Devastated People Reveal The Relationship Woe That Broke Them

Just Don’t Cheat!

“She lied about an episode of infidelity one night at her friend’s house where she said she drank too much. Said she was weak and kissed a boy. It turns out they hooked up in the hot tub, the shower, on a couch, and in her friend’s bed. I didn’t find out the truth until a month and a half later when we found out she was pregnant.

I thought it was mine for four days. I told my parents and told her parents I would marry her. It was really the happiest four days of my life. I had an injury in college that left me very infertile and my best friend’s wife kept calling it a miracle baby. We went to the doctor and got information on when the conception date was. It was within the 3 days of her indiscretion, and I was finally able to correctly deduce the truth.

My dad told me to try and make it work (?!?!) so I stupidly gave it some time, but she ended up doing something very similar again then threatened to shoot me (I own several weapons) because she didn’t want me taking the bed when I moved out.

I left the bed and got out!”

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The Lesson Learned Is To Not Stay Around

“My breaking point was when she tried bringing illegal substances around me constantly. I’m a former addict and have always had problems, whether it was staying sober or going crazy because of them. That’s not a good mix for a relationship with someone who likes to get high.

Our whole problem was she was smoking entirely too much weed/doing other substances too much and it was affecting every aspect of her life negatively (she was prone to just giving up on schoolwork, bail on hanging out with me or friends, decide to start a fight with her mom that when she was sober trying to work out the issues of the past). On top of this, I also had a VERY bad reaction to weed that led me into a delusional paranoia for a year and severe psychosis for a few years that still pops up from time to time. After that, I was a coke addict for about a year trying to deal with that psychosis. I dropped out of college the first time because of my problem with it, drinks got in the mix too, and I threw my life away. I managed to get back on track right before we started dating. So, I obviously hate any substance, because I can’t handle them on both ends of that spectrum. She kept getting me into situations where she’d get high on whatever and I couldn’t get out (got me hammered so I couldn’t drive home, call me controlling when I said I didn’t want her to get high because it causes that psychosis to flare up or I get cravings).

Good days were amazing, bad days were absolute nightmares. Praying for the good days, I stuck around. But a nice walk on a sunny day in the park could turn into full-on warfare at home later. And she was hostile and quick to try and manipulate, which I’d immediately call her out for, and things would get ugly quick. Getting gaslighted was such a terrible thing, she’d try and make me out to be guilty of everything. Me always getting accused of complete nonsense when I’d try to have a conversation and get through to her. She’d promise not to trap me in situations where I couldn’t leave. Then she would. Then I’d be the bad guy and the crazy one for not liking to get messed up. I had explained my history with them to her countless times and she always acted like she was so sorry and guilty feeling. Didn’t hold for long though.

Back to the breaking point: she told me she was going to do harder substances right before I was going to drive us to her grandma’s house two hours away. Hated being around her when she was high on anything and she knew that but always thought she could convince me otherwise, and I’m not about to deal with that in a car alone together for two hours. Gave up on the relationship right then and there when she told me. Hurt like crazy, but I was officially done. I dropped her off, waited a few days to sort my self out, went straight to her house with all her stuff and told her what was up and that I wanted my stuff back. The kicker was she didn’t seem to care at all, and I could tell right off the bat that she was high as a kite on something when I broke up with her.

Now, I have trust issues however, I know the red flags to look for in my next partner. Some red flags were that she had never dumped someone, her exes had always dumped her. Every ex she talked about was terrible in some way to her. All of them cheated or abused her or something when the reality is she just wanted a reason to feel justified so she lied. She threatened suicide to the one before me when he cut her out. She lied a lot and it was very transparent, whether to me, her mom, her sister, etc. and everyone called her out on it, but she kept it up. Lots of this stuff came out after the fact when my coworker who stopped being friends with her a while back told me about her antics.

A relationship isn’t supposed to have high highs and low lows. It should stay at a consistent level, with bumps in the road every now and then. It should be a happy thing, not an infatuated happy peak and an absolute heartbreak low every few days. Learned that in my first relationship.

This whole ordeal went down a few months ago, and I’m doing good now. Bad relationships are a waste of our temporary time on earth.”

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Nice Does Not Always Mean Kind

“Nice does not always mean kind. My first boyfriend brought me flowers when he picked me up for dates. He even got my mom some on our second date. He cooked for me for our fourth date at his house. He called and said nice things. He was vulnerable and open. He was an Eagle Scout. My grandparents loved him. And then he assaulted me.

