I’m thirty years old, freshly moved back to my hometown after disappearing the second I graduated high school. Bad home life, undiagnosed depression, the whole mess. I’d built something decent for myself on my own, but life had run me ragged, and I decided being near the good parts of my family was worth the risk of coming back. Nostalgia hit hard, so I reached out to a childhood friend on Facebook.
We’d known each other since kindergarten. I’d carried a crush on him through most of grade school, and we even lived together briefly while our families went through rough patches. I was always too shy and too low to make a move, and I spent years wishing we’d at least gone to a dance together. We reconnected, met up, walked around the nearby city, had a nice dinner.
Everything felt easy and warm. Then I started telling a story about how the only guy who ever asked me out in school was a creep in eighth grade. He cut me off. “That’s not true.
I asked you to senior prom. ”
I stopped mid-step. “What? ”
“Senior prom.
I asked you. You told me you just wanted to be friends. You were very clear about it. ”
I asked him three or four times if he was sure.
He was. And I had no reason to doubt him. My memory from that whole stretch of my life is shotty because of my mental health at the time, and it lined up with other gaps I’d never been able to explain. I wanted to push further, to bring up how I’d always wished I’d gone to prom with him instead of a platonic friend, how jealous I’d been when he went with someone else.
But he seemed eager to move the conversation along, and I was so mortified I let it drop. I spent the rest of the night mentally kicking my high school self for fumbling every chance I ever had with this guy. How do you forget turning down the person you had a crush on? Apparently, you do, when your brain is busy protecting you from the worst parts of your own life.
A few weeks later, we were hanging out constantly, and I thought I’d finally found a real partner. I asked him out for a proper date at a nice restaurant in a romantic city nearby. It went great. We started dating.
The cracks showed fast. On our second official date, he told me he loved me in front of my entire family. I was weirded out, but I gave a polite response so nobody would feel awkward. I wasn’t going to say it back because I barely knew him.
The next day I got a full essay over text about why I didn’t say it back, whether I was taking the relationship seriously, all of it. We talked it through and seemed to move past it. But I was stuck renting a bedroom from family because my career was more about feeling good than making a livable wage. Having someone over constantly was complicated logistically, though I made space for him at least once a week.
A few weeks we couldn’t make it work because of schedules, cars, work, family stuff. I didn’t think it was a big deal. Two or three weeks out of four months is nothing. He sent another giant text rant about how I didn’t make enough time for him.
I communicated my way out of that one too, and we went back to normal. Then he escalated. Not even a week later, in the middle of my workday, I got three rapid-fire calls from him. My job doesn’t let me step away easily—if I leave, it dumps work on my coworkers.
And I’d already been stepping away constantly because my car got damaged in a minor accident and I was fielding calls from insurance and the mechanic nonstop. So when I saw three missed calls from my boyfriend, I assumed it was an emergency. I stepped away. He had freaked out because I hadn’t responded to a single text from an hour ago.
I was beyond annoyed. But even that wasn’t where I bailed. We had a long talk by a coffee kiosk that ended with him literally begging for my forgiveness like a medieval serf. I told him, in no uncertain terms, that I never want anyone to feel like they have to beg me for anything.
That’s not how an equal partnership works. He was completely mystified by that concept. He said he needed to go think about it. Then he mentioned that this was how his relationship with his mother worked.
That terrified me. I didn’t wait to see what conclusion he reached. I knew I had to get out. He took the breakup surprisingly well, considering how anxious he’d been, and I still feel bad because I don’t think he’s a bad person.
But I made a promise to myself years ago that I would never date someone I had to fix. I saw my future flash before my eyes: him reliving his relationship with his mother through me while I absorbed every crisis. So now I’m sad and alone, but at least I’m not constantly anxious about setting off an adult man’s mental health spiral because I turned off my phone to watch a movie. The next one is from a seventeen-year-old girl.
She told her online friend, Jane, that she had feelings for her. Jane, also seventeen, said she felt the same. They’d been friends online for over seven months after meeting through mutual interests, and the feelings had grown quickly. They lost touch for a few months at the start of the year, then reconnected and got close again.
The problem was that Jane had a lot on her plate: personal problems, work, school, and a serious time zone difference. They both agreed that now wasn’t the time for a long-distance relationship. They weren’t in the right mental states, and their living situations were different. For a while, the girl was content just knowing the feelings were mutual.
Then Jane started getting distant. The texts slowed, then stopped. The girl didn’t want to be the only one putting in effort and getting a fraction of it back. When she checked up on Jane, Jane said the messages got lost among her work texts.
