He took me to a taco stand, which should have been a good sign, but he was twitchy the whole way there. I thought maybe he was nervous about something at work, or that he’d gotten into some kind of trouble. I didn’t expect him to look me dead in the eye and tell me we’d be announcing our engagement at his family’s Christmas party. I laughed.
He didn’t. He kept talking about how I was the love of his life and how he couldn’t wait for us to start our lives together. The whole time, I just kept thinking, what in the hell is happening right now? Because we weren’t in a romantic relationship.
At least, that’s what I thought. We were close friends who hung out a lot. We’d slept together exactly once, and it had been beyond underwhelming. I’d been bored and figured why not.
That was it. But he’d read something completely different into it. He’d built an entire future in his head, a future I’d never agreed to and had zero interest in. So I did the only thing I could think of in that moment.
I panicked. I ghosted him and went to stay with a family member in a different city. Several years later, he showed up out of the blue where I was living. He apologized for his behavior and told me he’d been spiraling into substance addiction when we knew each other.
I’d known something was off back then, but honestly, I hadn’t cared enough to dig into it. He said he thought marrying me would solve his problems, that I could save him. We had a good visit, shared some laughs, and then he hugged me and wished me well. I never saw or heard from him again.
I hope his life turned out good. We dated in high school for almost two years, and he was emotionally abusive the entire time. Making me feel worthless was basically his hobby. Every time I tried to break up with him, he’d drag me back in.
It didn’t help that we shared a friend group that didn’t care enough about me to step in. Five years after we finally split, he showed up at my house uninvited. He wanted closure. Apparently, his life had gone to crap after we broke up, and he thought that getting closure from me would fix things.
It was scary having him on my doorstep, but it also ended up being incredibly healing, because I got to scream everything I’d never been able to say at him. He’d spent years gaslighting me and calling me crazy to control me, so watching his little pea brain realize I wasn’t going to let him control me anymore was deeply rewarding. Plus, now he has a protection order against him. If he ever approaches me again, he’s in violation of it.
I’m hoping I never see that piece of crap again. My ex cheated on me with her boss. I called her from the road on New Year’s Day to tell her I loved her, and she told me not to bother coming home. She divorced me, married him, and slept with two mutual acquaintances somewhere in between.
Thirty years went by, and then I got a Facebook message from her. Her husband was divorcing her because they had nothing in common. Gee, what a shock. She said I looked like I was doing well for myself and asked what I thought about that.
So I sent her a very courteous note about my life. My career, the fact that I’d traveled to 93 countries, and how I’d been married to the same wonderful woman for the last twenty years with two beautiful kids. I included a photo just to underline it all. My wife is a knockout and my kids really are beautiful.
I’m blessed. She sent back a sheepish note saying she was sorry she bothered me and that she wouldn’t contact me again. My wife referred to it as the world’s most ancient booty call. The best revenge is living well, and revenge is a dish best served cold.
The nerve of some people. I broke up with her because she had a hair trigger. She could go from happy and normal to painful, mean, and screaming mad in a heartbeat. I never knew what would set her off.
It was like dating a cobra. I ran into her at a party years later. She came up to me and started chatting, and it took me about five minutes to realize who she was. She’d gained at least a hundred pounds, shaved one side of her head, and covered her face in piercings.
I literally didn’t recognize her, and I was faking the entire conversation, nodding along about how long it’d been and what she was up to. When it finally clicked, I shut the conversation down and got away from her as fast as I could. He sent me a video with advice for schizophrenics because he’d convinced himself I was one. He encouraged my visions, trying to tell me I was seeing into a different dimension.
Except I’d been going to therapy and gotten tested, and I wasn’t schizophrenic at all. I was just mentally unwell from the way he was treating me, and my brain wasn’t processing it well. Then he sent a laughing face at a current photo of me on social media. When I asked why he thought it was funny, he sent me an old photo of me in a bra from when I was fifteen, basically pointing out that I’d gained weight.
