What's your best/worst/weirdest experience running into an ex?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Inspired by this thread, since we’re still waiting on the outcome at the time of posting.

Share the story of your most interesting unexpected encounter with an ex, be it good, bad, or ugly. Or all of the above!

I’ll go first. I believe I posted this initially as a sob story elsewhere on the Dope, but I can now recount it with a bit of humor. My ex-wife and I had a fairly bitter end to our marriage that involved her falling in love with and sleeping with another guy. We tried to reconcile; that failed. We tried to split up as friends, but I had an awful lot of bitterness toward her actions at the end of the marriage.

We’d had tickets to a taping of the NPR show “Wait, Wait…” that we’d both months before the split up. I said I didn’t think I could deal with going to the event with her at this point, so I passed. She said that if she couldn’t go with me, she wasn’t going to go at all because that was something that was meant to be about us as a couple, so there was no point. She was going to give them away. I didn’t give it much thought beyond that.

At the last minute, I found other tickets to the show on Craigslist, so I decided, what the hell? I was going to go enjoy myself. And who should I happen to run into at the show? With her new boyfriend, no less – the same guy she had cheated on me with. The guy she’d sworn up and down she wasn’t going to have anything to do with even after we’d split up because she needed to get her head straight.

She would tell me later that she didn’t actually remember saying she wasn’t going to be seeing him after we split up (hah!), but that regardless, life was too short and she just didn’t see any reason not to move forward.

I was really devastated by that at the time, but now I see it as mostly just a sign of her character. And other than having one of the most heart-wrenching experiences of my life while she was an aisle over and publicly showing off her new beau, I enjoyed the show. :slight_smile:

So anyway – what’s your tale of triumph or woe?

2

I broke up with a long term BF over his excessive drinking.

He contacted me a lot for a short while and then suddenly stopped. I heard through the grapevine that he had found a new girl, and I was cool with that (and sort of relieved- at least there was someone to look after him when he was drunk!).

About two years later, I was cleaning house and found an old photo album and a smallish box with a few personal items that belonged to him that I thought he would want back, so I called him up.

As soon as I identified myself, he said something like “I’m not allowed to talk to you” and hung up on me! I thought it was strange since I never met the new woman and made no attempts to contact him at all during that time. I guess I could understand if there had been fighting or trouble or hard feelings or whatever, but none of that had happened.

So, I threw his stuff away and didn’t feel bad about it at all. Every time I think about that guy, I am so glad I decided to get rid of him, just because of weird responses like that.

3

My first boyfriend and I broke up very amicably (we were 15 years old and kissed just once) and are friends to this day. However, we broke up shortly before the winter formal dance. So I needed a date, and everyone already had dates. Enter Marc. Marc was a hot swimmer from a school 40 minutes away; we talked at swim meets and such. Enter Marc’s aunt, who becomes my mother’s patient a few weeks later. All she can do is tell me how great of a kid Marc is, how smart, funny, kind, the whole nine yards. All the positive words from Liar Auntie push me to ask him to to the dance. We date for a few months. He slowly goes crazy - very clingy, tells me he loves me, can’t wait to have sex with me (!), progressively it grows into him calling me 20 times in one night on my cell phone, then calling my house phone and waking my parents at 2am.

We break up, and he tries to kill himself. Yikes. I deal with the fallout We move beyond that, breakup, and have no contact save for being facebook friends.

6 years later I see him last summer across the street - and with a dozen people between us, and quickly try to veer off in a different direction with my friend. He sees us, calls out to us across the street - to which I wave, smile, and turn and walk away. He sprints over with what appeared to be his girlfriend following. He announces that this is the lindsaybluth - I saw we’re friends from swimming, he corrects it to say we used to date, and isn’t that so crazy!? How we were BFF’s and everyone loved us as a couple - lies, all lies. Meanwhile this girl is grunting and scrunching up her squirrel face at me, plotting to leave me in a shallow grave. We make awkward small talk about how college is going, and then we get away as fast as we can. My friend has a good laugh, while I marvel what I ever saw in that guy.