My second boyfriend was rough around the edges, sarcastic, and didn’t like most people he met. He was smart with a biting sense of humor and no patience for stupidity. He said the f-word a lot. He didn’t believe in Jesus and didn’t bring flowers. He read a lot and played video games and still lived with his parents. My mother was not overly impressed. You know what he did do?

He gave me rides to and from work. He had deep discussions with me about things we both cared about for hours. He shared books and movie recs with me. He was passionate about things and loved sharing that with me. He listened when I talked and wanted to know how I felt about things. He was patient with me even when I wouldn’t tell him what was wrong. He treated me like I mattered. He told me that I was the best thing that ever happened to him. It broke his heart when I finally felt safe enough to tell him what had happened to me, and he always, always respected my boundaries. And then we got married.

The first guy was nice. The second one is kind.”

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The Big Question – Can You Actually Live Together?

“The importance of compatibility is a bitter lesson to learn.

My last SO and I were together for about 3.5 years. It seemed like we were always struggling to make it work, but the good times seemed to make it worth it.

We had a lot in common and really enjoyed each other’s company, but something was just always…off.

The last year of our relationship we lived together, we wanted to give things an honest chance, and that’s when everything fell apart.

We HATED living with each other. We started fighting all of the time, we could never seem to get on the same page about things, we both built up a lot of resentment toward each other (he had people over too much, I didn’t help with the cleaning enough, etc). Even when we tried to work on our issues (as a couple and as individuals), we realized that a lot of the issues were coming from our differences in personality and values.

We decided at the end of our lease we were going to go our separate ways because we just weren’t happy together. Both of us are doing so much better on our own. We’ve remained friends and I hope nothing but the best for him.

You can have a lot of love for someone and have a lot of fun with someone, but if you’re not compatible it’s never going to work.”

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Broken By Infidelity

“I’ve been single for 5 years because of the heartbreak of a cheater. She broke my will to live with that crap. She did it with my best friend too. I was so anxious to not be alone or get closure or just fight off change (WHATEVER IT WAS), and she ended up coming over to ‘talk’ after I drove an hour and a half to go pick up my dog she had for the weekend and break up. She literally held on to my legs screaming and crying to not leave as I walked out the door.

Two weeks later that talk led to a ‘hate hookup’ and then I got addicted to how amazing she was being because she felt like she owed it to me for messing up so bad.

Two months later she’s hooking up with my other friend, dates him for a year and moves in with him.

I had the last laugh, though.

About a year and a half into their relationship, she contacts me out of nowhere. It was Christmas time and we had broken up around then and it was lonely and also I had no self-esteem, so I indulged and texted her back. She starts telling me how she still loves me and misses me and the whole time I just like ‘What?! Come on!’

We meet up once ( I did this to get closure) and she thought I was going to come back.

Then she proceeds to start texting me about how awful her new relationship is. How he beats her and they fight all the time and all this crazy stuff. I know the dude, dudes a slimeball but he wouldn’t harm a fly it somehow killed his mother.

So he sees her texting me one night and gets my number and texts me asking what was up. I screenshotted everything she sent me and sent it right back to him. She’s known for being a pathological liar and an attention-seeker. Making up assault stories and stuff.

He texts me back like ‘DUDE THAT’S THE SAME THING SHE SAID ABOUT YOU! She said you beat her and stole money from her and her parents!’ and some other nonsense.

I have never in my life hit a woman, I was raised not to. Verbatim my father told me ‘even if she has a baseball bat, you can’t hit her,’ but at that moment, I really wanted to.

Anyways they broke up shortly after the screenshot scenario. I got the closure I needed and it was finally outed that I wasn’t some woman beating thief, and she was just insane and craved attention.”

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She Was Manipulated

“My first serious relationship started just after my 21st birthday and lasted about three years (two spent living together), and the last year and a half were horrible. I overstayed in a relationship with a man who learned exactly how I was abused as a child and intentionally mimicked it because he knew that it was the way to control me. I learned a lot, but the big thing was this:

I filter myself to an insane degree. When I’m upset, I rarely express it, or I maintain that it isn’t important until people stop asking. I refuse to speak until I can express my feelings calmly, and then I minimize them even further. In an argument, I weigh everything I want to say first and don’t say anything that I don’t deem ‘productive.’ There would be days where I simply wanted to tell my exboyfriend about something funny or upsetting that happened to me at work, and I would sit next to him silently for fifteen minutes, trying to figure out how to lead into the story, and then ultimately decide that he wouldn’t be interested and just not say anything. I wouldn’t set appropriate boundaries because I didn’t want to be ‘THAT girlfriend,’ so I set my feelings aside and let him walk all over me.