She sort of understood, because she’d also stopped trying as hard. But now they were stuck: both had feelings, both agreed to work on themselves first, and now they were more distant than ever. They’d made vague plans to meet up, but nothing ever came of it. She posted asking what to do.
The comments were split, but a lot of people said Jane probably never actually liked her and was just trying to spare her feelings. That thought hadn’t occurred to her, and it stung. She didn’t think Jane lied, but she agreed that not texting back at all was weird. The bare minimum.
So she messaged Jane directly and asked straight out: did you ever actually like me, or were you protecting my feelings? Jane said it had nothing to do with her feelings. It was about distance, how busy she was, and her fear of ruining what they had. The girl said she understood and agreed.
They promised to text more often, but without pressure to message every single day. She didn’t want texting her to feel like a chore. For a while, that seemed to help. But four months later, the girl updated again.
She’d tried reaching out multiple times, and each time, she got nothing for days—or nothing at all. She decided she wasn’t going to put effort into a relationship or even a friendship if she wasn’t getting a sliver of it back. They don’t text anymore. They occasionally send each other pictures on Snapchat.
There’s no hate, just disappointment. She still wishes she was enough for Jane to try and talk to her. She’s moved on for the most part, but sometimes she wants to text her and ask why. Still, she knows long distance isn’t for either of them, and they both need to work on themselves.
She’s only seventeen. Her life is just beginning. Whoever ends up with Jane will be lucky. She’s accepted it won’t be her.
She’s glad she told Jane how she felt. She’s glad she can move on without the heartbreak crushing her. That one was unsalvageable from the start. The next story starts four days ago.
A guy and his girlfriend had been together for two years. He could feel things going flat between them. She didn’t light up when he came home from work anymore. So he talked to her about it.
She admitted that since he was her first and only boyfriend, she’d always wondered what she was missing. She said she still loved him and didn’t want to break up, but she wasn’t sure if she’d regret only ever being with him. He was the one who suggested an open relationship. Just for one month.
That way they could stay together, she could explore, and neither of them would feel tied down. He figured it was a temporary experiment, a way to save what they had. Less than three days later, she came home with a guy and asked if he could leave them alone in their bedroom. He hadn’t even talked to anyone yet.
But it had been his idea, so he agreed and left. He trusted he was still the guy she loved. He went out, came back at three in the morning, found the bedroom door locked, and slept on the couch. They were both gone by the time he woke up.
She texted him good morning. He texted it back. He sat on the couch watching reruns, not knowing what to do next. This was something he agreed to, after all.
The update came later. He called her Claire and the other guy Gus. Claire came home late that night and climbed into bed with him. She laughed when she noticed he’d changed the sheets.
He waited until morning to bring anything up. She admitted she’d been talking to Gus for a while but insisted she’d never been intimate with him until that day, after he gave permission. He argued that her talking to Gus in the first place was what caused the relationship issues. She said that wasn’t the reason.
He asked if they could stop the open relationship experiment. She called him a hypocrite. The argument went nowhere. She stormed out.
Since then, she’s been coming and going from the apartment, sleeping in the same bed with him, keeping their regular schedule. They don’t talk about anything. He checked with the landlord and found out that since he owns the lease and pays most of the rent, he could legally make her leave. But he wasn’t sure if she had anywhere else to go.
The final update: they did break up. But she still lives with him because he can’t stand to kick her out. Two years of history, plus the fact that he still finds her attractive, makes it impossible for him to just let her go. She told him she didn’t see a future with him but never really explained why.
He didn’t expect a future either, even though he kind of wanted one. They still live together and still sleep together, with the understanding that if either of them finds someone they actually want to be with, she’ll move out. He knows it’ll be easier for her to find someone than for him. When she does, he’ll be lost for a long time.
But he still enjoys the time they spend together. He’s hoping he can win her back while he still has the chance. The fact that she still wants to be intimate with him must mean she still has some feelings, right? Not necessarily.
She might just be using him. But he’s not ready to hear that. The next one is short and exhausting. An eighteen-year-old girl confessed to her crush of two years at one forty-five in the afternoon.
She got rejected, but they stayed on good terms. She ate half a carton of Ben & Jerry’s and decided to go outside and take photos of the waterfront. The walk was a disaster from minute one. Her face mask wouldn’t stay on because of her purple glasses, until she figured out wearing it upside down helped.
Her sun hat blew off. Her glasses fell off twice, and the second time the right frame popped out completely. She had to snap it back together on the sidewalk. Her hoodie zipper kept falling down because her mom had tied hand sanitizer to it, so she pushed the hat strings under it to hold everything in place.
