I was thinking about this after reading a thread where someone describes a past romantic relationship that went awry. He still loved her, but the damage was done. It interested me to think of what the girl’s take on the situation might have been. Does she feel remorse and look back on the situation with regret? Relief? What might have been a great regret in the guy’s life may have been a smart decision, from her perspective.
In my own life, I can’t help but think about my stalker from college. I spent one evening allowing him to cry on my shoulder, and he stuck to me for quite some time afterward, even showing up at my house on Christmas Eve (after driving more than an hour) to get to my hometown from where our college was located. It was sad, I felt sorry for him, but I had no romantic interest in him whatsoever and being nice only seem to encourage him. From his perspective, however, I can imagine that he might have felt jilted, that he messed up with me somehow, and tells the story in a quite different way.
I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m sneak-bragging. I’m just interested if anyone else wonders how they appear in someone’s else’s life story.
When I was a teenager a friend became jealous when I had a boyfriend. She accused him of all manner of nastiness (towards me, saying he was controlling) and would say these things to my mother. It culminated in my telling her a secret, which she told absolutely everyone (my mum, all my friends, her parents, my teacher). In her version of events she told everyone this because she was worried about me. We stopped being friends then. She is still the only person I ever “stopped being friends with”.
Almost 15 years later, I see her as being jealous of my new relationship. She misjudged the poor guy: he was lovely. She had no business telling anyone the secret, the “being worried” excuse was ridiculous, it was attention seeking.
I can imagine if in her version, I let a controlling boyfriend come between our friendship and that she acted only out of concern for me.
I was the one who wanted out of my first marriage. I knew six months after we married that I had made a mistake. Every time I’d work up the nerve and tell him I wanted out, he’d cry and even threaten suicide, so I stayed for five years and even had a child with him.
Of course we’ve stayed in contact since we have a daughter, but I imagine I have been the bitch in many of his stories. We do get along okay these days, though we seldom see one another anymore. I did feel really bad about hurting him, but it got so I couldn’t stand to be touched by him. Thankfully, he’s doing well without me.
I found out one rather alarming day that I’m the reason a friend packed up all her belongings and moved across the country.
We were having a bitch session the night before at the local Denny’s. Wah, wah, life sucks, men suck, the suburbs suck, why aren’t we living the lifestyle of the fabulous and famous out in LA?
“Well,” I felt compelled to point out, “this is a great way to vent. But, you know, if we really wanted to be movie stars in LA, we wouldn’t be sitting here in the Orland Park Denny’s. We’d be on a bus to LA.”
Next morning, she was on a bus to LA. :eek: Didn’t hear from her for another 10 years. It was a big lesson for me in the little ways in which we can have a big impact even when we don’t mean to.
To hear her tell the tale now, I was this influential “mentor” with all the answers who gave her the kick in the butt she needed to leave her dysfunctional existence here (and start a new dysfunctional existence in LA, but that’s another story.) And here I thought we were sharing a Grand Slam Breakfast and way too much coffee.
Definitely. There was the guy who left town because I wouldn’t be with him. He had his friend tell me (ok, spit out) the bitter details after he left. I barely knew the guy, quite odd.
After I left school a girl in the year below me decided she was taking over my role, whatever she perceived that to be … she was wrong. She ended up in a threesome with three of the guys I used to enjoy an innocent platonic relationship with, she dyed her hair my colour … I did bump into her once and she excitedly told me she was on her way to court … “just like you” for shoplifting. She looked pretty shocked when I said I’d never been to court for shoplifting or anything else. I think the lads were taking her for a bit of a ride.
A couple of years ago a girl who’d recently arrived cornered me saying she’d been considering living here, but had decided not to because of me (or I was one of the major reasons I think the wording was). I did remember seeing her once in the bank and once through a window she was sitting having dinner as I passed. Apparently she’d sensed something or the other … ?? Someone I’d never spoken to before.