I’m a little bigger because I grew up and I don’t have a child’s body anymore. I’m a healthy weight. That’s just how he views things. So yeah, nothing had changed.
He’s still a crap head. I’m pretty sure I was the crazy ex in this story. I slapped him in an alley. He cheated because he misunderstood our discussion about monogamy, and I found out about it after having unprotected sex with him, while I was out with his friends.
It led to a fight. I paid my tab and left. He chased me, grabbed my arm, and wouldn’t let me leave because he wanted to talk. I slapped him and went home.
I ran into him a few years later at an Oktoberfest event. He wanted to talk. I pretended I didn’t know him, walked away, and avoided him for the rest of the night. I didn’t run into her, but I got a phone call after about three years of silence.
We’d dated for three months during her summer home from school. She was a good friend, but her super religious parents had instilled some pretty toxic values in her. She’d have major regrets after anything sexual and would place all the blame on me. We broke up and she left for school, supposedly because I’d kept her out past curfew.
She was twenty-one, by the way. I suspect her parents pushed her to end things. Three months later, she was sent home from college for mental health reasons. Psychosis and depression.
That should have been a huge red flag, but she hit me up to be friends again. That turned into another three-month fling until I kicked her out of my house one night because my parents didn’t like her and I’d snuck her in. She took it personally and basically told me I’d used her. We didn’t talk after that night.
A couple of months later, I woke up early for work and walked out to my car covered in paint. Words like abuser and no means no. Not very subtle. Luckily, it was just car paint and I was able to wash it off.
That was the last I heard from her until a few months ago. She called to tell me she had a sickness. I’ve been tested multiple times since her, and she was the first girl I ever slept with. She said I’d be the only candidate for giving it to her.
I sat there and listened to her little speech word for word, then said thanks for telling me and that I’d use the information as I saw fit. Then I hung up. Honestly, I thought she was calling to apologize for falsely accusing me of things years ago. Nope.
Just another round of her not being able to take responsibility for her actions. I’m not even sure she actually has anything. I’m in a healthy relationship now and my girlfriend knows everything. We just laughed about it when I told her.
Calling after three years just to start another blame game is a pretty good reminder why the relationship ended. Bizarre and unwanted is the best way to describe that interaction. My ex-husband contacted me out of the blue two years after our divorce, wanting to be friends, which was a little suspicious, but okay. He said his life was what he wanted it to be.
He was back on substances, had dystopian plans, and was starting his own brewery. The real kicker was when he sent me pictures of some random person he’d fooled around with. He said he’d sent me the pic because eating her out one night made him miss doing that to me. I had to awkwardly remind him he never did that to me.
I don’t do butt stuff. He was uncomfortably adamant about it and recounted a lot of details, but it still wasn’t me. Whatever weird experiences he’d had with some other girl, he’d apparently copy and pasted my face onto her in his false memory. I felt slightly shaken and oddly violated, so I ended the weird conversation to go finish watching a movie with my husband and baby.
Odd dude, ten out of ten. Blocked for life. She made a lot of rough comments about how things were better now than when we were together, but every aspect of the conversation made it seem like she was having a really tough time. When she finished talking, I said it was nice to see her and walked away.
When I looked back from my car, she was still standing in the same spot, staring at me. Not sure what she expected. Guess I should have read between the lines and gotten back into bed with crazy. It was actually really difficult.
Almost really hard. But I wasn’t jumping back into that. When it was good, I was the happiest I’d ever been. I just couldn’t handle the crazy.
I didn’t run into her, but I did get almost two dozen rapid-fire single-sentence emails from her, totally out of the blue after years of no contact. The emails were scary and nonsensical. Things like black paracetamol and I will not leave you and weirdly phrased threats. It was honestly terrifying.