I thought that this was a mark of me being a good communicator- levelheaded, not vindictive, always thinking of the other person. What I learned as I slowly grew mute, that NOT communicating is not GOOD communication. In fact, it’s actually quite terrible communication. It was a symptom of my lack of self-worth, developed while growing up with a volatile, narcissistic mother, who would fly off the handle if I said the wrong thing or the right thing at the wrong time. It has bled into my friendships, where I still only feel comfortable with a thick wall surrounding me. Sometimes I’ll even start to type a comment on websites like Reddit, and then delete the whole thing because ‘no one cares’- as if the point of the internet is to only contribute things that people care about.

It wasn’t fair to me to diminish myself so heavily, and it isn’t fair to the people around me to refuse to let them have a full and honest relationship with me.

I’m working on it now, in my current relationship and with myself. I’m working on understanding that sometimes it okay to lose a little bit of control, and it’s okay to simply say ‘I’m having trouble thinking straight because I am upset and I don’t want to say something I don’t mean’ or ‘I’m angry/hurt, so please let me have a little time to myself right now.’ I’m working on letting my boyfriend have the opportunity to be there for me when I’m having a bad day, when I’m upset with my family, or when I just don’t feel like myself. I’m working on sharing the little details that make life so rich – what I had for lunch, what movie I want to see, or the online shopping that I’m really excited to receive. I’m working on letting myself believe that he really cares. I’m working on setting appropriate boundaries, but it’s still really hard for me not to feel like I’m being controlling.

It’s a hard thing to work on. I still put very little value into myself. I feel quite silly sharing this, as that voice in my head is saying ‘you’re wasting the time of anyone who happens to read this,’ and I will certainly end up cutting out a good chunk of it to try and make it a shorter read and less of a waste of time.

So maybe my progress isn’t vast, but it is happening.”

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Lesson Learned, But It Took A While

“She was one of the worst people I have ever met in my entire life. We endured and went through a lot of crap. I met her right after my dad died. So, I was really vulnerable. I had received a lot of money, and she took advantage of it. $1000 dinners. Spent $1500 on a one day vacation. $500 designer heels. I was 21. There was NO reason to be enjoying this kind of stuff. She wanted everything in the world. Probably spent $50,000 on her in 2 years. Never any thank yous. No gratitude. I remember I took her to see our favorite band, Modest Mouse, in Dallas. I’m in Houston. So, we drove up, enjoyed a $500/night hotel room, a $300 dinner, and a $200 bottle. She just went straight to sleep in the hotel room. Didn’t even celebrate or care. The final straw was she cheated on me. We broke up, but like an idiot, I continued talking to her. We shared a lot, so, I figured, why not? She ended up cheating on her new boyfriend with me! When I found that out, I told her she needed to break up with him or go back to him. Took her about a month to decide. She told me she broke up with him, so, we started dating again. Found out from her co-worker, she was playing both of us. She was living with him, for Christ’s sake. And she would split her time between both of us. I ended it then, obviously.

I did everything for her. Literally have never treated a human being half as well as I treated her. Conversely, I’ve never been treated by a human being WORSE than how she treated me.

She only ever texts me to make sure I won’t tell her new boyfriend everything that happened. Once, she asked me for help with her relationship. Yeah, she’s THAT CRAPPY.

Not talking to her is the best decision I have ever made in my entire life. People might say I’m angry. You bet I am!”

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Perfect On Paper Isn’t Alway Perfect

“I dated a guy who was ‘perfect’ on paper – doctor, successful, treated me like a queen (flowers, gifts, expensive trips, etc).

But what I will NEVER forget is the time that my sister and brother-in-law were in a car accident and had severe injuries. So severe, in fact, that they were moving in with my mother temporarily as they could not care for themselves.

In preparation for their arrival after being discharged from the hospital, we needed to move all the furniture out of my mom’s bedroom and into a spare room to make space for the incoming hospital equipment needed for my sis and brother-in-law.

Now, my dad had died of cancer the year prior, so it was just me and my mom living in the house. My sis and her husband had nearly lost their lives in the car accident. It had been a tough year for me and my mom.

The furniture needing to be moved was a ’60s solid wood bedroom set and it was HEAVY. There was pretty much no way we’d be able to move it on our own. So, I called my boyfriend and told him I really needed him to come over after work to help us move the furniture since the equipment was coming the following morning. The response was not what I expected.

He kind of sighed and said ‘Does it have to be done tonight? I’ve been working all day today and I’m really tired.’