Oops, I’ve got a few of these too, probably worth another thread. Friend was enduring beatings from her husband. I dunno I said being kind of fed up with her - how can I make him stop - thing, maybe tear your clothes off and run down the road screaming … oh dear. :smack:
A close friend of mine from grad school is pretty clearly clinically depressed. When she was evicted (not her fault, the building was sold and everyone went), I found her a job and a place to live, with a relative of mine who sometimes rents rooms.
Three years later, when she was still there and increasingly acting like a family member (inviting herself to things and / or getting pissy when she was treated like a friend rather than a relative), I issued an ultimatum: move, or lose the friendship. She chose to stay.
Three years after that, she is now on the periphery of my life. I see her on visits back home, and I feel sorry for her and I wish her well (though I also wish she’d move). I, on the other hand, am the starring villain in the drama of her life. I am a truly mean and awful person who made her move and then abandoned her, and said cruel, cruel things. I am the sole reason she is where she is today. Iunderstand that a large part of this is the untreated depression, but it’s kind of annoying.
The first time I fell in love, I sabotaged it every step of the way. He also, thought of us as the great love that never amounted to anything. A “one that got away” story.
We both went on with our lives, and got involved with other people. I found someone great to grow old with, he married… but there was always this little nagging “what if” feeling.
My first true love that I will never forgot, and sometimes still question why did I screw that up? He also describes this feeling, and believes that we both missed opportunities that could have made it possible for us to be a couple.
The fact that I ran away from it early on, makes me wonder if my instincts could have been telling me something that my heart refused to believe.
And possibly nostalgia has since replaced my original feelings, that were at the start, youthfully hormonal and romantic.
He claims that he made a less than stellar effort at the point where we had a second chance to get together, and blames his bitterness over being slighted by the initial rejection.
Oddly enough, we still stay in contact as friends, and have been for over 30 years.
For a few years in my early 20s I hung around a group of people who had known each other since kindergarten. I had never known friends who knew each other so well, had so many in-jokes, were so much fun to be around. I knew I was a satellite (someone’s girlfriend ), and not really a part of the core group (even though we lived together for awhile, and some of them spent weekends at a lake on my parent’s boat), but my experiences with them truly were the high point of my life (30+ years later I can still say that, sadly). The type of fun would have changed as we grew up, became more responsible, maybe started families, but it was the shared history that would have made the difference. I’ve told my kids many of the wild stories from that time, and I believe them when they say they love these stories. Sometimes we all laugh til we cry over some of them, and my son sometimes quotes a line or two from an old story at a most apropo time, so I know that he ‘got’ the humor.
To the people in that group, I was a mere blip in their timeline. They barely remember me as so-and-so’s girlfriend for awhile. I married and moved 1000 miles away, and have kept in touch with one of the other women in the group, so I know that after awhile they didn’t all get together regularly but still consider themselves very good friends. Their reminisces are about each other, and I doubt some of them even remember my name, whereas I can recall their names, parents and siblings, details about their houses - they meant so much to me, but I was really nothing to them.
I am certain that I’m the butt of a few jokes and the punchline in some hilarious stories. I used to be on merely a nodding acquaintance with reality. I don’t even remember the 80’s.
Not quite the same thing, but I stumbled across the web site of an old girlfriend a few months back and discovered that she almost certainly wrote a song about me (the me that I was back then when we knew each other). Can’t prove it definitively but there was a lot there that clicked with me in terms of our dynamic of the time.
There is one person I hate with all my soul, who probably doesn’t ever think about me. What I see as a series of serious betrayals, he probably sees as taking out the trash.
Yes. There has actually been several occassions where I’ve run into friends of mine and they’ve been like “OMG! We were just talking about that time you did…”
I’ve looked into it. There was a gas shortage and A Flock of Seagulls. That’s about it.
I’m always surprised when someone admits to having known me in the past, let alone been affected by me. It’s not that I think I’m an awful person or have done something terrible to people but that I can’t imagine people thinking about me when I’m not right in front of them. I think of myself as permanently transient .
