Happy New Year! It’s Over.

I apologize if my story is lame and/or cliche, but I guess I finally feel like telling it.

I started dating Robert in August. Our first date was his “perfect date” and we were oh so in love for a few months. I was so happy, or at least I thought I was. The first time he made me cry (which should have been the last) I found myself thinking “This again? Here we go.” But I kept on because I thought it would get better, and we had been friends for so long, I thought he wouldn’t purposefully hurt me.

Things deteriorated slowly, or at least on my end, it seemed that way. I tried to be a good girlfriend, and I ended up paying for dinners and his smokes every so often simply because I make “3 times as much as he does.” Mind, he was working two jobs at the time and I was essentially working one, as I was in the process of quitting my first job. The money thing was something that should have sent me running and I don’t know why it didn’t. Talking about money is a huge no with me unless it’s relevant to the conversation.

He started acting more and more distant, and on my birthday, we had dinner and he ended up taking up for what I thought was a noble reason (visiting a friend in the hospital). I came to find out later that it was a ploy designed by our mutual friends to get him away from me for the night. I didn’t think it was so likely, seeing as how my friends were never the type to try and screw my birthdays up.

He told me he’d make it up to me, and I do admit I overreacted, calling him crying on the phone because I had been ditched by the people who were going to hang out with me. I later found out that it had been his plan entirely and my best friend hadn’t had a clue what was going on. Robert showed up at my house at 6am. I let it slide because we had a New Year’s party which was also meant to celebrate my birthday and I didn’t want to ruin it. Neither did he, apparently.

He decided it would be a good idea to bring a girl and her brother with him, which was fine until she began to conduct herself in a less than lady like manner. I fell asleep early (long week at work and I’d been working a lot of hours due to holidays) and found out the next day that she’d taken off her underwear and pranced around all the guys. I’m sure she’s a nice girl and she was just drunk, but it rubbed me the wrong way big time.

Earlier that day, Robert had handed me his phone to text someone while he was driving. Once I’d sent the text, I unintentionally snooped and saw a text from her, and asked about it. He got really defensive, and basically told me to fuck off. I called him out on it being a red flag (sorry…) and he blamed it on his ex. I gritted my teeth and just sat it out.

New Year’s day, we sit outside my apartment in my car and he breaks up with me. At first, I was distraught, and demanded a break, which was stupid. When he refused to even talk with me about the terms of our ‘break,’ I said f*ck it, never mind, we’re done. The worst part of it was that I had to take him home after all of that since his fancy Mini Cooper’s clutch went out.

All I know is that I dodged a train wreck of crazy and drama here and I’m relieved. I’m sorry this is so long and poorly written!

The Biggest Mistake of My Life

Have you ever had a gut feeling that you chose to ignore but later really regretted? That’s the situation with me and my ex Janine. Now this might not be the most interesting story you’ve ever read here, but it is the most f*cked up situation ever in my life. Here goes nothin…..

I met Janine during a bar crawl with some of my friends. A friend of mine got hooked up with a friend of hers, so we ended up hanging out the whole night. Janine was cool, but I wasn’t really into her like that. After we talked for a long time, I found that she was a really cool girl and into a lot of the same interests as me. She invited me on a hike the next day and I accepted. We had a great time on the hike and went for dinner and drinks the following night. Before long, we were in a committed relationship and it was great.

When we first started dating Janine told me that she was still good friends with her ex. She said that the reason they broke up was because he was questioning his sexuality and had since come out as gay. I felt like I had no right or reason to question their relationship, so I didn’t.