I contacted the one mutual friend who still kept in touch with her, and she said she’d also gotten some extremely weird texts. That did make me feel better that it wasn’t just me. My friend called the police for a wellness check, but I have no idea how that turned out. I do know her borderline personality disorder symptoms had been getting much worse when I left after years of abuse.
She went back to live with her own abusive, crazy borderline mother and got addicted to substances, so I’m extremely doubtful anything got better. She was valedictorian of her high school, went to college on a full scholarship, and won prestigious awards while she was there. That’s who she was when I met her. Ten years later, this is what she’d become.
I thank God every day we didn’t have kids. Apparently, two of my crazy exes went on a date with each other. The first one went crazy after insulting my interests and I wasn’t having any of it, so I broke up with him. He claimed he’d bought me a puppy for Christmas even though we’d only been together for three months and I was on food stamps at the time.
My other ex ended up in jail for breaking my things and getting dangerous. They spent their entire date trash talking me, and then the first ex decided it was appropriate to text me the details before blocking me again. It was bizarre. She had married twice and had three kids.
As they reached their upper teens, she melted down and became a homeless junkie. She called me almost forty years later to tell me I’d ruined her life by dumping her, and everything was my fault from that point on. Another year went by and she called on New Year’s Eve to apologize. That lasted a couple of weeks before another meltdown, where she accused me of being basically a predator because she was almost two years younger than me when we dated.
I apparently made the right decision when I was young and dumb. I was the side dude for three years, not knowing I was the side dude. She was with the man she’s currently married to the whole time. I ran into her at a party at a bar, but we didn’t speak.
Five days later, I got an email that said something along the lines of I can never give you the apology you deserve, sorry this, sorry that. I replied that we could talk when she came back with divorce papers. Otherwise, she should show some respect for herself and her husband and leave me alone. I only said we could talk to give her the same hope she gave me.
I’m petty as hell. I encountered my ex after more than two years since we broke up. Mutual friends tell me I’m in a much better place now, and many of them have told me either that they disliked her or that they don’t know how I put up with so much crap. I was at a party in her village, which is almost the same as mine since we live in a rural area, and I was with my current girlfriend.
My ex stayed quiet in her corner with her friends, always trying to bring attention to herself. Even a friend of mine, whom my ex considers her best friend, said the same thing. At the end of the party, she went over to give my girlfriend two kisses on the cheek and tried to get to me, but I was already too far away since we were about to leave. We dated for about six years and even survived university together.
Thank God I’m where I am today. My wife and I have been friends since high school in Florida. I dated a crazy girl when I was a junior for about a year, and she ended up isolating me from a lot of my friends, including my future wife. Fast forward almost twenty years.
My wife and I are married and living in New York City. We were having a big fight about something while walking down the sidewalk, and we went down to the subway to go home, both in a huff. We got into an empty subway car at one end, and who should randomly get on the other end but my crazy ex. My wife looked at her.
She looked at us. No one said anything. Finally, my wife said, why don’t you go sit with her? I guess I didn’t really answer the question, but it was a completely insane coincidence.
Running into this woman over a thousand miles away and two decades later. She got off the train after a couple of stops. I broke up with my fiancée of six years and ran into her about six months later. Since she was a gold-digging crap stain whose emotional range couldn’t surround a Cheerio, it was interesting to see what she’d made of herself.
Her new things included a meth addiction, chain-smoking, being unemployed, and chatting with five guys. One was an ex-con who smashed her window and stole from her. One was the guy she’d cheated on me with, who was infatuated with her but wouldn’t commit because he married a second cousin. One passed away shortly after meeting her following a serious personal crisis that he’d passed on to his baby mama.
And there was a trucker she screwed a week after we split to try and make me jealous. Real men don’t ask when they want to choke or spank their girlfriend. Yeah. Bad self-esteem makes you put up with wild crap.
I ran into her in the street when I was in New York City. I said goodbye after reminiscing a little, and I mentioned I was moving back to my hometown in California. After I moved back, I was at the grocery store, and there she was. After that, she started messing around with my best friend, and all this weird stuff started happening.