On the bridge, some guy ran a red light and nearly ran her over. The entrance to the waterfront she wanted was blocked, so she walked across the whole bridge, fighting her hat the entire way, then found out the street to the casino was closed for construction and had to turn back. She got stuck under the bridge, found a shady street where a four-year-old was the only other person wearing a mask, crossed a street with no crosswalk and almost got hit again, kicked her water bottle across a traffic island when it fell, and went home covered in bruises she couldn’t explain. She finished her story by saying she was done for the day.
The confession itself barely got a mention. That one was more of a diary entry than a story. The last one is the longest and the worst. A kid turned eighteen yesterday.
For the past six years, every birthday, his family went to the same place for dinner, and he always ordered the same thing: steak and shrimp parmesan, loaded mashed potatoes, cheesy steamed broccoli, and mozzarella sticks. About thirty dollars total. He has extreme OCD and high-functioning autism. He’s well regulated and needs things to stay the way they’ve always been.
The night of his birthday, his mother, stepfather, and older brother took him to Applebee’s. They sat down and didn’t say anything. He was confused and started tapping his fingers together, which he always does. His mother said, “Well?
” He said, “Well? ” She said, “Aren’t you going to call the waiter over? ”
He has severe issues with talking to strangers. He stutters and gets terrified.
He asked her to do it, since she does it all the time. The waiter came, everyone ordered, and when the waiter got to him, his mother stopped him and said, “Serve her a bill. ”
His heart started racing. He doesn’t have a job.
The only money he has is from raking leaves for neighbors. He froze. His stomach cramped from anxiety. His mother explained that now that he’s eighteen, he should pay for his own things.
He said, “I don’t have the money. ” She huffed and shooed the waiter away. The dinner was ruined. His family called him an entitled little asshole the whole ride home.
He ran to his room and cried. They ignored him for the rest of the day. He’s terrible with social cues, but his family had never acted like this before. Never.
His mother eventually sat down with him and explained that he needed to learn people don’t always get what they want, even on birthdays. He asked why she hadn’t just talked to him about it beforehand. She said it wouldn’t have been as effective. Then she gave him a lecture about how he’d been leeching off them for months and needed to learn to be a proper adult.
When he asked if they could do a do-over dinner, she got angry. That night, he didn’t get any gifts. The dinner was always the treat. He posted about it, and the internet immediately told him his mother was manipulating him.
He tried to defend her, insisting she was loving, that he’d been a tough kid. Then the updates got darker. He found out his mom had been receiving social security for him since he was eight. About eight hundred dollars a month.
The money helped pay rent and buy food. When he refused to sign guardianship papers, she tried to convince him she should be his guardian. He had an evaluation done—an IQ test, basic questions. During the whole thing, his mother tried to convince the psychiatrist he couldn’t take care of himself.
The psychiatrist got so frustrated he sent her out of the room. He started to think his mother might have Munchausen syndrome. He wasn’t going to diagnose her, but he could see it. His stepdad, it turned out, was the decent one.
He’d tried to put aside cash for the kid for when he came of age, but his mother wouldn’t let him. The half-brother was a lot like their mother: always took her side, never went to college, never had a job. His mother has bipolar disorder, but she blames everything on it. She says the cruelest things, cuts you down to nothing, then acts like everything’s fine the next day.
If you bring it up, she says she was having an episode. He started therapy for anxiety and felt better than he had in a long time. He began to see that he’d been severely manipulated and emotionally abused for years. He decided he’d cut his mother out of his life when he could leave, keep contact with his stepdad, and maybe his stepbrother if he could escape their mother’s influence.
He even thought about reaching out to his biological dad’s family, who he hadn’t seen since his dad left. His mother always told him they didn’t want to see him. But that could have been a lie, too. Then his mother found the Reddit posts.
He doesn’t know how, but he suspects his brother had something to do with it. She flew into a rage, threw things across the room, used an abelist slur, and screamed that nearly everything he’d written was lies. He asked her to explain what was a lie. She dodged the question.
He cried and asked why she refused to buy him his birthday dinner. She wouldn’t answer. It was only thirty dollars. She told him he was being evicted.
He’s been served papers, but he was planning to leave anyway. She’s been crying and ignoring him. He started doubting himself, wondering if he was missing something, if he was actually the one in the wrong. Everyone online kept telling him no, but the doubt was crushing him.
She called him a leech. He couldn’t tell anymore if he was being manipulated or if this was another lie. He felt like he was going crazy in that house. He kept apologizing for clogging up the subreddit, for going viral, for dragging strangers into his family mess.
He’s still in his family’s house, job hunting, scoping out friends to stay with. He’s planning to reach out to his dad. His stepdad sat on the couch and said nothing while his mother gave her speech about how he was Satan’s spawn. It all started with a thirty-dollar birthday dinner.
His mother won’t even talk about it.