Did you know there are more breakups between New Year’s Day and Valentine’s Day than during any other 6-week period of the year? It’s true. So, in honor of this heartbreaking stretch, I thought I’d post this little poll to compare breakup scenarios.
[polldaddy poll=”9272428″]
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Lianne January 14, 2016, 10:07 am
My ex was an immature asshole and really didn’t want to be in a relationship. But instead of just saying that, he acting like a dick for about a month until I made him talk to me about it. Then, 2 months after the breakup, he texted me and said, “Finally admitting I love you.” I called him and he didn’t answer. But did that stop me? No. I kept trying to get in touch, which led to an on/off mostly sexual relationship for the next 3 years that did nothing but fuck with my head. This included sleeping me with (for the last time) when he was about a year into dating his now wife. Glad I am not married to him! While I should have just let it lie when he didn’t answer my call two months after the break up, I sometimes wonder how different things would have been if he never sent that text. God, what a dick.
ktfran January 14, 2016, 10:12 am
My last serious ex, the ex-fiance, I fell out of love with. Or maybe I never was in love. I did love him. But I don’t think it was the right kind of love for a long-term partnership. It was more of a friendly love. I just really didn’t want to have sex with him. I did the night we got engaged because I felt I should. Not because I particularly wanted to. I probably shouldn’t have said yes.
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I’ve dated after him. But noting serious. Those were mostly fade outs.
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I really hope me and the new guy make it past Valentine’s day! Actually, I really hope we make it much, much longer than that!!!!
Lianne January 14, 2016, 10:18 am
It seems like this is a solid relationship already, ktfran. If you were gonna break up, I would imagine the writing would be on the wall, so to speak.
ktfran January 14, 2016, 11:08 am
I’ve been kind of a butthead yesterday and today. But I agree. So far so good.
Addie Pray January 14, 2016, 12:30 pm
How? Why? Do share.
ktfran January 14, 2016, 1:36 pm
I’ve been easily annoyed/upset and I’m not being quite fair. I’m blaming period hormones. Which I usually don’t do. But I often get in a small funk right before.
for_cutie January 15, 2016, 9:55 am
Whenever I am being like that and I know it, I always apologize to my husband in a blanket way “sorry for being a pain in the ass.” I usually keep doing the bad behaviors until the funk has passed but he appreciates the heads up and acknowledgement of it. Maybe you can say something like that to the new guy so he doesn’t think it is all on him.
Loo January 14, 2016, 10:18 am
The most recent man I was dating ended things after 3 blissful months because he “could never marry an atheist”. I was devastated, especially since the topic of religion came up the first time we met. Apparently it took him 3 months to decide our religious incompatibility was a deal breaker.
SpaceySteph January 14, 2016, 11:06 am
Idk if I really fault the guy for that. Some people don’t really know what their dealbreakers really are until they are confronted with one and have to really think about what a forever relationship with [insert dealbreaker-type trait] really is. Also, I think in abstract a lot of people want to believe that they are open minded and that religious differences aren’t enough of a reason not to be with someone you love, but that the reality of it is different.
I’m in an interfaith marriage, but it definitely took a lot of soul searching and discussions to decide if that was something we both wanted… before dating him it was “something I hadn’t ruled out.”
Nico January 14, 2016, 10:34 am
Last ex – we dated for 9 months.. he helped me move into my new apartment.. and then the next day called me and said he didn’t think this was “long term” and broke up with me. I’m still curious as to why, I think it has something to do with the amount of student loan debt I had. At least he helped me move!
Krista January 14, 2016, 10:51 am
I answered “Never fell IN love”. The last guy I dated before my husband was…fine. Great on paper. We just didn’t click. I had a good time hanging out with him until I just didn’t really. One night, after dating for 3 months, I went out with friends and ran into him out with his friends, and we were both like, “Hey”. It was all rather tepid. We ended things amicably (in person!) a few days later. The conversation went like this:
Him: I don’t think we should see each other anymore.
Me: Oh. Okay. … Hug?
SpaceySteph January 14, 2016, 11:02 am
Yea… I don’t know. In retrospect we were deeply, seriously incompatible about a number of things and thank god we didn’t last. But I thought I was in love with him and.. idk, one day he dumped me by text without any explanation and then wouldn’t answer my calls. Never in love? Fell out of love? Hated the long distance? Was just waiting for the next best thing to come along (which she did, he was facebook official with a new girl a week later– the push I needed to block him on social media)? Who knows.
Rachel January 14, 2016, 11:19 am
Lol, my ex and I broke up on January 2nd last year, I had no idea it was a popular time for breaking up. He decided he can’t do monogamy, and monogamy is important to me. We also weren’t in love, thinking back on it, so that made it easier to break up with no drama and stay friends.
Steph January 14, 2016, 11:42 am
My last boyfriend broke up with me after two and a half months because he said he should be in love with me by now and he wasn’t. I literally laughed out loud because I thought he was joking. He wasn’t, I feel like if that was truly his reason, that’ a bullet dodge.
