Everything started so well for these people, just like a honeymoon phase. But these stories get way darker than any normal relationship, and they needed to end as soon as possible.
They Were Just My Brothers
“I was dating a guy. I really liked him. He was smart, funny, and adventurous. We were getting pretty serious, and he pretty much lived at my house.
One weekend I went home for my dad’s birthday. All five of my brothers were home. We ate, drank, and were merry. One of my sisters-in-law took some pictures and posted them with me tagged in them.
I got back to my house that Sunday evening and my boyfriend was coming over shorty to hang out and spend the night. When he got there he was basically frothing at the mouth. He shoved me and called me bad names before he started pushing me around ranting about how he had to see me showing myself all over the internet and hanging on a bunch of guys.
I told him they were my brothers, but at that point I was done with him. I told him to get out of my house. He took that as an invitation to throw me up against a wall and try to forcibly kiss me.
My roommate heard the commotion and came out of her room with a bat. Then this idiot made the only good decision he made that day and decided to leave. He even kicked in a pantry door and wrecked some drywall on his way out though.
I threw all his stuff in a dumpster. He ended up stalking me for years. Showing up inebriated at places I’d moved to after we dated. Calling after I’d changed my number. Even texted me on the week of my wedding to ask me to reconsider marrying him instead. Yeah, I want to dump the love of my life for a crazy stalker.”
It Just Kept Getting Worse
“I dated a chick years ago. She was essentially everything I thought I wanted in a girl. She was cute, funny, liked just enough things I liked for us to have common interests but just different enough to show each other new things and experiences.
Then things got weird. She started getting jealous of high school friends I’d known way before her and even went as far as telling me I wasn’t allowed to hang out with some of my female friends except for the few she thought were uglier than her.
Things got worse. She started getting jealous of inanimate objects like my game consoles, and video games, some of which she gave me. It came to a head when my grandmother asked me to watch her dog. She was a tiny lap dog that I adored and one day I was half asleep and saw her literally kick this tiny dog off my bed, like with her feet. I asked her what her problem was, and she told me that she doesn’t like that I give the dog more attention than her.
Things got even worse. She would physically abuse me by bending my fingers or hitting me in the face whenever I did things she didn’t like. Eventually, she didn’t like anything I did. After a while, I got the courage to dump her, and she tried to tell me she was pregnant to keep me which was an obvious lie.
After that I discovered she’d still stalk my Facebook page, and told some of her friends and mutual friends that I was the abuser. I also learned that when I was away she’d let dudes feel her up and other stuff too.
Luckily I’ve landed a great girl that cares about me and isn’t a jealous psycho.”
I Finally Had To Cut It Off
“We were in a long distance relationship for three years and eventually it started to fizzle. It wasn’t an exclusively online relationship. We did see each other sometimes. I would travel up there twice a year whenever I had vacations from school and spend about two months with her, which were always great. She’d just get incredibly possessive and insecure when we were apart because my social life started to blossom down here, and she was scared I’d meet someone else.
One time, I stayed for six months until the very last day of my visa. She told me to move to the states and drop my college degree, my family and my animals to live as an illegal immigrant and I could just do whatever odd jobs I could find just to be with her. I told her I needed to wait. She’d also get very upset every time I went out with friends and would bombard my Facebook with random junk and send me private messages with passive aggressive insults and threats of even worse.
I broke it off with her and moved on, but she kept messaging me asking to be friends. I tried, but she’d randomly start insulting me for ruining her life by making her think she could be loved. I told her that she did deserve love, and she’d get even more upset. We couldn’t talk at all.
Last year she messaged me yet again (we broke up in 2013) telling me that I had a legal obligation to marry her since I said I would five years ago. She expected me to just fly up there and fulfill my obligation to her.
I had to block her after that.”
A Switch Was Flipped
“Started dating in high school, had some ups and downs, but at the time I just chalked it up to us being immature. My last two years of college really proved he just had serious issues. When I moved out of state for good it was like a switch flipped, and he got extremely possessive and controlling.