She somehow got an invitation to the camp I’d been volunteering at for years and cornered me in the woods. One day, I came home and she was in my apartment. Long story short, she broke me and my longtime girlfriend up. I lived with her for a little while, and we ended up in a love triangle.
She ruined everything. I was a freshman in college when she was a junior in high school, but we started dating my senior year. When I tried to break it off, she accused me of taking advantage of her one night after she’d been drinking. She threatened to call the cops and report me if I broke up with her.
She’d experienced serious abuse as a child from a relative who’s still in prison, so she had a lot going on mentally, and she did not want things to end. I blocked her on everything. Thankfully, I went to college out of state. She called me from so many different numbers and left voicemails of crying, screaming, singing, just bizarre stuff.
Ten years later, she messaged me on Instagram and apologized for everything. She said she hadn’t been in a good place back then. It turned out the abuse had continued until she was sixteen. When we started dating, she was just turning seventeen, and she went through the whole ordeal of getting help, making reports, testifying, and recovering.
I hadn’t known it had been going on up until a few months before we started dating. She’d told me it only happened when she was a kid and that it stopped because the abuser went to prison. She’s doing amazing today. She finished her master’s in social work and helps adolescents through their trauma.
She owns her own house. I’m so proud of her. She didn’t stay the villain in the story. She healed, grew up, and turned everything she went through into something that could help other people.
I saw her in a parking lot with her kids. One of them was an ugly, ugly child. Not his fault, but he looked like a mini Shrek. She was getting into her beater car when she saw me getting into my Range Rover.
Yes, I know I sound like a complete tool saying all of this. But this is someone who faked a pregnancy, outed me to my family long after we broke up, and turned multiple friends against me. So getting into my very nice new car with my very handsome husband while she climbed into her crappy car with her kids gave me a perverse pleasure I’m not proud of. I don’t wish her ill at this point.
But knowing how my life turned out versus hers? Yeah, not a bad feeling. I met him when I was eighteen and he was twenty-five. Six months later, I became pregnant, and that’s when things changed.
Only in retrospect did I see it. I was so blinded by the naive idea of becoming a family that I didn’t notice how controlling he was until it was too late. It started with my clothes. He didn’t want me wearing tank tops, heels, V-necks, thongs.
Then came the isolation. I didn’t need a cell phone, social media, or a laptop. I should hold off on finishing school while pregnant, and the same excuse afterward. Focus on being a mom.
Same with work. I didn’t need to work even though we were barely making rent. While he was making excuses for why he shouldn’t visit my family, he contacted them and told them I didn’t want them talking to me because of things I’d told him. By the time it was all said and done, nobody was left but him.
Then our kid showed up, and he started being shady, messaging his ex, and I caught him with white powder in his nose. He fought a lot, but what could I do? He pushed everyone who cared about me away, and I was completely dependent on him with a baby. When my kid turned one, I brought up wanting to start online classes.
I can’t prove it, but I think he purposely knocked me up again to keep control. I was seven months pregnant with our second child when I woke up one morning to police banging on the door. They arrested him for an inappropriate relationship with a minor. He went to jail.
I got in touch with my family through his computer, which they had to hard reset. I later found my way into his MySpace account and saw the messages between him and the minor documenting what had happened. He began trying to control me from jail, having his friends and family watch me, writing letters with details about where I’d traveled and other things he disapproved of. I stopped opening his letters.
A year and a half went by, and he got out because the girl refused to testify. The district attorney no longer had a case. He didn’t reach out. Five years later, I was married, and my husband and I had a newborn.
His mom sent me a friend request on Facebook, then quickly deleted it. A few months later, I got served with court papers. He told the court I’d been hiding from him, but that was easy to disprove. My address was on white pages.
He got supervised visits. He showed up to the first one, and not even halfway through, they kicked him out for being intoxicated. He didn’t arrange any more visits. Around a year later, I got the news that he died on Father’s Day.