I’m going to skip over the details of the next year and get to the god part. one night, Janine and I were at my place watching a movie. We usually went out, but she had said that she felt like a night in, so I went along with it. Janine went out to her car to grab her overnight bag. She came back in and went straight to the kitchen, which was adjacent to the living room. Out of nowhere, my door busts open and the big burly guy charges in and grabs me by my shirt. He starts yelling and trying to swing on me. I fought him back thinking that he was an intruder, and I yelled for Janine to get out and call 9-1-1. But she just stood there and watched. This guy kept yelling that if i wanted to hit someone, I could hit him, he told me to fight like a man instead of hitting a women like a b!tch. I was so confused that I actually paused trying to figure out what he meant, and that’s when he hit me square in my face. There was blood everywhere and I knew I was injured bad. The guy took off and Janine went with him, arm in arm. I called the police and they went over to Janine’s. According to her story, I had been abusing her and forcing her to stay in a relationship with me. She had been beat, sexually assaulted, and mentally and verbally abused by a psycho and her ex whom she had recently rekindled a romance with decided to take matters into his own hands and get her out. So, as it turns out, the ex wasn’t gay but had just dumped her but kept her around as a f*@k buddy. She concocted the story about me abusing her as a way to get him to feel sorry for her and to win him back. Her story quickly fell apart and it all came out the next day that she had been lying to everyone. The psycho ex wasn’t so crazy after-all and he called with the deepest of apologies and offered to cover the costs of any medical or repair bills and then some. Plus, he invited me out for a beer. We ended up comparing stories and found out just how crazy and desperate this girl was. I dropped the charges against him and was just glad that Janine was out of my life for good. I heard from here two weeks ago in a text message that read, “do you think we could get together and talk things out. I’m sure we can work past this mess. I love you forever!” I just deleted the message and called the phone company and had her blocked.

I Was the Other Girl?

When I met Jason, he was dating Karen, and they had all sorts of trouble. She kept saying she was pregnant so he wouldn’t break up with her, they fought publicly (and loudly), and it ended with her dating someone else, but keeping Jason as the ‘other’ man and almost rubbing it in his face. and Jason was ok with it.

Well, my junior year of college, after knowing him for 4 years, he asks me out. I tell him, “no. you’re still Karen’s on the side thing, and I don’t do that shit.” so, shock, he tells her it’s over. I know he did, because she texted ME screaming about how I was in the way, and eventually just saying “good luck.”

We dated 9 months. I got him into my theatre company, and helped him find a day job. He says he wants to propose, and is saving up for a ring. I’m freakin’ over the moon. After the season, he dumps me, telling me “I just don’t feel that way about you anymore”, but telling everyone else that I was begging him to stay, that I was claiming to be pregnant. Now, I may have begged a bit (I was young), but I physically cannot have children. I even had told him so years before, and we had talked about adopting someday.M y closest friends and a few of our mutual friends knew this, and told me what was up. Wen I confronted him on why he was telling people this, he said, and I quote, “stop lying, Karen! this stuff won’t work!”

That was the day I just cut off contact. I graduated, took a year to just be single and learn about me. I go to rejoin my theatre company, and find I’ve been ‘blacklisted’ because now Jason works there, and doesn’t want to work with me. The creative director tells me “we can’t have fake pregnancies here.” That is drama that can’t be allowed.” I am so furious, I shove my ob/gyn’s card into the director’s hand, and say, “I can’t fucking GET pregnant.” and storm out. I get a call 2 months later telling me they fired Jason, and asking me to rejoin the company, but I had already found another one to work with.

Slowly, mutual friends start contacting me, saying hi, asking me how I’m doing. Several of them tell me that Jason has been talking about me. A few of them even ask about the pregnancy.

Fast forward two years, and I get a message: it’s his new girlfriend, who tracked me down through members of my former theatre company, and she’s asking if he ever confused me for Karen. and she’s really, really upset. I tell her that i think the answer is yes, and explain the break up. She says she’s been trying to get jason to get help, since he called her Karen several times while they were fighting.

I told her to get out, and left it at that. apparently, EVERY girl is Karen. as far as I know, he and karen haven’t spoken since about a year after we broke up, when they had a huge blow up at a convention we all ended up at (unintentionally). It’s been 5 years now, and I still get reminded by mutual friends about how ‘crazy’ Jason was back then. Funnily enough, no one seems to hang out with him anymore…

How She Was Dumped

Short and sweet? Hell no! When you only get to read one breakup a day it’s gotta be crammed with juicy details!
I am going to be un-apologetically thorough, but relevant.