He wanted all my friends’ numbers, gave me a schedule of when we ‘need to be in communication,’ and if I missed any, he was blowing my phone up with threats of suicide.
I finally got the restraining order when he showed up to my friend’s apartment looking for me, threatening to call the police because I still had a pair of his shoes (that I didn’t even have).”
Not Wanting To Move Ended Up Saving Me
“I graduated. She wanted to transfer schools. So, we moved to a college town where she told me she’d been accepted as a transfer. Turns out she hadn’t been accepted, and when she applied, was not accepted. She got a job at Walmart while trying to figure out her next move.
After about two months she decided we should move to Pittsburgh. She was convinced this would solve all her problems and make her happy, except we were in a recession and I just got my first good job. I didn’t want to move. She became abusive. I didn’t want to go home. She was constantly negative and on the edge of a screaming fight. I was just avoiding her at the end.
We were together four years before that, and she was always moody but not abusive. Six months of that, and she went to her home town to take a semester at a local school and stay with her parents.
I called her two weeks later and told her not to come back. It had been like a weight was lifted from me, and I never wanted to see her again.”
Seems Like He Had The Upper Hand
“We were actually engaged to be married. Then she went on holiday without me and came back pregnant. She then told me, ‘You have never done anything to prove you really love me…accept this baby and help me raise it to prove it.’
I declined and asked her to leave the home that I paid for (and that was in my name). She refused, so I made arrangements, cancelled my lease, then left and told her there were four days left on the lease.
She wailed, ‘But what am I supposed to do? I don’t have a job!'”
Hopefully That’s The End Of Him
“My sister and her ex dated on and off in high school. He admitted he was in love with her, and she admitted she had feelings for him.
I told her something was off about him. I’m not necessarily an intuitive person; I try my hardest not to judge a situation too quickly, but something about him just rubbed me the wrong way.
They dated for about six months when he started to show signs of abusive behavior. He began calling her and keeping tabs on her. He demanded to know when she made it home and when she went to sleep. He demanded that she edit her social media (MySpace, at this time) to include pictures of them and only them so everyone knew they were together.
She visited me in the hospital (I had a severe stomach flu). Something wasn’t right, and she told me she wanted to break up with him. She told me she was a bit scared of him. He was a big guy, maybe 6’4, about 230 pounds. My mom begged her to end it with him, and so she did.
The calls kept pouring in for about two weeks, and she did her best to avoid him. Once I was back in school, I happened to catch an encounter between the two of them. He had her pinned against her locker telling her she wasn’t leaving until they ‘talked things out.’ I told him to back off, and he threatened me, and then she threatened him. He stormed off, punched a locker and broke two of his fingers. He dropped it for a while.
He popped up a few years later on the morning of my sister’s wedding with a love letter. We are not sure how he knew she was getting married — we all had him blocked on social media (the letter was mailed to our home which she no longer lived in).
He hasn’t come around since, but honestly, I would not put it past him. My sister’s husband is an avid hunter, so that may be what’s keeping him away.”
An Absolutely Awful Person
“I dated someone for almost three years starting back in Grade 10 in high school. Everything was great for the first year or so, and he treated me well, and we had some things in common. Didn’t realize after we broke up how much of a grade A neck beard he actually was. I thought for a while that if we stayed together after high school, we could get married, because he was my first relationship and I felt like I loved him so much that I would marry him.
Then about a year and a half into the relationship, he started to show his true colors. His family never had much money, so sometimes I would help to pay for stuff for him. He started to yell and scream if I didn’t give him money to buy some game, food, or something else that he wanted, and many times would embarrass me in the middle of a public setting. My parents would sometimes help pay for his gas, and that got to the point where he would come to me to ask my parents for the money because they didn’t give it to him yet. I didn’t want to give him money all the time and even tried calling him out in it, but he would always scream and yell, saying ‘how dare I tell him not to take my money.’
