out with him more he wouldn’t be so into porn. When I said I didn’t care if he watched porn, he would explain that it was evil, and I should be upset.
* Spoke to me passionately about how nice it was to meet a girl who wanted to wait until marriage for sex. (I was down for that!) Complained to me about people and fictional characters who got all hot and heavy before marriage. Complained to his sister, my best friend at the time, that I was uncomfortable when he wanted to make out, while I was under the impression I was virtuously keeping us from being led into temptation.
* Would be very smug about how nice it was that I didn’t wear makeup, and how no woman ever should. (I did not tell him I went without makeup because I was lazy, clumsy, and cheap, not because of any objection to it as a fashion statement.)
* Borrowed my laptop. Dug into my files. Found my embarrassing half-written fanfic, never posted. Confronted me about having written stories in which people were implied to be about to have sex.
* When we finally broke up, gave me a dramatic letter to read, with the middle portion stapled together in case I wasn’t ready for the things in that part. This is how it came out that when he talked about his struggles with porn, he meant he hung out on forums where other people posted child porn, which somehow had never been part of the “I should stop watching porn because God disapproves” discussions before. He spoke dramatically about how terrible it was, assured me he wasn’t into that stuff anyway–it just always popped up if someone went looking for porn on the internet! honest!–and when I asked him if he had reported it to the authorities, claimed that of course the FBI was constantly monitoring those places anyway because they were so easy to find by accident.
My biggest sign of my own emotional growth during college is that I had the sense to break up with him before graduation.
Here’s a few:
– Kissed my best friend on her birthday when she was crying to “make her feel better”
– Ran off with a married woman who got a divorce for him; they are now living in the middle of nowhere living off the grid/prepping for the apocalypse and avoiding the IRS (side note: this kind of living was verbatim described by him once as his “version of hell”)
– Ghosted in the weirdest way–he was legit “on his way” to my house to meet up, never showed up, never wrote me back again
– Read my emails and messages in secret, told me about it months after to accuse me of cheating. Got defensive/surprised when I never wanted to see him again/expected at least an apology
These are all different people. Damn, can I pick them!
I’m bisexual but this thread definitely convinces me I can quit men.
Repeatedly told me that none of my friends respected or liked me, then dumped me (six times!) because he found the resulting lack of confidence and self esteem unattractive.
Oh, and then he cheated on me two weeks after an abortion.
I think I approve of your username if the guy in question is named Jake
Dated a neighbor.
I mean if that wasn’t the dumbest choice I’ve made anyway. (I’m not looking at you right now, Nashville bar).
He wanted to get my attention one night so he could come over and cuddle (after drinking and driving) so he got creative with his communication style and threw a shoe against my bedroom wall from his side in his apartment. Then he stole all my forks before I had a chance to break up with him two days later. Received an e-mail a couple weeks later asking what I think he could do differently to improve as a partner.
I ran out of space in my gmail e-mail I drafted. Did you know you could do that?
My worst ex was a narcissistic, very unintelligent mama’s boy/man-child. We dated for a year and a half and let’s just say that there was a lot of shit going on behind my back that I wasn’t entirely aware of until after we broke up (though there were warning signs and I promptly ignored them).
1) When I say Mama’s Boy, I mean, he literally would tell his mother everything about our relationship until it got to the point where she was calling me, asking to come have lunch with her. I managed to avoid that, but I’m sure she wanted to try to convince me that her “sweet baby boy” could do no harm. She sometimes called to make excuses for his shitty behavior too.
2) Well “sweet baby boy” tried to break up with me over the phone. I guess he essentially did, because he never called me back. He said he wanted to go on a “break”. Oh, and he had me on speaker phone the whole time, and I know this, because his psychotic mother called me 30 minutes later AND TOLD ME. She then exploded over the phone at me, essentially saying that I was a nagging girlfriend who needed to “step up”. Keep in mind, the entire reason why Mama’s Boy was calling to go on a “break” was because he felt insulted that, two days prior, I questioned his loyalty to me after he had been ignoring me for a month. BUT OH NO HOW DARE I. Oh, and this guy was 25 by the way.
There’s soooo much other shit I could tell you, but this post would be too long.
But now I’m very happy with someone else and apparently Mama’s Boy is in the navy now, trying to win the approval of his father.
Failed actor, former teacher at a Christian cult of some kind, part-time undertaker. Shouted a lot, once made me cry in a Helsinki mini-market. After I broke up with him he would call late at night and leave long voicemail messages that started “Dear God…” and literally pray down the phone for me and my sins. He later attempted to use the martyrdom of several Coptic Christians in the Middle East as a reason I should text him back. Most recently, I hear he impregnated the homeless lesbian who was briefly living on his sofa. I do not know if they are happy.
hoo boy. I was young and stupid ok? This isn’t nearly as bad as some people had it but it was still pretty bad.