K January 14, 2016, 12:09 pm
Never was in love, honestly I think we were both just dating each other to pass the time. Also, he broke up with me because work was too busy for him, but we should’ve broken up anyway. He never made time for me. He’s now engaged to a woman that he’s been dating for half as long as my boyfriend and I have been dating. But, so glad that I have my boyfriend, and not that guy!
shakeourtree January 14, 2016, 12:38 pm
He decided that he didn’t “believe” in marriage after almost two years together.
Addie Pray January 14, 2016, 12:41 pm
I want to hear from the (so far) 3 people who checked Facebook scandal!
Erin January 14, 2016, 1:48 pm
I found out my ex had been cheating on me with a coworker for 6 months only AFTER he and I had moved to a different city and gotten into a 1 bedroom apartment I couldn’t afford on my own.
kmentothat January 14, 2016, 2:25 pm
In reverse order from most recent to least recent:
-Never fell in love: he told me after 6 months that he was “never going to love me.” And I was like ok? I wasn’t asking you to ? Met my current bf 4 days later.
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-AP, it was a FB scandal! Sort of. On Facebook I saw he added a girl he hooked up with right before we got together and was never around since. I asked if he had recently spoken to her and he said no. Which turned into him admitting she texted. Which really meant they went out one night with my best friend and her bf/his roommate and she slept over. I broke up with him very calmly in a voicemail and never spoke to him or my best friend again. And then moved to Chicago.
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-Never fell in love. After 6 months he told me he didn’t fall in love with me and he should have by now. I had told him I loved him, so it was a bummer.
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-Fell out of love: I did after two years, but really he was an asshat and I always forget we even dated.
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-MYSPACE scandal: hacked into my bf of a year’s band’s Myspace page and found all the emails between him and the other girl. The whole band knew. I has also been in the band at one point. When I confronted him he laughed. I was 20, obviously.
So cathartic!
Addie Pray January 14, 2016, 3:17 pm
And remember in the 4 days between your break up and when you met your current BF I tried to set you up with my coworker, the llama lover? I think that’s when it was, right? But he was too slow, Joe.
MiamiMami January 14, 2016, 2:48 pm
Oh boy. I broke up with my last boyfriend on because he was a RAGING sexist. He hid it well until the last two weeks of our relationship. The relationship was 3 months and I was 26 and he was 30. He is African American, I am Pacific Islander. We met on a dating site.
He was great on paper and a seemingly good boyfriend until last two weeks of our relationship he started saying….very worrying things.
The first instance was when he out of the blue said “white women age poorly” when we had a white server at a restaurant. When I called him out for being prejudiced, sexist, and downright cruel he did not acknowledge his wrongdoing and merely said “WELL I’M JUST SAYING”. I found this strange considering he’s only dated white women prior to me. He also claimed that “white women don’t know how to take care of their men”. I found these statements extremely cruel and prejudiced in addition to being absolutely incorrect.
THEN a week later he went on a tirade on how he thought that the Bill Cosby rape cases were nothing but a government conspiracy to smear black men and that IF Bill Cosby committed the rapes, he would have been arrested and killed in the 1960s. When I pointed out that Cosby’s victim’s were both black and white women he deflected and said that he didn’t say the women were lying but “was just saying” that if Cosby did it he would have been arrested. He also said that segregation should have stayed in place because it was better for Black Americans.
I considered these red-flags but decided to keep dating him in hopes of him learning more about feminism and intersectionality but BOY was I wrong.
I had a Friendsgiving with him, my high school best friend. Me and my high school bestie cooked all day but my boyfriend did not thank us once when he arrived. Then during dinner, after I specifically stated that I did not want to discuss politics, he started going on another tirade. The tirade was brought on when my bestie mentioned casually an anecdote about a man being callous about race-politics to our mutual friend (also African American). Then my now-ex started belligerently yelling about how the man was rightfully rude to our friend, how intersectionality is a white man’s concept, how black feminism is destroying the black community, and that addressing homophobia, transphobia, and sexism for black people was ruining the black cause. My friend pointed out that intersectionality is a term coined by black feminists and is therefore not a white concept, but then he became very verbally aggressive to her. He cut off my friend 9 times and cut me off 6 times and refused to listen to us.
After my friend left, I felt extremely uneasy after seeing his verbally aggressive behavior at dinner. He started yelling at me again at how non-black people aren’t allowed to talk about black issues unless it’s about paying reparations. When I asked how non-black people can support black people (I have Black family for goodness sake!) then he and he replied that non-black people can only support black people by reparations and can’t talk about race issues. I then asked him to not cut me off and be verbally aggressive towards me and he was completely dismissive.
After watching Netflix he did not attempt to verbally berate me. He seemed to only be nice to me when I listened to him and said nothing.