I had been more or less happily married for 6 years and had two beautiful girls when my husband’s father passed away from lung cancer suddenly.
My husband didn’t really deal with his grief from losing his only parent; he took his 2 weeks of bereavement leave and basically played video games and spent time with our kids and I.
He went back to work, and in the next couple of months he started to get a little distant and “weird”. Picking fights, criticizing my weight, how the house was always cluttered. Complaining that I “never let him pick anything” when we went grocery shopping of all things was a recurring argument. I didn’t think it was a big deal when I got strawberry ice cream instead of rocky road for example. His work provided a literal buffet 24/7 so anytime he wasn’t home he could literally eat anything he wanted…

Looking back now, it wasn’t surprising that he started caring about a female friend from work a little too much while he refused to address his grief properly. When I caught a flu bug from taking care of him that laid me out for about 3 weeks it wasn’t hard for her to look a lot more appealing than a sick, crabby wife who was worn down from being home with little kids 24/7.

One day, he left the house to go “get an estimate on new car tires”, and when he came home he confessed within 2 hours that he sneaked out to go on a date with this woman whom he kissed goodbye and told he loved. It turned out that every time he took the kids to the park so I could rest at home he had been calling her while they played.

Well, I was pretty shocked considering that it seemed like just weeks before that he regularly said things like I was the “most wonderful woman in the world”, and “he loved me more than anything”.

When I stopped sobbing and yelling in disbelief I gave him my best right hook… then I cried some more. He promised to try to work it out with me “for the kids” and cut communication with her while we went to counseling, had more date nights. He would get angry at me when I reached out to friends in pain to talk through what I was going through because he said I was “airing our dirty laundry”. I refused to apologize. As it turns out, he never stopped talking to her, and was b!tching me out over HIS guilty conscience. He’d call her and delete his history, and they would have long talks over lunch together, breaks, and walking her to her car at the end of the shift complete with hugs and “I love yous” exchanged.

She put on a brave face for him and told him she wanted him to take his time “for the sake of the kids”, then call him and say she was having “panic attacks from the stress of not being with him.” I talked to her in person and explained our history and relationship and to please give us this chance to save our marriage and leave him alone (amazing since I wanted to shatter her teeth and run over her with my car and feed her remains to wild dogs at the time.) She replied she would let him do what he wanted– she didn’t feel guilty since he was “unhappy” and she “tried to stay away when she had a crush on him already out of respect.”

We struggled through my birthday (we had drive through burgers. I wasn’t going to make him go through the motions of blowing cash on a big night out we would both be miserable faking.)

Finally when we took the kids to the zoo and he kept referring to it as “one last happy family outing” over and over, on the car ride home I demanded he decide right then, his family or her– because I was sick of trying to compete with someone who could never do anything wrong when I caught sh!t for leaving my dirty clothes in the bathroom.
He paused for a second, and then said “Her.” I shrugged my way out of my stuck wedding band and handed it to him right there in the car.

He moved out his stuff that weekend. The kids didn’t understand why daddy was leaving and cried and cried. He said they would come visit him next week.
He moved his things into her house and that’s where my kids went to have their first sleep over to “visit daddy”. She kept telling my girls that her kids and mine “were all sisters now, isn’t that cool!” They came back after playing all weekend, and being babysat by a stranger one night so Dad and girlfriend could go out– to add insult to injury they sent home hand me down clothes for my youngest, and a bike with broken training wheels. It was like twisting the knife every time one of the other dads in our complex would try to help her fix that damn thing. My life felt like a broken, used bike.

I celebrated my three year old’s birthday, just me, the two kids, a homemade cake, and a couple toys from the dollar store. After about a month of living in the apartment and being harassed about “when I was going to get a job” every time he called the kids, my mother invited me to move in with her 20 hours away, and I accepted since I was afraid how I was going to make it on my own, and desperately needed a new start. I was loading my things up on a truck on my seventh wedding anniversary.

About two months later, I was working on getting my new life together. Kids had started school, and after a lot of prayer and introspection I was settled on moving forward, working again, going back to school etc. while I waited for the divorce to come through.