He generally became emotionally and financially abusive (I didn’t know financial abuse was a thing until after we broke up), and the incident that made me really stop loving him was the night he took advantage of me. He finally decided that waiting for me to be ready wasn’t enough, so he took it. We still dated almost a year after that but out of fear of what he would do if I left him. I finally left him the next year right before my birthday after finding out that he had cheated on me again with my (now ex) best friend.
I wish I had said something sooner to my parents but only told them a few years after it happened. Now I hope I never see him again.”
It Was Extremely Complicated
“I was dating a guy who was very sweet in the beginning. After about six months he got possessive. He didn’t trust me. An example of this was one night I told him I was meeting a friend I used to work with at a bar a block away. We lived in a safe area and it was a short walk. Her name sounded like it could be male or female, but I assured him she was a girl. He showed up at the bar while we were there and it made him look very insecure.
He began tracking my phone’s GPS. I found out when I stopped at a relative’s house after work on my way home, and he freaked out and called my mom. She actually knew that was where I was, and he had a hard time believing I wasn’t cheating.
The last straw was my first week at a new job. I worked nights and had my phone. I got this long-winded email regarding an innocent comment on a selfie of me. There were screenshots of it and a huge manifesto about why my buddies online all wanted to take me away from him.
After I broke up with him, I got emails for months swinging between apologies and telling me I was the abuser.”
It Could Have Been Way Worse
“After being beat down mentally by her, I started suffering from performance issues at 22 years old. Eventually, I mustered the courage to leave her. She quickly moved on to someone else (who would later become her husband) and called me every week to basically rub it in. Saying how much better he was than me. How much bigger he was that me.
I moved out of state. Changed my number. Never heard from her again. She called my parents and even showed up at their home, but they told her to go away.
About 10 years later, my friend ran into an old friend of hers. Apparently, my ex got arrested for beating her own mother. Got out of jail, and beat her husband, then tried to take their kids from him. She was arrested again.
Guess I dodged a huge bullet there.”
She Abused Me Financially
“I moved my ex in WAY too early. She hated where she was living and I wanted to help her with her mental state so it seemed like a good idea at the time.
She didn’t have a job, so I paid for everything. Whenever she finally did get a job, she would keep all the money to herself and then quit out of nowhere after a couple of weeks or so. Slowly but surely she started abusing me in pretty much every way but romantic and like a frog in boiling water, I allowed it to happen by justifying it to myself. I even found out that ‘financial abuse’ is a thing. You know it’s a great relationship when it teaches you about a new form of spousal abuse.
She used her mental issues to manipulate me into buying her so many things, including a $700 laptop! As soon as I ran out of money, we started having problems, and $16,000 in credit card debt later, she broke up with me and continued to live in my apartment for another couple of months. She was on the lease, so I couldn’t kick her out because legally, the apartment was hers just as much as it was mine. She finally moved out on my birthday and I’m STILL picking up the pieces.”
You’re Not The Crazy One
“I was in a relationship that went from ‘good and fun!’ to ‘why am I smashing plates in a blind rage!’ in a year and a half. I really didn’t appreciate how much someone can drag you into a nightmare with them. I think my ‘crazy’ was self-defense.
The first nine months or so were amazing; we had so much fun, threw great parties for all our friends, went to all the concerts. Then for about five or six months, things got rocky, and he started becoming obsessed with the idea that I was emotionally cheating on him. The last three months were a nightmare. The things he was accusing me of made no sense, the situations we would get into were insane, and somehow always my fault, and he would abandon me there saying I was the reason things had gotten out of control and that he had to leave for his own protection. It made me feel like a monster. I signed up with a therapist because I thought I was having a psychiatric break.