His note basically implied he chose that day so my kids would be reminded of him every year. I later found out he took his own life because he was going back to jail and knew it. This time, the allegations involved multiple very young children. After his death, we did an uncontested stepparent adoption.
My kids are now in high school. As much as I hate bringing up their biological father, I’ve been honest with them about the situation, especially since his family has tried to reach out. They have a great relationship with my husband and his family, and it was their decision not to communicate with his kin. Haven’t heard from them in a while, and life has been calm.
We had a crazy whirlwind romance. I left my dead bedroom marriage and was working on the divorce. Things happened, and she became pregnant. I was happy and excited.
We had issues, both of us. Think of the reaction when you mix fire with gasoline. She seriously injured me with a firearm. She got custody and kept her daughter away until the baby was two.
I had no chance because I couldn’t establish a relationship. She married a solid guy. She got on medication. We were communicating.
Then she got cancer. She passed away. I was asked to leave at the funeral. I have eight more years until my little girl is of age.
I have a mutual family friend who gets me photos. I have all the emails, letters, and texts. Even though some of it puts me in a bad light, I plan to share all of it to show her that I loved her and thought of her every day. I did find a caring, wonderful lady who said two words to me that made me happy.
I’ve been a dad to her son, who’s now a teenager. I love his mom more than anything. We also had another little boy who is my joy. I got to give my daughter a gift when she was three years old.
I’m damaged in all of this. I’m in therapy to deal with my guilt and to be a better father. I still believe in love. Love with everything you are.
I dated a guy for six months in tenth grade. When I broke up with him, he wouldn’t leave me alone for four months. Begging me back, following me around school, texting me constantly. Then I got a new boyfriend, and my ex punched him in the face.
He also punched a guy friend who told him to leave me alone. After another six months, I dated him again. I know. Stupid.
I was only in tenth grade, still a child. We lasted another six months and broke up again. That time, he just said okay and left it at that. Then I got with my current partner in twelfth grade.
We’re now engaged. My ex texted me and asked what I’d done to make me happy. I told him he just made me feel all light and butterflies. About a year later, he texted me again and said he knew what I meant now.
He’d been with his current girlfriend almost as long as I’d been with mine. I’m very happy for him. He seems to have grown up and found happiness. He wasn’t a bad dude.
He just wasn’t the guy for me, even though part of me wanted him to be because he was sweet. Now he occasionally looks at my Instagram stories, and it makes me laugh. I hope he’s happy wherever he is. Not a crazy ex-girlfriend, but a crazy ex-customer.
I was a pharmacist once and had a few methadone patients. I always treated them with respect, and I struck up a friendship with one girl who was really struggling. She’d often try to get extra doses, and I encouraged her as best I could. I moved jobs, and about two years later I was shopping at the supermarket when this gorgeous redhead ran up and gave me a big hug.
She had gotten her crap together. She had a job, no substances, a boyfriend. She cried and told me her story, how she ditched all her old friends and started fresh. I was smiling for days.
I haven’t run into her, and it’s hard to say she was crazy, though she was very troubled. Extremely well-educated and intelligent. She was twenty-five when we started dating, and I was freshly twenty-two. At first, I thought she was just a work hard, play hard type.
We drank and partied all the time. She already had two master’s degrees and was working on her doctorate. Then I realized I couldn’t go out for just a few beers anymore. I felt compelled to get absolutely trashed any night of the week.
We went out every night. It was when she started pouring me gin and tonics in bed first thing every morning that it really hit me how much she relied on alcohol. We tried to remain friends, but she’d have a meltdown whenever I started seeing someone new and would make the new girl extremely uncomfortable. She made scenes more than once and damaged two budding relationships before I finally cut contact.
We had a great time early on, and she was always generous and kind to me. Looking back, after reading some of the more wholesome stories in this thread, I realize I treated her emotionally recklessly. She was more invested than I was. She was further along in her life, looking for something more serious.