Then my husband started instant messaging me. I assumed he had some business to discuss about the kids, but no, he wanted to be “friends again”. I told him to piss off. You don’t treat someone who was faithful to you for all those years like that and expect her to be happy for your new adulterous living arrangement and the redhead that made it all possible.
He persisted and I decided to be civil one night when I had a couple mixed drinks at home after the kids were in bed. He said he was sorry it happened the way it did and we pretty much talked about the kid’s school and video games and said good night.

A few weeks later, he dropped a bomb. Apparently, he had learned that his girlfriend basically wasn’t the person she said she was. They were having some kind of discussion about abortion of all things, and it came out accidentally that she lied about her prior opinion on the subject. It was like a cloud had lifted. As he peeled away the veneer of the woman he lived with for 3 months, he came to understand that she had told him what she thought he wanted to hear to “get him to like her”– Where she said she had been lonely since her marriage ended, she had had many boyfriends and a long standing “f*ck buddy” she was still hanging out with even after her she made it official with her poached man.
Her politics, her religious beliefs, her bra size, her taste in music, and even her sexual likes and dislikes turned out to be gross exaggerations.

He realized he made a big mistake. He said if I still lived there he’d move back in that day. “Well, sucks for you that I don’t. You’ll just have to figure something out.”
That week my cell phone broke and I didn’t have the money to replace it. I let him know and he went and got a new cell plan “so he could talk to the kids”. He got two phones, and I discovered he kept his new one a secret from his girlfriend. He started calling and texting me every time she wasn’t around. He made plans to move down and be near the kids. She called in to work for 4 days because of her “depression” over it. She suggested a long distance relationship and he said he’d think about it (he listed everything of value he owned on craigslist to raise money to see me and the kids again behind her back.) She told him she thought she was pregnant.
He waited for the pregnancy test.

He told me that if she was pregnant he would have to stay because there was no way he’d let her raise his child with her manipulation games and crazy family, and the worry was killing him that he would be trapped in the worst mistake of his life.
Negative.

She tested again in 2 weeks.
Negative.
She said “well, I guess it’s over then.”
“Yes it is” he said.
When he called me with the news, I agreed to let him try to win me back. I was tired of burying how much I missed him.

The next day she came home to a hole in the living room. He sold the flat screen TV he moved from our house to hers. She b!tched and b!tched about how she gave away her old sh!tty TV to make room for it. He calmly told her the next day was his last at his job- he was driving down to see his kids. She asked to come with him, he told her flat out; No, she wasn’t invited.
She went shopping and bought him a toiletries bag for his trip, and framed a photo of her and HER two kids for him to bring so he “didn’t forget his family”. He gave her kids a couple of small presents and told them that they were great kids and his leaving had nothing to do with them, but he had to be responsible and be with his own children that missed him.

He spent the money he raised on a plane ticket for me, he picked me up at the airport that very night and we drove all the way to my house, talking out our problems for 3 days on the scenic route. She had no idea that the man she cheated to get had gone behind her back to reconcile with his wife for weeks, telling me he loved me and was sorry every night before he went to sleep if I answered the phone or not while he developed “insomnia” and refused to sleep in her bed while she was in it.
That photo she gave him got thrown out the window at 65 mph on a lonely desert highway somewhere in Nevada.
She mailed him a stuffed toy that said “I love you” and he wrote “return to sender” on it after resealing the box.

All of that happened 4 years ago now. Mike dedicated every day of his life to proving to me how I was the best thing in his life that had ever happened to him, and that he would never f*ck it up again by being such a dumbass to think ANYone on earth could possibly be a better mate to him than me.
Neither of us are perfect, but we found that we really are perfect for each other.
He changed careers to one he found more fulfilling. We had another daughter. Developed new hobbies together, bought our first home, and are now expecting our son. We have moved on. Whenever the topic comes up he wonders what in the hell came over him.
Normally, “once a cheater, always a cheater” is true. I don’t advise every wife of a man who steps out on her to forgive.
But you know, sometimes even really good men make mistakes. And if he learns from them, it only makes him a better one.
Story so uplifting it must be wishful thinking?
Not really. If no one could take a bushel of sh!t and then create a happily ever after after the fact, no one would bother with the whole affair of chasing a lasting love.

