Partially inspired by this thread, and partially inspired by recent events in my own life, I’m curious to hear from people what kind of stupid arguments have you been involved in that caused the end of your friendship or the breakup of a relationship.
In my own case, I had a disagreement with a friend with whom I had lunch this Sunday over what she considered to be a violation of cell phone etiquette, and how that impacted other issues she had with the lunch as a whole. This disagreement escalated into a seven-page long email thread between the two of us that ended this morning with her proclaiming that it was clear to her that I no longer wanted to be friends with her, and therefore, she was moving on.
So, a 14 year-old friendship has now been completely undone in slightly less than 72 hours. Over a cell phone.
His family is Dutch and his mother said I was no good because I didn’t want kids. Well, it seemed dumb to me at the time.
However, through the grapevine, I hear he has split with the one who did want kids and is living with a younger (read: no kids) woman because “it’s less responsibility”.
My best (female) friend from 6th grade through right out of high school stopped being friendly to me when I got pregnant. She just stopped talking to me. I never knew why until a few years ago when she told me that she was jealous of my being pregnant. :dubious: How odd…
I ended a relationship over an argument about the relative talents of J-Lo and Pam Anderson.
Ok, it wasn’t that I so much disagreed with his position, or even cared much about either of those women, it was the Springer-flavored debate tactics that turned me off. I’m sure if he ever thinks about it he remembers it as “that chick who was into talentless bimbos” while I remember it as “the seemingly normal fella who aggressively flipped out over trivial non-issues.”
So I really don’t feel my reason was dumb, he went all scary and intimidating during a meaningless argument, but since I couldn’t make him understand my POV, it’s likely he views it as the dumbest reason a relationship of his has ended.
When I was eighteen, I had a really nice boyfriend who was thirty years old. After we had dated for over a year, he broke up with me because he was exasperated by my inability to converse knowledgeably about life in the 1940s, which he remembered vividly. I was born in 1948, and my earliest memories were of the Eisenhower era.
When I was in my early twenties I made the mistake of having my oldest and best friend as a roommate. I knew she was a neat freak and I was a bit of a slob, but hey that made for a good sitcom at one time so I figured we’d be fine.
And I thought we were fine! I did the cooking, she did the cleaning. I worked at she watched my daughter instead of paying rent. It was a great arrangement! Little did I know what was going on inside that pretty head of hers.
It all came down to a milk cap.
At some point in the middle of the night when I got up to fix my baby a bottle of warm milk I dropped the milk cap and didn’t bother to hunt around for it.
The next day she made a crack about how ridiculously lazy it was to not replace the milk cap (it was MY milk that I paid for). And then she started in on my lack of cleaning skills and hinted that perhaps I wasn’t a good mother if I couldn’t put bread ties back on the bread or wipe down the sink every time I washed my hands.
You just don’t criticize an exhausted mother unless you’re just looking for trouble. I shot back with a few choice criticisms of my own. Somehow we ended up in a physical fight, the only one I’ve ever had in my life. Well…not so much a fight as me getting my ass kicked. She pushed me over a chair and started screaming in my face and slapping me about. Worst part was I couldn’t hit her back because she was six months pregnant! I eventually locked myself in the bathroom and called the police. She left before they got there. I took everything she owned, left it on the porch and didn’t see her again for ten years.
Fifteen years of friendship down the drain over a milk cap.
After reading your whole post that seems like an oversimplification of some serious issues she had with you. And if it resulted in a physcial fight then I’d say there was definitely something bigger going on.
Yeah I was thinking about saying that myself. It’s just that I thought everything was going great. She was incredibly anal about cleaning but it never bothered me and she knew me well enough to know how I was when we moved in together. If she’d just talked to me about it instead of going batshit crazy perhaps it would have ended on a kinder, less police-involved note.
My sister once broke up with someone because his arms were too long. Literally… long arms!
In her defence, she was 13 or so, so it wasn’t really a serious relationship nor a serious break up, but it has got to be one of the funniest reasons to break up with someone, ever!
I once broke up with a guy who’d been an on line boyfriend, and things were progressing to me moving to be near him, when two things happened.
His mother got remarried and didn’t phone him every night on her honeymoon.
Someone gave his six year old niece something with dinosaurs on it.
Suddenly he became a complete fundamentalist southern baptist and freaked right out about evolution, corrupting children, family values, the evils of his mother re marrying, (when I suggested she was enjoying herself travelling with her new husband he accused me of being “filthy”) Anyway he decided that i was going to hell. I told him I didnt want to be with someone who thought I was going to hell. We broke up in two minutes after that.
I broke up with a chick once because she insulted my car. No, that’s not true, she didn’t really insult it - that was a different girl about the same time that called my 1972 Chevy Nova “Christine”
The first one I broke up with because she wanted to talk on the phone while I was working on my car. She came back with “you love that car more than you love me” to which I replied “well, yeah”
Never heard back from her, but the car lasted until I drove it off a cliff 5 years later.
One of my friends from law school stopped speaking to me when she learned that I was born on Long Island and had lived there until I was 16. She told me that no self-respecting Southerner could ever be friends with a Yankee. She even accused me of deliberately hiding my New York accent to trick her!
Her reaction was so bizarre and over-the-top that I thought she was kidding at first. It’s the only time I’ve seen that kind of behavior outside of a Yosemite Sam cartoon.
Well, what I thought was a great friendship foundered in the aftermath of her move. I helped a little on the moving out end, but had a class that night and frankly wasn’t feeling well to begin with. Since she had her ex-boyfriend and two big burly mover guys to help I naturally bailed thinking she would be cool with it. Never heard from her again, she never called to bitch me out, never returned my calls or anything, just dead stop. Puzzling because a few days before we were really in one of our grooves, laughing and having a great time.
A lot of times I have broken up with someone over something that seems trivial and dumb at first sight, but they are symbolic of a larger problem- it may have just been that one thing that brought it to my attention or was the last straw.
I once broke up with a guy because he didn’t know that stir-fry meant Chinese food. But really it was because I was looking for a man who was a bit smarter. That one thing was just the last straw.
Once I ended a long friendship because my friend wanted to use her $2000 check that she got every two years from her tribe (Native American) to buy a second car to sit in her driveway just in case her primary car ever broke down. But really it was because I couldn’t support her bad choices anymore. She was dirt-poor, she kept having fatherless babies, and she and her kids went without regularly. I couldn’t see her spending that money on a car that could sit there for months or years when the kids needed it now.