Sometimes, the journey of loving someone is letting them go — as I learned when I recently wrote about the moments when men realized their girlfriend wasn't 'the one,' when many of you responded with your own breakup stories.
Here are some of those stories, sourced from the BuzzFeed Community as well as from Reddit threads:
1. "I cooked a massive ham dinner with multiple sides for a romantic night. While we were eating, he got mad at me for asking him not to make jokes about my mother because 'it was just a joke.' He even threatened to throw out everything I had just finished cooking for him and go out to get something else to eat so he could get away from me."
2. "I knew an ex-boyfriend wasn't the right one for me when he broke up with me and I realized the only thing I would miss was his cooking."
3. "She asked me if I would help pay her bills, even though she owned her own mobile home and earned five times what I was earning while I worked for a local grocery store. She would buy $500 outfits at the mall, hang them up in her spare room, and never wear them again. And if I drank more than a cup of milk on my cereal, she would start screaming that I 'need to learn how to save money.' She literally used a measuring cup to ration out her milk!"
4. "My boyfriend drives me absolutely fucking insane. He’s been my best friend for years, and I always knew he wanted more than that, so we recently got together. Certain things about him have always irritated me, but never as much as they do now. He takes things the wrong way all the time, and gets so angry when I try to teach him something. He either yells or says, 'I guess I’m just an idiot then,' even though I’m being as nice as I can about it and merely trying to teach him something. It might sound silly, but I think him being an only child has quite a bit to do with it."
5. "I broke up with my ex because he had a DUI and a suspended license. He would ask me to pick him up, take him to work, and then to the store. I didn't want to be a chauffeur."
6. "I left my most recent ex for a bunch of reasons, but it pretty much came down to when he told me, 'I do everything around here!' If you considered cleaning up dog poop in the yard once every three months and putting stuff on top of the bed to vacuum once every two months as 'everything,' then I suppose you could say he did only everything. A few months before that, I was on work-leave for about three months due to a medical issue, and I told him I wouldn't be much help and needed a low-stress environment while recovering. Instead, he made my life as stressful as possible by not picking up the slack I needed him to at that time."
7. "She showed up the day before I was deploying to the Mediterranean for six months to tell me she was pregnant. She'd sold everything and came from California to Virginia. She thought I would just leave with her and get a dishonorable discharge, like it was nothing."
8. "When I was working an internship in another country, I got like two texts from him over three weeks. That's how I realized I didn't miss him at all."
9. "My relationship with the mother of my kids was never, ever that great for multiple reasons, including her overspending and our lack of intimacy. We stayed together for the kids. But eventually, it got to the point where I would come home from work, and she would immediately leave so she could go out with her friends to clubs, spending what little extra money we had, while I stayed home watching the kids. We're talking three or four nights a week. We never went out together because we didn't have money and couldn't afford a sitter, and I couldn't ever go out myself, because 'it wasn't fair that I left her with the kids.' Finally, I found multiple notes from guys with their phone numbers on them. She said, 'Guys give me numbers at the club all the time, but I never call them.' A quick check of her phone history when she was in the shower proved that wrong. I ended it right there."
10. "This wasn’t my relationship, but I was involved. I have a best friend; we’ve known each other since the third grade, and now we’re both 26. He’s basically family. Three or four years ago, he started dating this woman, and we all liked her at first. She was funny, stylish, and could hold a conversation in our friend group. They seemed legit happy. There were times where I didn’t get to see him as much, but I was easy to brush it off. Then, out of nowhere, she blocks me on all social media. I assumed they had gotten into a fight and were on the verge of breaking up, and she was worried we'd take his side, so it was preemptive. Turns out that after nearly seven months of dating, she couldn’t handle him being friends with gay guys. She found out I was gay in a conversation with him, and it activated her bigotry. She gave him an ultimatum — either her or me. And my best friend broke up with her."
