Making a Scene

I’m going to try to keep this short. This isn’t so much about my relationship than the actual breakup. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. Here it goes…..

I was a sophomore in college and had been dating this girl named Emily for around 9 months. She was a great girlfriend and we had fun together, but there was just something between us that wasn’t clicking. I had really been trying to make things work, but things just didn’t seem to be working out. We had started to argue over the dumbest things and just couldn’t enjoy each other like we did before. One Sunday night, I decided to just balls up and break things off with her. I just felt like staying together would just be dragging the process out because it was inevitable that we were going to fail as a couple. I called her and asked her to meet me in the lounge of our dorms. She came and I didn’t waste any time. I told her that she was great and that it wasn’t either of us that was the problem, it was just that “us” wasn’t working. I was upset to be losing her, but I knew it was the right thing. I expected that she would be upset but I never expected her to go crazy! She immediately started shrieking, like she was being hurt physically. Then she started crying and screaming “WHY? How CAN YOU JUST BE WITH SOMEONE ONE DAY THEN JUST ABANDON THEM?! NO! YOU’RE NOT DOING THIS TO ME!” She started pulling all over my clothes and throwing herself on me. Then, out of nowhere, she just slapped me! I hadn’t said anything rude to her, and I had tried to do it in person and as respectful as I could. You would have thought she had caught me in bed with someone else with the way she was acting. Students started coming out of there rooms, and the next thing I know, the RA and security are standing around us and the police were called. They cleared the students out and separated us. When they questioned Emily, she told them that I had sexually assaulted her, then dumped her when she refused my advances. She said that she had acted out because I had said incredibly cruel things to her. I told my side of the story but still somehow ended up in a disciplinary hearing to see if I’d be allowed to stay anywhere on campus ever again. Luckily for me, they had the security camera footage and the video that a student had taken, and it proved that I had never done any of the things I had been accused of. It really pissed Emily off that she didn’t get her revenge on me so she started acting psycho. She was coming into my lectures and just standing at the door staring at me, or she would sit near me and send me text after text. I tried to ignore it, but she got more aggressive and started trying to pick fights with me or do crazy stuff to get my attention. I finally had enough and I reported it to the school. She ended up being expelled. All of this for a college relationship that didn’t even last a year. I’m backing off of serious relationships until after I graduate!

For Better or Worse

You’d think that a man who pursues a woman for 8 years and went through a ton of trouble to propose on the most spectacular way would have stayed committed to those vows. Unfortunately for me, my ex-husband seemed to take the first out he could get. I’ll be the first to admit that I wasn’t always pleasant to be around, but I don’t think I deserved any of the treatment that I received toward the end of our marriage.

I work in design. It is a stressful position, filled with long hours in the office, working at home and meeting deadlines. My husband and I had been dating for 7 years. He spent the entire year before we were together finishing up med school and building a really close friendship with me. We were friends first, and I loved that about our relationship. He went all out during the holidays of our eighth year together and hired the mall Santa to be a part of his proposal. He acted like he wanted me to take his nephews to see Santa, so we went one afternoon at his suggestion. There was an old guy taking pictures and giving out little gifts. After the boys had taken their picture with Santa, the photographer asked me to take one for fun. He said to open my gift and look surprised. You can imagine my face when I opened the box to a sparkling ring. Then Santa pulled off his beard and it was my boyfriend asking me to marry him!

We were married the following year and things seemed to be going well. One day while at work, I had a bad anxiety attack and ended up in the hospital. I was diagnosed with anxiety and fatigue and told to take some time off work. Things just seemed to get worse from there. I couldn’t get through my day without being on edge or just feeling down. I was diagnosed with severe depression and started taking medication, but the damage had been done. My husband had started taking on extra shifts and claiming that he had to do entire weekends working in the hospital. I knew to expect that sort of thing with him being a doctor, but I was barely seeing my husband and most of the time my calls and texts went unanswered. When he did come home, he was short with me and acted like he just didn’t want to be there, then his phone would ring and one of his friends would ask him to go out to the bar, and he would hop right up like his old self and take off. I reached a point where I just couldn’t take it any more. I knew when his lunchtime was, so I went up to the hospital so we could just sit and talk. I asked the receptionist to page him but she told me that he wasn’t in that day. In fact, there had been quite a few days that he claimed he was working when he wasn’t even on duty.

