Hi folks,
I have been reading these forums for some time (there seems to be an unusually high level of intelligence among the posters to these forums), but this is my first post.
I just spent a very pleasurable bit of time reading the stories in the thread about “When you knew he/she was the ONE”? My question is this, “when did you know he/she was not the one?”
From my own point of view it was when she, the woman I thought was the best thing that had ever happened to me, admitted to having an affair with another man while we were committed to each other, and almost having one (at that point they had just engaged in serious necking/petting, call it what you will) with another one. To be fair, she never claimed her actions were my fault, she had told me from the beginning that she had had “fidelity problems” in past relationships. She claimed, often, that ours was the best relationship she had ever had, she just couldn’t stop herself from acting on these impulses. A different man may have been able to help her get past these issues. I could not. When she told me she thought I would help her once she told me about it my only response was “Maybe by making you face the consequences of your actions I’m helping you the only way I know how”. It’s been three months, and she now has a new guy, and I still think I did the right thing.
So, when did you know that he/she were not the One?
My last relationship ended last fall. At first I thought she was “the one”, but then I began to think otherwise when she started getting greedy and tried to use me for the fact that I had money, a job and a car. After I told her that I could no longer afford to take her out to dinner 2-3 times a week and buy toys and goodies for her kids from previous marriages I knew things weren’t going to get anywhere. She began to make sudden excuses to not wanting to see me, and she was suddenly getting sick a lot more (pregnancy could be ruled out since she had her tubes tied). When she began talking about how she kept thinking about her ex-boyfriends and ex-husbands I knew this thing was over with for good.
In retrospect I’m glad I bailed out of that relationship when I did.
To clarify, you’re asking, “For the women who you once thought were The One, when did you know?”, not “How were you spectacularly dumped?”, because that would be one big, long thread full o’ woe…
With my ex, I pretty much knew he wasn’t the one during my pregnancy scare. I was freaking out. He wasn’t being any help–but I figured that was okay–he’s young. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do.
That friday, however, for a very minor reason (I fell asleep at the computer at 2 AM when I was supposed to be talking to him), he ripped into me. I mean, really, really, really badly. To the point where I was crying. And he did it “to make [me] stronger.” The boy was calling me a worthless bitch to help my self-esteem.
That would’ve been bad enough…but that was the exact same line my dad used to “apologize” for calling me a “fat lazy bitch” when I was living at home (ages 5-18).
That was when I knew it wasn’t meant to be. Didn’t stop me from clinging on to him, but, hey, I was young and stupid, and he was my first boyfriend.
I realized that she wasn’t the one when all there was was a physical attraction. We didn’t have similar interests, and we stopped having interesting conversations.
Then I showed up at her house one day for a date and she had invited her friend the Cowboy over. They were going to his horse ranch. She had forgotten about our date.
Not that this makes me sad. Quite the contrary. I was wondering how I was going to break it off and she did it for me.
I went out with a guy once, and his idea of a good time was running over turtles! Honest to god. He was just so oooogy. The date ended about five minutes later. Redneck mutherfucker.
A few years ago, I moved my son and I to Boston from Chicago to live with my boyfriend of (at that point) 3 years. The boyfriend’s one household chore was to do the dishes. A couple of days after moving in, I walked into the kitchen one night to find all the dishes done – except my son’s plate, bowl, glass, and flatware. They were still in the sink. I looked in the dishwasher – plenty of room for more. I asked the boyfriend why he didn’t wash those. He replied, “I didn’t think I should have to do his dishes.” In that moment I saw everything good about him stripped away to see what an incredibly selfish, small, petty person he was, and regretted moving in with him more than anything I’d ever done. By that time, though, he had me convinced that no one else would want to date a girl with a kid, so it took me a while to grow up enough to do something about it.
She was great, but she didn’t brush her teeth regularly. I was going in to kiss her once and she literally had green fuzz on her front teeth. The night we broke up, I found out that she had cheated on me. Later, when I was studying with a mutual friend while she was around, she became enraged and threw her Doc Marten at my head. She said it was because she saw me write in my textbook with a ballpoint pen.
There were many things (both small and large) that made me want to leave my ex. There was one moment I remember very clearly as “the moment” I knew I was going to leave. We were in bed, he was sleeping and I was not. I couldn’t sleep because the sound of him breathing was the most annoying thing I had ever heard in my entire life. I don’t know what I would have done if he had started to snore.
I knew that if I got mad at him for just breathing there wasn’t much he was going to be able to do that wouldn’t anger me. I hated being angry all the time. So the next week I left.
When, even after I had tried to forgive his cheating on me, he called me fat (this was after a multi-year debacle with leg surgery and chronic pain, during most of which I was on crutches. I was at most ~15 lbs. over my ideal weight during the whole thing; he was rather more over his ideal weight than I was, but I never cared).
I told him to fuck off and that I didn’t want to speak to him again until he learned to treat me with respect.
When I moved out of state and realized that despite loving him, I didn’t like him that much - or who I was when I was with him.
It was losing myself - and feeling like I shouldn’t have different opinions. I was away from that and realized that I could and should think for myself, not be who he wanted me to be, and only that. And that being myself was going to mean that I changed - freezing who I was at 21 for fear of not having him. And realizing that I was only afraid of not having him because it meant that I’d be alone.
Then I realized that being single does not equal being alone OR being lonely. And that right then, I didn’t want to date him anymore and I didn’t need to.
I rarely get sick, so when I’m sick enough to throw up, I’m really sick. We were at a friend’s house and he wouldn’t stop playing video games to take me home when I was puking my guts out from food poisoning (not the friend’s fault, we’d gone out to an early dinner). There was other stuff too, but that night was when I knew I’d have to break the engagement sooner or later.
We had just gotten back together and were only together for two weeks. She tried to throw a surprise party for my birthday and invited friend from all over for it. They didn’t know that we were back together (they are good friends, but we don’t talk every week) and she freaked out because I hadn’t told everyone. I’m much too old for such nonesense.