– Told his mother everything, including, I came to find out, how often we did it
-Told me he would never want to be with someone who had been with someone before him
-In the three years we were together he never had a job or a car (I had to force him to even get his driver’s license)
-Routinely lied to me about doing homework or going to sleep so he could play WOW (world of warcraft) without interruption
-Only had close friendships with his online friends from WOW
-I would have to schedule events around his WOW schedule
-Lied to me to avoid talking to me all day the day after my grandma DIED
-I would get up and work my entire shift at work and come home to him just waking up for the day
After I wised up to his lack of ambition and wanted to break it off he told me he would have tons of sex with randoms all summer (yea, ok, good luck with that) and then when that didn’t work he tried to propose to keep me with him. Didn’t work and I now have someone who is everything he wasn’t.
Moved overseas with me to a developing country (East Timor, from Australia), so I could take a (great) job and he could study and have an adventure. Dumped me 3 months into my year long contract as we were ‘best friends’ and he ‘didn’t want that’. I thought we were going to get married and have kids together as all my friends were going overseas with their partners and getting engaged. I got broken up with instead. And he’d been saying things like ‘We can get married when you stop worrying I’m going to break up with you.’
So he fucked off home to mummy and daddy’s house, and found a girlfriend ten years younger than me. I was 27. And he was studying to be a teacher. So he was 30 and she was 17.
Dodged a bullet, I’ve been with my amazing dude for nearly 4 years and we just got engaged 🙂
This thread is great therapy!
I’ve got 3 I’ll talk about:
1. Ex-boyfriend who was uncomfortable when I developed feelings for him, and it quickly devolved into basically friends (with no benefits). Once we broke up we tried to stay friends, but the big issue comes when he complained about me leaving at 10pm one night after spending 6 hours with him, that was apparently not enough time to spend with a friend. The next night I spent 3 hours with another friend, but got home at 1am, and this guy complained again that I was somehow not giving him enough, since I’d stayed out that late with someone else. I gave up on that friendship.
2. Ex-boyfriend/kinda ex-fiance – he proposed when drunk and instead of saying what I wanted to (ask me again when you’re sober) I said ‘ask me again when you’re sure’ and he explained that he was (while driving btw). We were going to his sisters house for a family dinner and he started talking about how we’d get married and go to Ireland for the honeymoon. I didn’t know what to say since I hadn’t really said yes and now was in front of family. I was depressed at the time, and cutting, and after this I cut myself bad enough to scare myself so I called him and said we couldn’t be engaged right then.
I told myself never to date an alcoholic, and then I did – for years. 3 years together when we lived near each other, then I moved to a new state since I couldn’t break myself of that relationship when we were near by. Then stayed emotionally tied for another 3 years, and dated for another 6 months long distance when he was sober. Him being sober didn’t last, and I finally got myself emotionally detached. One of the best things I did for myself was after the move, I told him I couldn’t talk to him for a month. I lived through it, and so did he. It was the beginning of my healing and growth.
3. Ex-husband of 4.5 years married and together 12 years. He used to tell me how bad my behavior was (I’m a hippie/free spirit/dances in fountains kind of girl). He didn’t like my long hair, he didn’t like most of my clothes, and he eventually said I needed to loose weight. I couldn’t make him happy with me, and eventually gave it a year to improve before I’d call it off. He beat me to that deadline by 2 months, ending our marriage 2 months after moving into a new house and me buying a brand new car (after paying his off of course). The divorce went pretty ok, but we didn’t settle the house at the same time which caused me to have to take him to court to force the sale. We were at the point where we could not be business partners.
He started dating a 20 year old when he was 34 and has since married her.
I’m now happily married to someone who thinks I hung the moon 🙂 (no, he did)
Aww! 🙂
I had an ex who didn’t ejaculate because he wanted to “transform it into magic”. This went on for two years. When he finally broke down, it was to anime. He maintained that the magical force of his orgasm caused the polar vortex. He hated mangoes and the “Well-behaved women rarely make history” bumper stickers.
Not exactly an Ex, but this guy I used to fuck got arrested and convicted for possession of child pornography. As far as I know, he’s still in prison.
I got a friend to take me instead, so it wasn't a big deal. But I def broke up with him.
Dated for nearly 6 months and I never met any of his friends; he said he didn’t wanna share me with other people, but I assumed he was embarrassed of me because I was fat. Didn’t have a lot of confidence obviously..
Turns out he was keeping me a secret because he was engaged.
A year after I ended things he came to my retail job with a couple of friends and had a loud conversation with them about how retail was for stupid people.
You’re right, my life is terrible; I can’t believe I’m putting myself through business school.
Good luck with your pop punk band, dude.