11. "I was driving home from work one day and called my now-ex to ask when he was going to drop off the divorce papers that he'd filled out to legally end his previous marriage. At that point, we were together for over three years, and he was separated from his wife for over five years. His response was, 'The courthouse is 20 minutes out of my way. I don’t want to deal with the extra traffic.' When I mentioned that it was important to me, he got aggravated and threatened to 'never' drop off the divorce papers if I kept 'pressuring' him to do it. Mind you, he had been talking about marrying and starting a family with me, to the point where he constantly started arguments over me not being pregnant. He even let it slip to my parents that he had been saving up for an engagement ring. After that phone call, I kept very minimal contact with him for another two weeks before finally breaking up with him."
12. "She broke up my best friend's marriage. She told me his wife was cheating on him, and then flat out denied it when I told him about it. I came to find out she was just jealous because his wife and I got along so well."
13. "I had been dating a women for about three months. One night she said to me, 'Even when I’m wrong, I’m right.' I laughed because I thought she was joking. She was deadly serious. That exchange opened my eyes to just how manipulative she was, and we broke up soon afterwards."
14. "I've only had one boyfriend. I was eventually just supporting him with his depression, and it was very confusing as to what we were. He would send mixed signals, and was a huge hypocrite. He could discuss sex, but I couldn't or would be told I was being insensitive to his very weird depression where his feelings weren't consistent. He'd tell me he hoped I knew I was a terrible person for not being kind to someone who was struggling. He was purposely cruel."
15. After nearly three years, he would pick fights with me just because I was talking to the opposite sex — it didn't matter if I ran into an old friend or was just saying hi to someone. The last straw was when he went through my phone while I was sleeping, slammed the phone in to the bed to wake me up, and then accused me of cheating on him and wanting to leave him over talking to a male friend...about Netflix."
16. "I met the family of my significant other. Suddenly, the otherwise easy-to-ignore weird personality traits got huge once I saw them writ large on similar-looking people."
17. "A friend of mine knew it was time to break up with her partner in the middle of class. We were doing this physics experiment in class, and she needed a pencil, so asked the person next to her. Her ex, who was also in the class, stormed up to them at that moment and yelled at her for 'flirting.' She tried to explain that she just wanted a damn pencil. He said that she should always ask him for anything. Before my friend opened her mouth, the pencil-giver said, 'Dude, you're sitting in the back of the class. No idiot is going to walk all the way over there for a pencil.' To which the ex responded, 'Shut up cow-lover.' She broke up with him on the spot."
18. "Honestly, one day when I was driving her somewhere, she was just talking, and I thought, God, this woman is annoying. And for the next month, she was just insufferable."
19. "I watched him cheat on me, and he will never know. We'd been dating for about 10 months. Those last couple of months, his passive-aggressive manipulations became more transparent, but I was young and convinced I could fix everything. On a Friday when we had plans, he called to say a friend at work had been fired, and he was going to go out with him to help cheer him up. It was fine, I said, and he hung up before I could finish my sentence — I had left some work papers at his place the night before and needed to grab them. I had keys so I didn't think anything of swinging by after dinner and drinks with my brother to let myself in to grab them. As expected, he and his two roommates were out. I was in the little office adjoining his bedroom gathering my papers when the apartment door suddenly opened. There was a lot of giggling."
20. "For six years, we built a life together. We laughed; we cried. We lost our jobs; we got new better jobs. We moved in together; we had cat babies. We stayed up late watching nerdy shows; we loved barbecue. We had Halloween parties. We made Thanksgiving dinner. We hung up Christmas lights. We got photos taken. He was my family. Then, he lied. He cheated. He promised. He tried. I hesitated. I said yes. He lied again. He cheated again. He stopped listening. He stopped talking. I cried. I cheated. I confessed. He didn't care. I opened the door. He left."
21. "I had an ex-girlfriend refuse to watch one of my favorite movies with me, because I had watched it with my ex-wife at one time. This was about a month into the relationship, and it was a movie I originally saw before even meeting my ex-wife."
22. "My boyfriend had to leave the country for a great career opportunity. The nature of his profession required him to travel practically all the time, for long periods of time. In my line of work back then, moving all the time was pretty much impossible. The last thing I wanted to do was stand in the way of his dreams, so after many hurtful days and discussions, we decided to move separate ways. It would've been so much easier if we broke up because one of us cheated or we hated each other, but we actually were a really good couple. We loved each other a lot."
What stories resonated with you? What made you realize that you needed to break up with an ex? Let me know in the comments.
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.