Me, I was young, occasionally thoughtless, and still emotionally closed off from my first significant heartbreak. In the years since, I’ve married my wife and told myself daily to treat her like she hung the moon. Because in my eyes, she did. I looked her up on Facebook recently.
She never used social media when we were together, and it seems like she deleted it altogether. I’m on at least cordial terms with pretty much everyone else I’ve ever been with romantically. Most of them are married or have kids by now, and we all cheer each other on from the sidelines. So I really hope she got sober and found someone who treats her the way she deserves.
It’s cliché and uncomfortable to think about, but it’s a harsh reminder that we’re all the bad guy in somebody’s story. After I wrote this, I googled her name. Turns out she’s a professor in her field now. Good for her.
He just married my best friend. I really don’t understand why she’d want that, since she knew us as a couple and saw all the horrible things he did. But that’s her problem, I guess. It’s hard to be happy for her when I think it’s a huge mistake.
I don’t want to lose my friend, so I’ll just smile along when she tells me stories about his quirks. And I’ll be there for her when he inevitably shows his true colors. After all the abuse, torment, and false allegations she put me through, I never thought I’d see her again. It’s been five years since we split, and I’ve healed.
She hasn’t changed much. She still blames everything she did on me. I know I wasn’t the perfect boyfriend. I was a bit of a jerk, and halfway through the relationship I started therapy to deal with my anger and PTSD.
Two years after we split, I saw her in a local supermarket. She seemed to have relaxed a little, or so I thought. Then I saw her again that same night drinking with friends, and I got doused in a strawberry daiquiri. She then started dating someone else in my friend group, and I got invited to a gathering they were at.
I skipped the days they were there and decided to brave it once. I could feel her eyes burning into the side of my skull. It was a really awkward ordeal. They’ve since split, and from what I know, he’s doing better now.
I still talk to her now and again when we bump into each other, but nothing beyond hello. I lost a lot of friends because of her allegations, but I’m thankful for all the ones who knew she was lying and stuck with me. She’s still a schmuck. I had a girlfriend about ten years ago.
We had a great relationship for the first year and a half. Then she suddenly became a born-again Christian, and everything changed. All of a sudden, she was trying to change the way I dressed, the music I listened to, the things I did for fun, the people I associated with. I was, and still am, a very good person.
But to her, me not doing what a Christian would do meant the devil was overtaking me. We got into constant arguments, and I eventually had to leave. We ended on bitter terms and pretty much hated each other. About two years ago, her little brother, now in his twenties, randomly started texting me.
I’d always been cool with him, so I kept it cordial. He just wanted to ask how I was because he remembered me. After a few minutes, he asked why his sister and I broke up. I said we were just incompatible.
Then he started asking if I thought I’d ever get back together with her. It started feeling weird, so I told him I got over her long ago. The next day, she showed up at my house knocking on the door. I knew instantly either I’d been talking to her, or she’d put him up to it.
She was begging for me back, telling me I was right the whole time, that I was the best boyfriend she ever had, that she’d been with many men after me and none of them measured up. It was really weird. I had to get in my car and just drive off. I went to a friend’s house and stayed there for hours.
She eventually left. I had an ex who struck me during an intimate moment without my consent. Not super hard, but still. I never said I liked that.
I instantly dug my nails into both his arms and ripped his skin down to his wrists out of shock and anger. After that, I just wasn’t attracted to him anymore and ended things soon after. He’d text me randomly, and at one point he said something about how the scars on his arms were really visible, like it should be a shame that I did that. Maybe don’t slap someone during intimacy without their consent, though.
I wasn’t having any of it, and we just stopped talking. A few years later, I saw him in Costco. It was during the mask era, but I knew it was him. I was going to say hi or wave, but he just crept around and stared at my boyfriend.