4

One of the men I briefly dated in college was a guy who I’d had a long-distance crush on in high school. I ended up finally meeting him at a party shortly after his long-term girlfriend broke up with him. I confessed that I’d had a crush on him and had enjoyed watching his high school basketball games. We ended up dating, but his head was clearly not with me – he was still reeling over the breakup with his girlfriend. I don’t think we ever formally broke up, it just kind of died on the vine with no anger or turmoil because neither of us were that emotionally vested into it.

Fast forward another 6 months and I run into Mike at a party. I’m there with another guy (who turned out to be my future husband, but we’d just started dating), who also happened to go to the same high school as Mike. They shook hands, probably too hard, but all seemed fine. I honestly didn’t feel any awkwardness with the two of them in the same room because it wasn’t like Mike and I had shared a storied romance or anything. I was friendly with him, he was friendly with us, and we played a few rounds of pool together. I did notice that Mike was getting pretty drunk and got into a brief altercation with another guy, but I didn’t think anything of it.

Anywho, the next day, we all ended up at a Bengals game, where Mike proceeded to get drunk again. As we were leaving, he pulled me to the side. He had a look of pure anguish on his face and kept blubbering that he was sorry. At one point, he broke down in tears and collapsed on me, which was funny because he was 6’5" tall and I’m 5’5". I was completely confused and thought he was apologizing for getting into the fight the night before. So I patted him and said it was okay and that the guy wasn’t hurt and no one called the cops… Mike looked at me cockeyed, realized that I wasn’t getting it, and suddenly got beligerent. “I’m not talking about last night. I’m talking about US. I can’t believe that I had you and let you go. I’m an idiot! I took you for granted. I’m trying to tell you that I LOVE YOU.”

Huh? To say I was taken aback was an understatement. I mean, our “relationship” had consisted of making out, followed by him pouring out his heart about how heartbroken he was that his girlfriend betrayed him.

Needless to say, I felt a little awkward, especially since I knew that my new boyfriend was probably wondering where I was. So I hugged him and told him thank you but that I’d started another relationship blah blah blah. And I left him there under the underpass of the Bengals parking lot, looking absolutely devastated.

Alcohol does strange things to people.

P.S. I saw him again, about 5 years ago, at a church festival. He still looked yummy. He had his wife and 2 kids with him and I winked at him as we passed each other. :slight_smile:

5

Worst:

Before my boyfriend and I started dating, we used to get together about once a year when he’d be in town visiting his parents for the holidays (they live here, he lives on the east coast). Christmas Eve of 2008, one of my best friends was going to be spinning records at a bar in Riverwest, so future-boyfriend-then-just-friend (FBTJF?) and I decided to head there after dinner.

This bar happened to be in the same neighborhood where my previous boyfriend lived, who I’d broken up with about five months previously but made an attempt to stay friends with (with varying levels of success). After saying hi to my friend DJing and introducing him to FBTJF, FB and I grabbed a table and started playing a card game. Ex-BF came in and sat at the bar, probably already drunk, and proceeded to drink more. A lot more.

Eventually, Ex-BF stumbled over to the table where FBTJF and I were sitting. Standing next to me, swaying (literally swaying–he was so drunk he couldn’t stand up straight, which means he was really fucking drunk, because his tolerance was fairly high), he asked if this was my new boyfriend. I told him, no, this is my friend FBTJF, who’s in town visiting his family for the holidays. During the rest of the awkward drunken conversation, Ex-BF asked me at least two more times if FB was my new boyfriend. An Afghan Wigs song played, and when I made some comment about it being off an album I like, Ex-BF ranted about how much he hates the band. Ex-BF, when DJing-friend played a song that somewhat romantic (in a punk way–I don’t remember what it was), put his arm around my shoulder and sang along while attempting to stare into my eyes. Ex-BF started telling me he could kick my ass, and asked me if I thought he could kick my ass.