I confronted him later that night. He lied and denied at first, then finally came out with the fact that he wasn’t satisfied in our marriage and had instead been partying with friends and dating some young nurse on the side. He blamed my issues on the breakdown of the marriage. Yes, my bought of depression and anxiety that lasted a few weeks was the reson behind my husband lying, cheating and leaving me. Thanks, you really stuck those rough times out!

The Sweetest Guy You Could Know

I met this guy named Chase at my cousin’s wedding. He was a friend of another cousin’s and he was super cute. He was a bit shy, but as the night went on he got more comfortable with me and we ended up having a great time. After the wedding, we went out for a late night bite to eat and a drink. We stayed out until 3AM, then parted ways with a hug. He asked if he could call me the next day and take me out. He called the next morning and offered to take me to dinner that night. He told me to pick the place and to pretty much tell him what my dream date was so that he could try to make it happen. It was like a dream come true. After that night, things started moving really fast and we were spending nearly every day together. We had decided to make things official and he said that he had never met someone as perfect as me and could see himself spending the rest of his life with me. It was a little soon, but I had started to feel the same way. It just felt so right, so natural.

By month 3, we were staying over at either my place or his, mostly mine during the week and his on the weekends. We kept things separate though, so I didn’t keep anything at his house and he didn’t keep anything at mine. We had talked about living together and getting engaged, and had decided that we were going to wait until after the holidays passed and start the process. One night, we were sitting around watching movies and eating takeout and his phone would not stop ringing. He eventually silenced it, saying that it was a friend who wanted to borrow his car. Then, there was a huge bang at the door and this girl started screaming. Apparently he had a girlfriend of 3 years, whom he had failed to break up with before he started to date me, and who he had continued to date while dating me. I guess he had decided to leave her and pursue things with me and he had told her that morning that they were finished and the reason why. He asked me to leave so that I wasn’t put in the middle of the drama. He called me the next morning to tell me that he really wanted to be with her and apologized for ever getting involved with me. Thanks @$$hole!

What Was I Thinking?

This story starts when I was 19 (2007). I had just gotten out of navy boot camp and a seriously weird relationship with an ex, and I ended up meeting this guy. He was 11 years older than me and a student at my A school. We ended up dating while we were in class together and the relationship continued for almost 5 years. Looking back now I should have seen some of the red flags. 1) he had an ex wife and 2 kids that he hasn’t seen in years, 2) any mention of said ex wife ended up in an argument, 3) he was controlling, 4) he had OCD to the point that he and I would fight over the smallest thing in the apartment not being clean, and 5) he was emotionally abusive. Fast forward a couple of years and I ended up getting discharged from the military and marrying him. As the years went on in our relationship I noticed that things weren’t quite right. He was emotionally distant. He never had a compliment that wasn’t laced with something that he was complaining about. He belittled me constantly. He made me feel like I was a worthless broken wreck. I would bend over backwards to avoid setting off arguments but always seemed to fail in one way or another. He would tell me to speak my mind and speak up for myself, however whenever I did, it would end up putting me in a worse situation if I hadn’t said anything. He refused to get off the computer and spend time with me. He refused to help me with household chores. He procrastinated on everything that didn’t specifically help just himself. If anything that needed to be done didn’t benefit him alone, getting him to do it (especially if it wasn’t something that I had access to due to my status as a civilian) was like pulling teeth. He had a glaringly apparent lack of regard for anyone but himself. He blamed me for his problems when things started to go downhill in his career (like failed Physical Fitness Assessments), yet whenever I attempted to help him fix the problem, he would shove me away or refuse to do it. The final straw came when he went on IA. I was stressed out because he wasn’t there and things were going downhill at home fast. Previously in our relationship he had threatened me with divorce a couple of times in the past. He claimed that I was cheating on him and threatened me with divorce again. This time I had enough and called his bluff. As it stands now, for the first time in our relationship he actually wants to save our marriage (too little too late f!@#ker, I gave him opportunities left and right), he refuses to cooperate with the divorce proceedings and is generally acting immature over the fact that I am walking away.