I said ‘Yes, it does. The equipment is coming tomorrow.’ Mind you, I’d worked a full day too and I was tired too, but it had to be done and I sure as heck wasn’t going to make my 60-something-year-old mom do it.

He says ‘Ok, I guess I can come help.’

In my head, I was saying, ‘Oh come off it, I just lost my father, and now my sister and brother-in-law nearly lose their lives in a car accident, I ask for your help, which I NEVER do, and you’re ‘tired’?’

In reality, I just said ‘Fine, see you after work.’

He came over, asked for some dinner before we got to work (a bit annoying as it was probably a 20-30 minute job with the two of us working together, but not completely unreasonable) and he helped move the furniture – but did it with a scowl on his face and without a word, like a petulant three year old.

The whole thing was telling, and, quite honestly, the beginning of the end of that relationship.

I don’t want someone to bring me flowers and take me on trips – I want someone who lends a hand, gladly, when it is needed.”

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Love Isn’t Always Equal

“Just because you’re into someone fully, they’re not necessarily into you to the same degree.

On a trip that we were on with a few other people, one of my friends let slip to my boyfriend that I was a bit uncomfortable about how flirty he was with one of his female friends who was very obviously into him.

He took me to the beach that evening and told me that he’d never loved anyone as much as me, and that his friend was like a sister to him. He told me that he’d never even think of leaving me for her.

The next day, he got one of his friends to break up with me for him. If that wasn’t bad enough, the next day he was passionately making out with his ‘sister like’ friend in the back of the car while I was sitting in the front as we drove to a beautiful lake, where she wore a very skimpy swimming suit and kept rubbing up against him in the water as he studiously ignored me. She kept giving me dirty looks whenever I looked at him as if I was about to steal him off her. I couldn’t freaking believe how immature he was being about it. It did seem like the bad plot of a high school TV show – I couldn’t quite believe it was happening to me.

I was really, really tempted to start obviously flirting with one of his friends, but I couldn’t bring myself to sink to his level.”

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She Wanted To Keep The Car

“The beginning of our relationship was difficult. Her family is full of terrible people. They emotionally abused her and tried to force us apart. The driving force was her racist mother since I’m not 100% white.

I was the counter to all that. I gave her genuine affection and love with no ulterior motives. She would tell me how much she loved me and was planning a life together with me. She loved how well I treated her and her friends were a little jealous because their guys didn’t do the things that I did. She wanted me forever.

Eventually, after I got my degree, we moved together 200 miles away. She now had her permanent escape.

Her car died so I bought her a brand new one of her choice. I gave her a $20k limit and told her to choose whatever she wanted, new or used. She wanted something small and easy to drive with good storage space so she chose a Scion xD. We drove 4 hours to the next state to get one in the color that she wanted.

After a year or so, however, I noticed a change in her. Apparently, now that she had her escape she couldn’t hide from the fact that she never really wanted me as a person. She just wanted what I represented. She wanted the escape.

So she started cheating on me with a married guy who she knew full well was cheating on his wife to be with her. This guy was 6 or 7 years older, unemployed, uneducated, with no real job skills, and stayed at home while his wife supported both of them.

When his wife left for work my ex would pick him up (in the brand new car that I bought for her) go out and do their thing, and then made sure to get him back home before his wife did so that she was none the wiser.

Luckily I’m more observant than his wife. I did notice. I confronted her. She made the choice to leave me for him. We were engaged and had even started to plan a wedding, too.

Then here’s this brand new car. It was in my name. I was making the payments. And she’s leaving me to go be with this cheater. I told her that she had two options regarding this car. She could either get a loan to purchase this car off of me or I’m taking the car back. I’m not going to pay ~$18,000 after interest for a car for you now.

She wasn’t happy about this. She was also using my old cell phone since she broke hers. I told her that I wanted my phone back, too. After I got it back I looked at what she left on it. She deleted the contact of her new cheater ‘boy’ but the text messages remained. I knew his number so it was easy to see who she was talking to.

She was saying to him that I was ‘driving her crazy’ about this car and that I wouldn’t just leave her alone about it.

You think that you can leave me for the guy that you were cheating on me with and that I’m still going to pay for this brand new car of your choice for you?

I’m the ‘bad guy’ here? Are you kidding me?

I told her that before the next payment either she buys it off me or I come and take it back. Her parents ended up buying it off me. They took a loan from their bank, we met, and I signed over the title after the payment.

She even tried to pull the ‘we can still be friends’ thing on me. No, we freaking cannot. Seven years, together. Seven years, lost.”

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