I’d imagine I’m the ‘evil ex’ from my first long-term relationship. I was 20/21 and just out into the big wild world while she stayed at home, and I behaved scurrilously towards her. I did all the things that I read about in He’s Just Not That Into You (which is a great book - though a sucky movie - even for guys) and then some. To her great credit, ten years later she specifically forgave me, in person. And my treatment of her led her to get together with the guy who consoled her and they’re very happily married with two kids now.
Awful, awful behaviour and it took me many years to get over the guilt. But having had a few heartbreaks of my own subsequently, purely selfishly it’s good to have the perspective of the wrongdoer - and to know what not to do in the future.
Also, a couple of years ago I reconnected with an ex friend’s ex wife, who I was friendly with for just a few months 15 years ago. I expressed surprise that she would even remember me, saying I thought I’d just been a speed-bump in her existence, but she told me I was actually really influential and memorable. Once when we were both quite drunk I indulged in some fairly harmless flirting with her, and she said that it had stuck with her. They had a messy divorce, and five years afterwards went on to remarry someone who happens to have had many of the same life experiences as me, though I’m not sure if I can really claim that one.
Finally, I once went to visit a place I’d lived for a few years. I met a friend-of-a-friend and when he heard my name he started laughing and said “So you’re the famous guy who spent hundreds of dollars on a remote control helicopter and completely destroyed it on its first flight?!” Yes, that was me. :o :mad:
Possibly the guy I first kissed. I was a real bitch when we broke up, because I was a coward with trust issues and inexperienced at relationships. Instead of just telling him I wanted to break up, I kept trying to disengage slowly and he kept clinging harder. I still feel bad about breaking his heart, even though I WAS really relieved when it was officially over.
In my defense, it was my first real relationship since being sexually abused by my dad, and my parents had a severely fucked-up marriage, so I lacked a healthy/loving foundation to base things on.
I also suspect my last boyfriend thinks he lost out on a really good girlfriend when I broke up with him (which he did, I put up with his shit for way too long). The reason I broke up with him is he didn’t take responsibility for his own fuck-ups, ever. That just didn’t become clear to me until after he very nearly fucked up his brother, got kicked out of the house by his mom, and he was *still *whining in emails about how it wasn’t his fault he threatened to smash his brother’s face in with a rubber mallet. Anyway, that incident made me realize why there was friction between him and me–he wouldn’t ever accept responsibility for the bad decisions he made. He never apologized for anything, he just insisted on making every problem someone else’s fault (often mine, in the context of our relationship). I decided I was sick of the excuses and misplaced blame and dumped his ass… best decision of my life.
Also, learning that my sister looked up to me was kind of a shock. She always poked fun of me (often in very mean-spirited ways) while we were growing up. It was weird to learn after the fact that I had a positive influence on her, in spite of all the smack talk.
Oh I just remembered, this is kind of a reverse story, but anyway: When I was in 4th and 5th grade, I was on the softball team with a girl who was a couple years ahead of me. She was the daughter of the coach and I always thought she was so cool. Then, when the middle school band came and did a performance for my elementary school, I saw she played the saxophone. And I thought, I have to do that. I did end up playing sax from 6th grade up to my first 2 years in college, and it was all because of her. But she never really knew me, and I’m sure she wouldn’t even remember me now.
I used to work with a woman who had been adopted as an infant. The circumstances of her adoption was a singular event, which meant that there were a couple hundred other adoptees of roughly the same age and background. (I apologise for that butchered sentence, but I’m trying to avoid specifics.) Anyway, after a lot of searching, I found a support group for those adoptees. I told her about it, she joined, fell in love with the founder and they married a few months later. Around the same time, she got her dream job in the city she always wanted to live in. Her new boss told her that she decided to offer her the position after a phone conversation with me. I don’t know if I’m the star of her story, but I get a big thrill out of playing a role in her happiness. Whenever I’m with her and she is introducing me to some people I don’t know, she tells these stories and I get to stand there going “aw, shucks.”
I can think of a different tale where I play the villian, but hey, why would I tell that one?
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