Okay, he was clearly not going to just fuck off, so I made some excuse about the time and FB and I packed up, gave our regards to DJing friend, and got the hell out of there.

Ex-BF got a very terse email the next day telling him that I never wanted to hear from him again. His baffled response: “What did I do?” :rolleyes:

6

Best (one of the best, at any rate):

A long time ago, I met this really cute, sweet, flamey boy at a dance. I was having a horrible day, and was hating the party, and they were playing shit music, but suddenly they put on this song that I like, and I went on the dance floor and immediately he danced up to me and we started getting down. We traded phone numbers and dated for a few months, but drifted apart later. He was one of the first other effeminate guys I met who had a consciousness around it and appreciated it in others.

Anyway, fast-forward seven years. I’ve joined this Facebook group for a protest against something transphobic going on in Vancouver. Next day I get a Facebook message from a woman named Beth. “Um, hi, Matt? This is kind of awkward but… I think we dated.”

I recognized the last name, then looked at the photo. “Oh my god. Did you use to be called [boy name]?!”

Sure enough. She ended up coming to Montreal a few weeks later and we spent an afternoon catching up and having a great old time. A few months after that I stayed with her for a weekend out in Vancouver on business. It was a lot of fun to reconnect with her and now we talk from time to time on the phone.

7

I should say that what made it so interesting for me at the time wasn’t so much the fact that she had transitioned as the fact that I had wondered what happened to her for years and she just popped up out of the blue, and how much fun it was to reconnect. The transition was just a sort of cymbal crash (as well as explaining why I hadn’t been previously able to find her on Facebook)

8

Some months after my last girlfriend broke up with me (amicably), I opened up Lavalife and made a search. She was the first listed match.

9

Another nice one:

I dated a guy named J. for several years back in the early/mid '90s. Semi-amicable breakup: he was pissed in the immediate aftermath [I was the one who ended it] but we’ve been in touch sporadically ever since.

A year ago, I was walking out of the meetinghouse after the memorial service of my much beloved brother-in-law, who had died completely unexpectedly of a heart attack – and who do I see but J. He’d seen the obituary in the newspaper and came to pay his respects (he and I had socialized fairly regularly with my sister and BIL). Very, very sweet of him to come to the service; he then came to the gathering back at the house after and we had a lovely time catching up. It meant so much to me that he came.

10

My husband and I had a rather whirlwind romance. I had been living in Calgary and casually dating someone when my requested transfer back home to Toronto came through. I said goodbye and drove with my two kitties across the country. I met my husband the first day at the office and we were dating the next day. 6 weeks later we moved in together. It was a fairly intense start. The encounters however both happened the second week. First I get a call from the receptionist that there is someone there to see me. I go out to find that Calgary ex has, with now word or warning, quit his job, packed his stuff and followed me to Toronto. Oh boy. 2 weeks. New job and the receptionist who is a friend of my new boyfriend is watching me delicately explain that he should have discussed is with me and that no, I did not want to pick up again and it really didn’t have anything to do with anyone else. Mostly true because even had I not been head over heels the whole following me without warning thing would have skeeved me out. He was sobbing when he left but at least he left. I thought. After work I’m getting cash from a bank machine and new guy is with me and kissing my neck while I try to put in my PIN when the sound of screeching tires made us look outside. Calgary boy had waited outside work to follow me and was now angry.

2 days later new guys ex tried to run me over in a parking garage. She is a whole other story.

11

!!!

He left his job, packed up and completely moved without uttering a peep to come and try to win you back!?1?! See, the crazy ex who tried to kill himself over me had these little things called warning signs that I disregarded or that he hid. But this guy sounds like he somewhat had his life together, and just had a horrible, horrible period of bad judgment. Is that correct, or was he really nuts to begin with?