Pathological Cheater

I apologize in advance, but this is not going to be short, nor will it be sweet.
In June 2011, I met Jason on a dating site. I thought he was wonderful. We had some of the same interests, and we both loved intellectual conversations. There was an instant connection. At first I was a little reluctant to talk to him, because he lived so far away (over 600 miles). However, we really hit it off, so I decided to give being friends a chance.

As the weeks went by, we spoke every day, and learned about each other. He told me that he was almost completely blind, and that his ex-girlfriend Angela lived with him as his live-in aide. This bothered me a little at first, but as I got to know both of them, I realized that she was there only as his aide; nothing more. We began speaking of meeting each other. I didn’t have a vehicle at the time, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable driving over 600 miles to meet him. He said that he would buy me Greyhound tickets to come stay with him for a couple of weeks, so that we could really get to know one another in person. Again, I was a little reluctant, as I had never traveled that far before, but eventually I decided that it could be fun. (Side note, for those wondering how he could use a computer if he was almost completely blind, he could see a little out of one eye and used enlarging software.)

Fast forward to September 2011, I’m on a Greyhound headed for upstate NY. I get there, and I’m immediately greeted by him and Angela. I spend the next month there with them, and things were wonderful. He was kind, caring, sweet…everything I had wanted in a man. We decided to begin an exclusive relationship. Angela and I became great friends; she was an amazing person who genuinely cared about me, and I was happy to have a new friend. October came, and it was time for me to go home. I tearfully said goodbye to my boyfriend and my new friend, and began the long bus ride home.

After returning home, Jason called me every day, multiple times a day. We would sometimes stay up all night on the phone with each other, for up to 8 hours. I had fallen in love with this man, and he told me he had fallen in love with me as well. I missed him terribly. We began making plans to see each other again, and started talking about the possibility of me moving to NY. He asked me to come back in early January 2012, and said that he wanted me to stay for at least 2 months this time. I bought my ticket and headed out in early January.

When I got there, things started out wonderfully, but by that night it wasn’t so wonderful. I wanted nothing more than to curl up next to him in bed, and fall asleep in his arms. Instead, he told me that he was going to stay up all night to finish his work, and to go to bed without him. I was so upset; I had endured a 23 hour bus ride to come spend time with him, and be with him, and suddenly his work (a non-profit online radio station) was more important. I laid in bed and cried. Eventually he heard me, and stopped his work to come lie down with me. He apologized for being so rude to me, saying it was wrong of him to have done what he did. I told him it was okay, and fell asleep in his arms.

The next few weeks were great; Jason and I were happily in love, I got involved in helping him with his radio station, Angela and I had girls’ days out, I was just insanely happy. One day, Angela asked me if Jason had told me why the two of them had broken up. I told her that he said they had drifted apart, and were having problems, and that she got upset and broke things off when she found him talking online to a friend about their relationship problems. She said that wasn’t what happened. She told me that there hadn’t been any problems in their relationship at all. She had needed to use his computer to print documents for work, and she found a ton of messages between him and other women, all of whom he was flirting with, trying to start relationships with them. She had confronted him about it, and they broke up. This new information made me extremely uncomfortable. I asked Jason about it, and he hesitantly admitted that it was true. He said that he had never done anything like that before, or since, and that he was terribly ashamed for having done it. He said it was because he had not really loved Angela, but didn’t know how to break things off with her. He assured me that that would never happen with us, and eventually I moved on from that.