After a while, every time I saw him, it started with my apologies for how I acted the last time, and I would try to be as ‘shut down’ as possible. Then my phone would buzz, and he would look at me accusingly and act distant the rest of the night. I would be like ‘IT’S MY MOM! MY MOM IS TEXTING ME. LOOK. MY PHONE IS UNLOCKED. IT’S JUST MY MOM.’ He would still act sour the whole rest of the night, withholding affection, every physical gesture of disgust and disappointment. Every moment of every day became a full time job of proving to him I was better, that I wasn’t crazy, but everything I did to do that made me look crazier.
I left him in a huge dramatic fit of rage, and it took months to normalize. I now see how I went from being a pretty normal person with normal people problems, to following him to the depths of my personality’s ability to retaliate against lies, and then I fought my way kicking and screaming out of that hole and left him down there. I had never acted that way before or since. I have never gotten into rages towards anyone like that, other than when in that relationship with him. This was four years ago, so I’m pretty sure I’m not ‘insane,’ as it started and stopped all within the time he was in my life.
The only consolation is that within months of us breaking up, he burned every bridge with every friend we had, lost his job, and ended up moving out of state. I still live here and have a pleasant quiet life with someone else, and am still friends with the people that were our ‘mutual’ friends during that relationship.”
I Was Just So Young
“I was 15, extremely dumb because I’d never really been in a serious relationship before, and had no idea what I was doing. This was my first ‘love’ so of course I was convinced I was going to marry him.
He was 18 and a total piece of garbage. He told me he loved me, that we were going to be together forever, and sold me on the idea of a perfect life. I wanted to be grown so bad that I jumped at my chance to feel like an adult.
The crazy thing is, there’s not a singular event or thing he did to trigger a grandiose ‘get away from me’ moment. He was terrible from the beginning.
Our first ‘date’ as a ‘couple’ was homecoming. He was actually taking another girl to homecoming ‘as a friend,’ but the week of he told me he cancelled on her so he could go as my date. Instead of seeing this as the red flag it was, I thought it was some nice romantic gesture.
It was only downhill from there. He expected me to be on the phone with him constantly when I wasn’t at school. I would get home from school and he would expect me to call. If I took too long to do it he would yell at me. We would stay on the phone until I literally fell asleep. On the weekends, I was expected to call him as soon as I woke up. If I slept in too late he would yell at me. What were we talking about? Literally nothing. He would expect me to stay on the phone with him sitting in silence for hours and get mad if I said I wanted to go. Half the time he would get mad at me anyway for not having anything to say, never mind the fact he didn’t have anything to say either.
Any time I told him I would be out of town for the weekend for a family or school trip he would get angry at me. It took at minimum an hour to get him to tell me what his deal was. Every time he would tell me he had this amazing weekend planned and we were going to go out and do all these fun things. Never mind the fact that he never had any plans for any of the weekends I was in town.
He did get physical on a couple of occasions, but I was dumb and just thought it was because he was passionate.
I started to realize I was in over my head when he started pressuring me to take the relationship to the next level. I didn’t want to, but he did. And he talked about all these plans about going to a hotel room and how amazing it was going to be. It made me super uncomfortable, but after a while I just started going along with making the plans because I knew it meant we would move past the subject faster.
I’m not sure what happened. I was talking with my mom one day and something just… snapped. It was like one minute I was head over heels with this guy and the next I was repulsed by the very idea of him.
My mom made and executed a plan beyond what I could have handled myself. I ended it over the phone because I was scared of how he would react in person. My mom contacted his parents and told them what was going on. She contacted the school to make sure I had support there too. I made it clear to him in no uncertain terms that he shouldn’t talk to me or come around me at all.
He drove by my house frequently for a couple of days. My mom called me out of school for a week. He would sit outside on the street for an hour or two at a time. Even our neighbors got involved in helping us. They would warn us if he was outside or let us know if he came by when we were out. It got pretty bad and I went to stay with my dad for a few days. He came by and left a card and a stuffed bear on the porch at my mom’s on Valentine’s Day.
Eventually he just…stopped. But I spent a lot of time scared out of my mind not knowing if or when he was going to pop up, even after he stopped coming around. I still have no idea why he stopped but I won’t forget that kind of fear.”