We tried having sex that night but I was still in pain from recovering a UTI I contracted three days before. He insisted that I am fine but I said no because I am in pain. I refused and told him to respect my boundaries and let me recover. He tried to have sex with me in the morning and when I said no, he immediately jumped out of bed and got dressed and tried to leave without kissing or hugging me goodbye. When I addressed this and told him to text me he kissed my cheek without looking at me and stormed out the door.
Later on that day I noticed he unfollowed me on Twitter and Instagram (we were still friends on Facebook but his account was deactivated) when I checked on him because I hadn’t heard from him all day despite asking him to text me. He also is one of those ~I don’t care about social media~ types so I was shocked at his passive-aggressive unfollowing act. I hadn’t even posted anything in days!
The following text conversation then happened:
Me: Hey uh, why did you unfollow me on social media?
Him: Why does that matter?
Me: Well you ARE my boyfriend so it’s concerning! Did I do something to make you mad?
*I try calling him but he doesn’t pick up*
Him: We can talk tomorrow. I need to think about some things.
*I try calling him again but he doesn’t pick up and realize that he is no longer worth dating*
Me: Actually it’s okay. I’ve been thinking too and I don’t think we’re a good fit so I’m breaking up with you
Him: I agree
Me: Alrighty then, good luck with things!
Crazy how literally the day after Thanksgiving we broke up but I am thankful that we did. I unfriended him on Facebook and never heard from him since good riddance. I have never met anyone with such opinions on race and gender politics in my life.
anonymousse January 14, 2016, 3:12 pm
My last relationship before my husband was full of ALL of the red flags. By why let that stop me?
We were relatively happy for many years (at least, I thought I was) but he just stopped spending time with me. He’d work 12 hours (by choice!) work out, eat dinner and literally pass out right afterwards. I’d be lucky if we had a conversation first.
The worst part of our breakup was we split our pets, and he gave our puppy away without even asking me if I wanted to take him first!
Ange January 14, 2016, 4:58 pm
I checked ‘other’ due to general nastiness and a police presence at our breakup. :-/
Mylaray January 14, 2016, 5:31 pm
I never really fell in love with him. I think it was mostly timing. He was great on paper, to the point where my friends were still asking about him up to the point I got engaged, which I found rude. I met my husband a few days after that ex and I broke up. I slowly became friends with the ex. We’re now best friends and he’s close with my husband too. He told me he’s proposing to his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day and I’m very happy for them and looking forward to more double dates. I think I lucked out with that ex. The others didn’t end so well.
Mr. Cellophane January 14, 2016, 11:37 pm
I voted “other”.
My girlfriend, nearly fiancee, was great. We had a great relationship for 2 years, but we were very young. I was 22 and she was 21 at the end. I bought the ring and was going to give it to her at Christmas in 1988. Then I took a step back, at my father’s suggestion, and really looked at the future.
.
Her Mother was Batshit crazy. Like Westboro Baptist crazy. She was a recovering alcoholic who “found Jesus” about the time her daughter and I started dating. Ultra fundamentalist religious and obsessed with fornication and “the end times”. She was convinced that her daughter and I were “having sex like rabbits” every time her back was turned, and that I was going to “get her knocked up” and abandon her. She was verbally and emotionally abusive to her husband and son. She didn’t like men in general. To her, all men were just sex crazed maniacs who only want to get drunk and fornicate. Everyone, except her and her little group of holy rollers at church (just her church, mind you, no others) were “goin’ to hell in a hand basket”. I realized that I just couldn’t deal with her insanity, and I didn’t want my future children influenced by her, and my girlfriend (who was otherwise completely normal) just couldn’t walk away from her family.
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This was almost 30 years ago. The weird thing is, I just had a random dream about her (the ex, not the mom) last week. Hadn’t thought about her in YEARS.
SpaceySteph January 15, 2016, 12:59 pm
You are the perfect example all those LWs with the crazy MILs should have followed. Crazy mothers and children who can’t set boundaries with them are a problem that will haunt your relationship for years, ending only when either the child grows a spine or the parent dies unfortunately.
If you can’t deal in the dating phase, think about how much worse it’ll get in the married phase. Awful to have to walk away from someone you otherwise live, but I hope (and bet) you are happier without that in your life.
vixky89 January 15, 2016, 7:50 am
Text message saying he was sorry but he decided that he wanted to be alone. Then he told me to throw away his stuff. This less than a week before he was going to immigration with me to help me pick up my work visa since I’m not fluent in the language here yet. Basically, a class act.
Luckily we hadn’t been together for too long (less than 6 months). Good riddance to bad rubbish!
Avangelis January 15, 2016, 12:34 pm
My relationship ended because I was dating a man child, a 35 yr old man child 10 yrs older than me. At 35, he did have his life together but I was only 23 so neither did I. We built ourselves up together for the course of a yr only for him to drop me once he got his dream job and money. Telling someone you’re not ready for a relationship after 1.5 yrs is wack.