A couple of weeks later, we were in bed sleeping, when I suddenly woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. Jason was asleep, so I slipped out of bed and went to the computer. I thought it was the perfect time to check my email and Facebook, since I wouldn’t be cutting into his work time. When I got to his computer, there was a new instant message on Yahoo Messenger flashing. It was from a girl named Krystal, asking him where he had been the last few weeks, was he okay, she missed him and she loved him. I was dumbfounded. For a few minutes, all I could do was stare blankly at the screen. I then went through his archived messages and discovered he had been talking to her and telling her he loved her since November. She wasn’t the only one; there were countless other messages between him and several other women. I began shaking, and went to the bedroom to confront him. He cried, saying he had done it because he missed me, but that he knew it was wrong and that’s why he had stopped talking to her shortly before I arrived. I told him that even though I loved him, I didn’t know if I could trust him anymore, and that I needed time to think about our relationship. I eventually decided to give him another chance, since I was going to be there for another month.

Over the course of the next month, I discovered he had lied to me about many things, including going to jail for cyber stalking. One day I walked into the room and caught him on OkCupid. He defensively said he wasn’t doing anything wrong, he was just making friends. I said that you don’t go on dating sites just to make friends, and that he was lying to me. We had an enormous fight and broke up; however, I was stuck there for another 2 weeks, as my ticket home wasn’t valid until the beginning of March. I tiptoed around the apartment for a day, trying to avoid him as much as possible. The next day he came to me and apologized. What he had done was wrong, he loved me, he would never do it again if I’d just give him another chance. I still loved him, so I agreed to give him a trial period that would end the day I left. He gave me his messenger password and OKC login info to prove that he was being faithful (his idea, not mine). Things went well for the last 2 weeks I was there. He hadn’t done anything suspicious, and was being a wonderful boyfriend. On March 3rd, it was time for me to go home. I told him that I would give him one more chance to prove that he had really changed. I truly loved him, and I wanted to try and make it work.

I went home, and things seemed fine, normal. A week later, Angela texted me and told me there was a new number that kept calling the house phone. She gave me the number, and I called it; it was a girl in Wisconsin Jason had been talking to, and starting a “relationship” with. I immediately logged in to his OKC account to get hard, solid proof. He had hidden his tracks, but not well enough. He had deleted all messages from his inbox, but had neglected to delete his sent messages and IMs. I called him and broke things off with him for good. I told him that he had screwed up one too many times, and there was no way I could ever trust him again. He cried, begged me to take him back, swore that he had changed, but I had had enough of his cheating and lies. I discovered he had done the exact same thing to every girlfriend he had ever had. We tried to remain friends, but he became nasty towards me, so I stopped speaking to him. The last I heard of him, he started dating a 19 year old girl (he’s 33) a week after we broke up, had taken her virginity with his fingers (he’s also impotent) and talked the poor girl into moving in with him and supporting him. I feel so sorry for her, but am extremely grateful that he’s out of my life once and for all.

Dumped by an Online Ding-Dong

When I was just barely situated into high school, I had this stupid idea of getting online and chatting through people in a website. (I couldn’t tell you which one now) I met good ol’ Bryan, he had moved a few states south from where I lived, but was originally from my area. We chatted for months about all sorts of things, told me he was 17 and had a horse show to go to in my area, and that he wanted to meet me. I said that I needed to ask my parents, and he insisted on asking my mother himself. He sweet talked her until she went as far as to ask what his favorite thing to drink was and his favorite food so that we might have it for him when he came. The day came when he was supposed to meet, I had made fresh lemonade, I began making lunch, and a fresh blackberry cobbler with homemade vanilla ice cream for dessert. He said he’d be at the house at around 11:00am, but he never came. I called him and he said there was a problem with the horse trailer and that he would be a little late.

Then he called me back and told me that his little brother was going to have his tonsils taken out, so he had to go back home. After that he just dropped off the face of the earth. No more messages or calls from him. I knew he lied to me about coming to see me. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but my mom thought he sounded older than 17. I simply chalked it up to him being a lot older than what he told me and when it came down to seeing me, he got afraid when my parents became involved. I would never think a pedophile would go to lengths as far as talking to one’s parents, but you never know. But now I feel like the ding-dong, I never cried over him-which says a lot right there- I moved on with my academics, singing in opera competitions, and loving my life out in the country.

My mother, who is very loving, still makes comments about how I have the worst taste in men. And that I need to wait for the right choice to choose me. Well, Mr. Right! Where are you?! Times a waistin’!