Last time I was in a “relationship” with someone we talked for a few months, he ghosted me, then I found out years later he was a pedophile fantasizing some weird shit about me. Worst part is he’s now infamous and is widely joked about in one specific community for a thing I’m into so I have to hear about him all the time. My stepdad had the balls to bring up the whole thing during dinner once and holy shit that was uncomfortable.

Still haven’t recovered from that.

Met someone I liked better.

I was in middle school. We just didn’t last, too different I think.

Found out she cheated. Not sure what her motivation for that was, we never really had any problems prior to it.

I definitely don’t consider the end of the relationship a failure but the entire thing was the failure and leaving was the success.

He wasn’t abusive or anything. He was also very Christian and it took me a while to realize that he was fetishizing me for being “bad” while simultaneously putting me on a pedastal. I feel so gross when I even think about it tbh. He wanted kids, wanted a marriage, I convinced myself I wanted that as well. Thankfully we never even got close to that. He criticized me constantly for drinking/weed (I was in my early 20s and in college and definitely wasn’t partaking anymore than your average party person), but he criticized me for it in the condescending fucking way only a religious person would.

He also only brushed his teeth like twice a week… Something I only figured out when he stayed with me and my parents for a month and we didn’t have mouthwash for him to clean his mouth with daily??

Talked about his previous ex pretty often too, about how heartbroken she had left him blah blah blah. Honestly there were a lot of red flags but I was young and infatuated.

Last straw was when I had to cancel a trip to visit him to travel to my home country because my aunt was sick. He told me to “have fun” (in a completely serious tone, not sarcastically) and was sending me selfies throughout asking me which ones were better as I watched my aunt dying.

I spiralled very soon after that, faced some of the darkest experiences of my life. But at least I broke up with him.

I don’t think he was necessarily a bad person after all that, maybe just naive, but I will never trust any feelings of infatuation again. He’s probably the only person I’ve dated where I genuinely regret it.

We were polyamorous, had spent 8 years together, and then her other (new) partner decided she didn’t like me. So she put a wedge into our relationship by breaking the trust down between me and my partner, framing me as abusive, and eventually my partner abandoned me after the trust was gone.

The other gal turned everything I did into some manipulative scheme or way to control my partners. For example, the fact that I couldn’t suddenly drop $2k on a wisdom tooth removal for her became “financial abuse and control”.

I’m going to be angry about it for the rest of my life, I think.

She was religious to the point of being crazy, and she was absolutely obsessed with her dog, who was the worst behaved dog I’ve ever personally known.

I fell for her because she helped me become more of an adult, someone who could pay bills and be sort of responsible for myself. And like every super-religious woman I have ever personally known, she was an absolute horndog but felt really guilty about it, especially if she really enjoyed it.

We were on this yo-yo thing for years where she would determine that im too much of a heathen, so she would leave, and then she would see me talking with some other woman, and she would run said woman off. I was young and stupid and kept going back. We were even married for a bit, but she fell right back into the same pattern and divorced me two months later.

Not long after that she went and married someone else. Finally. Shes with this guy for three months and is trying to get her claws back into me. But by this time I had found the woman I am now married to. My current wife doesn’t have the same religious and sexual hangups, and she understands things like “dogs need to be housebroken” and “You have to train dogs not to bite children”. Well of course she pulled out all the stops to try and quash it, but I finally learned to say “would you kindly fuck off”.

And I have been happily married to a really amazing woman for 17 years.

The short version of the story is I was seeing a nurse, then Covid happened and she did the travel nurse thing and I never saw her again.

In fact…remember those 3D printed notebook divider face masks? I had volunteered to make a bunch of those, including one that, one spool ran out so I started another spool so it came out two-colored. Just so happens she was the point of contact between the hospital and the maker community, so she was the one tasked with the “how to correctly use” instructions, and that was the one she wore in the demo pictures. Those are the last pictures I have of her.

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10 years together. She was upfront about her long-term goal of never having children, and I was upfront about how I felt at the time, which was “meh, I could go either way.”

We met while I was diving into the depths of alcoholism. My first (and only) DUI was when we’d been seeing each other for a couple months, They wanted me to pay $300 or spend a few nights in jail, I said “Lemme text my girl so she can feed my cat.”

I broke up with her a few times, but kept coming back because she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever met, and we did genuinely care for each other. I said “I’m moving across country, you can come or you can stay,” She came. I proposed a couple years later. We married a few years after that.

I finally got sober, and immediately knew that we didn’t belong together. My alcoholism told me I wasn’t good enough to be a father, but I truly do want to be one. We had become roommates, neither one of us really sharing emotionally or physically. I remember how terrible I felt, when we’d be in the same room, and instead of talking to each other, we’d baby talk to our (amazing, wonderful) little dog instead. I remember feeling so jealous of that dog, because she was so physically affectionate with her, and never (ever) me.

This is an aside, but, For our entire relationship together, the only thing I ever really asked for, was a giant cookie for my birthday. It’s a family tradition, and I love them. 10 years I asked for a simple $7.99 giant cookie from the grocery store, with a Happy Birthday message, and for 10 years, she never did it. I did everything for her, took care of everything. The car, the house, the groceries, her health care, her mental healthcare… I realized that’s all she wanted, was a caretaker.

Well, it came to a head one night when we were randomly talking openly, and she told me the only reason she slept with me was so I wouldn’t leave her. When I sobered up, I started a mental clock of two years, and told her what I needed from her, and gave her those 2 years to fix it. She didn’t, so after two years, I told her we weren’t right together and we split up. I cried, so much. It was awful. I still very much love her, but, I was right. We just weren’t meant for each other.

It’s been 5 years since then, and I’ve been having trouble finding my person. I went to therapy, went HARD in therapy, really worked on myself. Got better physically, mentally, have a much better job, and just recently started texting a woman that lives a thousand miles away in Texas. She’s beautiful just like my ex-wife is, except she wants to have kids.

Pray for me, bros, I really like her, and don’t want to mess this up.

Im married but my last dating thing was with a girl where I liked her and she was nice and responsible but I kinda felt like she did not like/love me as much as I met a sorta list of requirements and then was not bad from that subgroup. Then also I was thinking about a career change from IT to teaching high school and she sorta laughed that off. Because of your story I will mention another girl I dated. We had started dating and were doing a makeout session and I was getting to handsy for her and she told me to stop, she did not want to go that far. So I stopped and going forward did not go that far waiting for her to give some signal that the boundaries had changed. She broke up with me and dated someone I would describe as an asshole and I kinda feel she was looking for a guy to get her what she wanted while being able for it not to be her fault. Something I have seen again and again.

She was mostly asexual and I was relatively inexperienced. We got along really well and moved in together. Unfortunately we just wanted different things.

She was an alcoholic with border-line personality disorder, and as a naive and lonely young Scotsman I foolishly mistook her for a bright girl with a quirky personality who liked a drink and had occasional violent moodswings. Took way too long to realise what the gravity of her condition meant. I was emotionally inexperienced and trusting. And I paid the price.

On the bright side, when i came out of that relationship and healed I met someone well-balanced and kind, who is now my wife. I’m so grateful for the love i now have and the relative stability of my life, and in a weird way I’m glad I went through what I did with my ex, as it makes me appreciate what I now have.

She was a parasite, a substance abuser and a manipulator

She had never been in a “real” relationship before, in her late 30s, and I grew to understand why

I am, or at least was, an immature ass.