He didn’t even look at me. He kept following close by and staring. My ex is about five-nine, and my boyfriend is six-seven, so he’s easy to spot. My ex kept finding him and staring, and wouldn’t look away even when my boyfriend stared back.
After we left, my boyfriend was creeped out, but also shrugged it off. Like, I’m twice his size. What’s he going to do? I always thought my ex was off, but it was so weird and eerie seeing him stare like that.
I hope I never see him again. When I was in college, I had a coworker who turned into a best friend. She had a crap boyfriend, and I was a total sucker for her. She broke up with him after a year of me listening to her complain, came over very intoxicated one night, confessed her feelings, and we started dating.
Summer started immediately after, and I drove eleven hours to spend time with her. Directly after that, she stopped returning my calls, because she’d gotten very intoxicated and hooked up with a childhood best friend and didn’t know how to tell me. She’d left stuff at my place and was planning to move into the same apartment complex, and then she ghosted me before ghosting was even a named thing. Six years later, after I married my wife, she came to my wife’s tattoo shop with a grungy guy with dreadlocks who smelled like beer and piss.
She had shaved her whole head bald and was living out of her car so she could play bass for beer tickets. Bullet dodged. I know everyone jokes about how your first serious lesbian relationship is always traumatic, and mine was no different. I was with a girl who abused me for quite some time, and I’ve never told anyone the full story of that relationship.
For a while after we finally broke up, I would still see her regularly from afar. Even the smell of her perfume was enough to trigger a panic attack or an intense visceral response. About a year after it ended, she messaged me offering an apology. Her new girlfriend wouldn’t take things further with her until she apologized for what she did to me.
The new girlfriend had heard the story and realized how awful the relationship had been, even from the abuser’s point of view. I told her I would not accept the apology and blocked her messages. To this day, I haven’t fully processed what happened between us, and I have no idea what would happen if I saw her in public again. I think I’d drop dead on the spot.
Pray for me. She was my first love. We were together for about a year, and the relationship was great. Things got rocky when her ex-boyfriend of three years came back to visit.
She threw me under the bus and went back to him. The guy was a douchebag. He cheated on her with multiple girls and thought he was hot stuff. Eventually he left and tossed her aside.
She tried to reach out and stay friends, but I wasn’t interested. She was going to college anyway, and she’d tossed me aside. Time passed. I enlisted in the military, did five years, and came home for a bit to stay with family before going back to school.
I got a gym membership to kill time and stay fit. One day, I pulled up to the gym in my dope sports car, hit the treadmill, and noticed a girl pull up on the machine next to me. She kept staring, but I couldn’t make out her face since I wasn’t wearing my contacts. Turns out it was her.
She didn’t recognize me immediately because I’d grown three inches and put on fifteen pounds of muscle since high school. She glanced over a lot, and I caught her a few times, but I just did my thing and went home. She messaged me on Instagram later and wanted to hang out. I declined because I knew she had a boyfriend.
I never got one ounce of an apology, and I felt it would have been wrong to meet up with her. We dated for a few years in high school. Long story short, she was very emotionally and physically abusive. I left for tech school the summer I graduated, and I came home a few years later after a roommate situation escalated to violence.
She’d tried to marry the guy she’d been cheating on me with right out of high school, but he’d left town. Then she dated and tried to marry a guy from a town over. Small town living. My parents still adore her to this day and even pay for some of her stuff.
When I came home, her at-the-time boyfriend or fiancé was living in my parents’ house. No one bothered to tell me before I arrived alone to find a stranger glaring at me. He was cold and mean for the week or two I was there. When I moved back out, he’d evidently skipped off to be with another girl.
Throughout all of it, my ex kept telling me she was happy. Good for her. But when her fiancé ran out, she started trying to get back together with me long distance. At that point, I had a boyfriend of about a year, now happily living together.
I eventually blocked her on social media. It made my parents mad to no end, but maybe not everyone has to be friends with their exes. She really hurt me consistently for her own self-pleasure. Now I don’t know what she’s up to.