Basic Training Faker

So, back last year, I met and began dating this guy. Let’s call him Michael. Michael was everything I had ever wanted in a guy. He was the biggest sweetheart and he had a good job working for his dad. I would go over to his place all the time and we’d go see movies or cook dinner together and to make a long story short, we could do anything together and have fun. Our relationship progressed quickly, and we talked about everything from kids names to the log cabin house we wanted to build one day. Well, near the end of the year, I had been talking to an ex of mine that lived in Virginia (I live in Illinois). This ex had some of my belongings, which I was simply trying to recover. I volunteered all and any conversations I had with the ex with Michael. He said that wasn’t necessary. But lo and behold, he flipped out about it later that same day, after I had gone home. He called me and I told him that it was ridiculous that he was upset about this. But he refused and said he was worried I was going to cheat on him. With a guy that lives 18 hours away. Because that makes sense.

I broke it off with him right then, thinking that would snap him to reality. Well it didn’t. I didn’t talk to him in two weeks. Now, my friend had a dating profile on the same website I had met Michael. She found him on it. Less than two weeks after I had ended with him. Needless to say, I was angry. But I didn’t call him on it. I asked him if we could hang out. He said ok, but it took me weeks to pin him down and getting him to text me was like pulling teeth.

When we were together, he seemed normal, like when we were dating. But then he broke the news to me: he was joining the navy. He said basic training started in three months (from the end of January). Then he said he was to be sent to Japan. I should have known something fishy was going on then. They don’t tell you anything about deployment until after training and it doesn’t happen two weeks after you graduate. He had made a facebook then, and added me. He said he wanted to be able to keep in touch with everyone when he was gone. I saw him two more times before he left. The last time, he told me he loved me many times, and that he’d see me soon. Days later, he was living in Florida with his mom before basic started. Then I found myself blocked on facebook from him and any texts to him were ignored.

Down the road five months: unblocked on facebook, new girlfriend, no navy basic training start date. He moved to Florida to date some girl exactly one week after I saw him last. To make it worse, he told me he was joining the navy as an excuse to leave! He didn’t join.

Not Quite Right

I have had only one relationship in my life that did not end well. I should have seen it coming, but you know what they say about hindsight being 20/20…. I met James through mutual friends and we began dating soon after. Everything went well at first, but one thing that irritated me was that he would complain non-stop about his ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend. He always made it sound as though they were so terrible and he was so great. This should have been my tip off that something was not quite right about James, but I ignored it. I lived about an hour away from James so we would only see each other on weekends, but we texted and talked daily. Sometimes our weekend plans would be delayed or canceled because he had to do something for/ with the ex-wife (they had kids together). I was very considerate of the time he would spend with his kids because as a child I had a step-mom who wasn’t very nice. What I found out is that for the most part his claim of spending time with his children was an utter and complete lie. How did I find out? His ex-wife called me and told me he had another girlfriend besides me and he was spending some weekends with her. She went on some speech about how she thought I was a good person and did not think I should be treated like this. She gave me the name and phone number of the other girlfriend. Needless to say I was dumbfounded at first and did not know what to think. I confronted him and he said that his ex-wife was lying and was jealous of me. I didn’t buy it. I told him I have the name and number of the woman his ex-wife claimed he was seeing. I asked him to call her on speaker phone in front of me and ask her if she is seeing him. He refused and basically told me that if I did not trust him then we were over. I was quite alright with us being over and asked him to leave. He left with little fanfare and telling me how I would never find someone else like him (I could only be so lucky). I called the woman and sure enough he was seeing her. I told her everything and she told me about their relationship. Apparently, she was the ex-girlfriend, but he never broke up with her. I felt like such a fool when this was all said and done. He called a few times to tell me what a less than wonderful person I was for calling his “ex-girlfriend.” I changed my number and that put a stop to him calling me. I would tell you how horrible he is doing and how karma bit him in the arse, but quite frankly I do not know/care. I have moved on with my life (this happened seven years ago) and haven’t met anyone like him since. Life is good.