For me, it was when I realized how much happier I was when she wasn’t around, and how much more I enjoyed spending time with anyone who wasn’t her. She was simply a mean, dreadful person – always angry, and looking for someone to blame it on. Even then, it took me a long time to finally break it off. (First girlfriend – didn’t really understand that it’s ok to break up if you’re not happy.) The only regret I have in my life is not breaking up with her a lot sooner – what a waste.
But considering how unbelievably awesome Mrs. Giraffe is, I’d say I’m still ahead of the game overall.
When the manager of the apartment complex we lived in mentioned a “friend” staying at our apt. when I was on a business trip, and finding an email from her later explaining her professional ahem fees, PLUS finding her airfare (he flew her in) billed to my credit card. I figured I didn’t really like him anymore after that.
College girlfriend - we had just moved in together, something I was never certain about, when we began decorating our new place. OK, I guess I can tolerate a couple of Nagels here and there, but then we started hanging her masks. In the living room. She had these painted china masks, each one about 5 inches tall. You know, like the “comedy/tragedy” masks. Some had ribbons, others has different fabric attached to them. Well, she spent about an hour giving me shit because I wasn’t hanging them properly while she supervised and kept making me get back on the ladder to rearrange them.
So I’m standing there, staring at these fugly masks, listening to her make some sarcastic comment about how stupid I was to hang two “comedies” next to each other, and I had one of those “moments of clarity.” I calmly stepped off the ladder, handed her the mask I was holding in my hand, and left. The next day I showed up with my friend’s truck and began moving my shit out.
Best decision I ever made, aside from marrying my wife.
When I finaly realised just how selfish she was. It affected her kids, even. Needless to say, it was rough to do, because by that time I was also in love with her kids, but… I just couldn’t do it.
I tried to stay friends with her, really, because I didn’t want her (or the kids) to be unhappy for any reason. Even that didn’t work.
FTR, she was the one who broke up with me first, but as I said in another thread, my break ups last a long time, always getting back together “to work it out.” I thought she was “The One.” At one time, she did of me, too. She even asked me to marry her (twice). This time, the break up lasted longer than the original good time.
Yes, she had/has good points in her favor. However, the major flaw of being so incredibly selfish finally trumped everything else.
In retrospect, for me there is ALWAYS a pivotal moment, never quite realized at the time, when it was over. After that, the relationship is a walking ghost until someone realizes it’s been over for months/years.
With my most recent ex, it was at the midpoint of our relationship. I spent two years, first getting him to stop sleeping with other women, then to move out of his mother’s house (he was 34), then to get his degree and get the job he wanted. He was supposed to move to where I was (after I tried for a year to get a job where he was and couldn’t, but spent tons of time and money trying). He kept putting it off, and THE NIGHT BEFORE HE WAS SUPPOSED TO MOVE, he called me at midnight and kept me on the phone until 3am, still undecided. I was all out of effort: finally, something broke in me and I just gave up. I told him to do whatever the hell he wanted, but I was hanging up. At that point, it was over for me.
He moved, but things were never right after that. We had a renaissance last year, but then he picked a fight with me about dental floss, and used it as a springboard to tell me how evil I was as a person, and that was the last nail in the coffin.
I knew he was wrong, in retrospect, when I found he poured out all of his feelings to me… WHEN I WAS ASLEEP! I had a voice-activated tape recorder (I was a journalist at the time), and it caught some night-time revelations. He, pouring out his heart, me, snoring lightly. After that, I never slept nearly as well. I should have known… but I married him anyway. Divorced, 7 yrs now. No wonder. Still creeps me out.
When our second child was born. I was up all nite (17 hr labor) and the baby finally came in the a.m. Later that morning he called me in a drunken rage threatening to come to the hospital and beat all the nurses’ and the doctor’s @$$es. My sis-in-law wanted to bring my daugter to see the baby, and I was so terrified that she would witness this carnage, so I said “No”. Later I thought, “What kind of Daddy would stomp on his daughter’s first greeting of the new baby?”. I started thinking of ways out, that day.
It’s been 14 years, and I can still feel that sick knot in the pit of my stomach.
I’m glad I did though, if just for our daughter, we were divorced after a year. I still see her three times a week but we have only our kid in common.
Now there’s a girl I met last year, I know SHE’s the one, I mean, when the snake jumps up on the kayak in the middle of the river, looks you both over and then swims away, well, that’s just FATE. But she doesn’t know it.
He wasn’t ‘the one’ but boy, did the universe snap it’s fingers and wake me up. We were at a fairly nice restaurant, he excused himself from the table and came back a few minutes later with a couple of safety pins through the flesh of his cheeks. I’d gone out with him in the beginning because he seemed fun, then he was wacky but still fun. It took the safety pins and blood running down his cheeks for me to see he hadn’t ever been joking at all. Eesh!