I randomly get updates about who she’s dating through my parents, despite asking them to stop. But I hope she finds happiness and peace someday soon. Like her Christian upbringing suggests, you don’t need to be married and popping out kids before you’re twenty-five. I didn’t run into him, but I talked to his best friend.
He still lives in my old apartment, the one I fled to get away from him, with all my decorations still up. He works at my old university, where he’d applied in hopes of getting my new address so he could keep stalking me. He also entered a TV dating show where he got rejected by literally every single woman. Luckily, they have better taste than me, or better radar for abusive deadbeats.
She’s still single. She went and got her body done in Miami and is working on starting her hair business. We haven’t been together in about two years. It’s been three since we really saw each other.
I actually saw her when I was on vacation in Miami, at the same restaurant. She noticed me, and we ended up dining together. She caught me up on her life and seemed pretty happy for the most part. She kept her composure and was nice.
When we were together, she was physically, mentally, and emotionally abusive. She would twist things constantly, and it led to a lot of physical altercations. But at dinner, she seemed different. She never brought up the past, which she was famously known for doing.
She never tried to switch anything on me. We actually had a decent time. After that, we exchanged numbers but never texted. We’re both in a good place now.
It’s been almost forty years since my divorce from a very manipulative, controlling, and moody husband. The first ten years after the divorce, he turned every interaction into a battleground, trashing me to our daughters and, unbeknownst to me, turning his time with them into an emotional hell. He moved to another state a few years later and seemed to get help through AA. He seemed emotionally more stable.
The surprising thing was that he didn’t drink much while we were an intact family, so we didn’t understand why he chose AA. When he made amends with all of us, he told me he’d been diagnosed bipolar but didn’t want to take medication. After he made amends with our daughters, they revealed the emotional abuse they’d suffered during their early visits with him. They said they’d been afraid things would only get worse if they told anyone.
I was devastated to learn this so many years later. Things continued to seem to improve. For a while, we even had fairly pleasant family visits and holidays, though on occasion he continued passive-aggressive behavior toward our older daughter, so it was never totally smooth. He moved closer to the girls, and this somewhat workable relationship lasted maybe twenty years.
If things had stayed that way, I could have said the ex is fine. Before the pandemic, he’d fallen out of favor with his entire family. After the pandemic hit, our daughter worried he was so alone and isolated that she reached out and encouraged him to move closer, offering to help him find a place. He started looking, but simultaneously began initiating emotional flare-ups and attacking landlords during interviews.
He proudly recounted these interactions to us with no awareness that he was overreacting. His behavior was counterproductive and shed a bad light on those who’d recommended him. Then, just before a Father’s Day celebration our daughters were planning for him, he told everyone in a group text that he wouldn’t be coming for Father’s Day, moving, or visiting our area in the future. We were all in total shock.
When we asked him to explain, he said he couldn’t celebrate Father’s Day because it embarrassed him. He’d been a bad father. In fact, he wouldn’t be seeing any of us because he couldn’t deal with the guilt. One daughter, worried about his mental state, continued a private, careful, tactful conversation with him, trying to understand and possibly resolve it.
She suggested working through it to improve the relationships. It did no good. She asked if he would please get help or therapy. His last words to her were, I can’t make any promises.
Then he issued a fake identical apology to each of us separately, the kind a young child gives when forced to say sorry. That was over two years ago. We recently heard he’s moved further away. My daughters have had to go through a new healing process.
They’ve confirmed he’s a toxic person and committed to no future contact. One daughter resolved this immediately. It took the other daughter months to work through substantial fear, anxiety, and guilt before she could commit to no contact. In summary, no real permanent improvement ever occurred.
Through all of it, I was reminded of my original reasons for divorce. And in retrospect, I sadly realize that out of guilt and fear while divorcing him, I showed him more fairness than he deserved by granting him joint custody and visitation rights. My daughters have suffered the consequences.