12

I went to party not long after I’d broken up with an exboyfiend. It was a crappy party, I wandered out to the porch and talked to somebody for a while. Wandered back into the party and found my ex having sex on the living room floor with someone I didn’t know. It was really more surreal than anything else.

13

Getting all the evidence off my car after I ran into her.

Sure made the custody battle less complicated.

14

Dark , murder my ex joke aside
In the mid 70s I dated a wonderful girl in a college in the midwest. Really liked her. I ran out of money and moved back to Maine. We tried to stay connected. She came to Maine to visit, but in the long run, it didn’t work out and she broke it off.

fast forward about 25 years. She was always a bright spot in my mind and I kept pictures of her for years but finally threw them away after getting married. Still, she stayed in my mind in a “I wonder what might have been” So over 50 and single I did what I did every few years and tried to see if I could locate her online.
I found her on classmates.com.
She was divorced {like me} and had evidently thought of me in the same way as I thought of her. We wrote. We talked on the phone and eventually got together and discovered that the same personality traits we liked about each other way back when still existed. We couldn’t spend a lot of time together because we lived states apart, but made several trips to spend time together. It appealed to the sappy romantic in me that we still cared about each other so many years later. More years had passed than our ages at the time.
The problem was that she was a member of a conservative Christian church, that I had been in also when we first met. My beliefs had changed quite a bit and there was no possibility of me going back into the fold. Still, she was very enthusiastic about us and at one point was willing to start planning a life together. I wanted to take it slower since we weren’t actually spending a lot of time with each other. I cared and was willing to be patient and see how things worked out. I respected her beliefs even though I didn’t agree and she seemed to accept and enjoy my friends who were good people but drank and smoked a little at gatherings. It was obvious she cared a lot about what her church friends thought and said, and I feel they probably were telling her that if I wouldn’t repent and come back to church then we had no future. Eventually she decided we weren’t going anywhere and we shouldn’t be in touch AT ALL. I was surprised that she felt no contact at all was the best solution. Why not just continue to be two people who really care about each other and talk occasionally.Never got a real answer to that, but she stopped responding to Emails. Every now and then I try again to see if she’s okay and perhaps has changed her mind.

15

What kind of party was that?

16

Back in November I met someone through a personal ad. We talked on the phone a few times before we met. One thing she mentioned is that she hated her living situation, and had waited for years to move into a super-cool building closer to where she works. It took I while to convince her that I live in that building.

So we went out on a couple of dates, one of which was here. I still have an article of her clothing here, not quite sure what to do with it. Nice girl, but a bit of a downer. She never smiled once when we were together. We decided after our second date not to see each other anymore.

Well, I saw her. Yesterday. With furniture.

I can hear her moving furniture around right now, in the unit above me.

17

An ordinary stand-around-and-chat-while-drinking-beer-and-eating-snacks-party, which made it all the more surreal. I think he was really drunk and his new um-friend was really easy.

18

Best was probably when I was a senior in college and was coming out of the subway station, dressed in a fancy black velvet dress to go to an art opening. I was walking across the plaza when I spied my first love, the guy who had broken my heart freshman year. I called his name and he rushed over to me, picked me up, and spun me around. It was like something out of a movie.

I’m kind of blanking on the worst encounter right now. Maybe I’ve repressed traumatic memories or something.

19

Hey, at least it’ll be easy to return the article of clothing, right?

(And seriously, if you have to have someone you dated move into the building, far better a ‘two dates neither one of us thought it was going anywhere’ than a ‘broke my heart when she dumped me, moving in with her kind-of-a-jerk husband while I’m still single and I can hear the bed squeaking every night’ (or maybe worse, the ‘suicide attempt when I broke up with her and had to stop answering her phone calls’)

20

Excellent points.

I broke up with someone 3 years ago, and I thought it was going to be tough living not only in the same building but on the same floor. But funnily enough, in the 5 months before she moved out, we ran into each other only twice.