On our first dinner date. We had a great conversation. Then I asked a question about her plans for the future in her job and she suddenly flew into a rage and told me to F. off in a loud voice.
It took me 4 years to admit it wasn’t going to work out. There is much I admire about that woman, but her mood swings are like a baseball bat hitting a home run (my head being the baseball). Luv ya honey, but I can’t handle the abuse.
She and I used to go out with a big group of folks after work on Fridays, have a couple drinks, and then people would go their separate ways, to dinner or movies or more drinks or whathaveyou.
One Friday she and I decided that after the big group meeting we’d go home and just spend the evening at home talking, “like we did in the old days.” We got wine and cheese and fired up some jazz and sat down, and…
After 15 minutes we had nothing left to say to each other. We gave up and went to the video store.
That’s when I knew. It didn’t really fizzle out for another six months or so (you don’t throw away six years casually), but I think that was when we both knew.
There were a lot of clues that The Schmuck (that’s all my friends, family and I will refer to him as) wasn’t Mr. Right after all, but there was one particular incident that got through even to my low-self-esteem-drenched skull…
He was sitting on the edge of my bed in my dorm room. I had just undressed and was basically presenting myself, butt naked, for sex. What does he say?
“You look pretty good for a fat girl.”
I don’t remember much after that other than crying inside of my locked bathroom (the dormatory used to be a hotel) bawling my eyes out and him pounding on the door shouting, “I was just kidding.” Bastard.
Now I’m married to a saint who worships my ass. And my thighs. And my belly. And my coochie…
Patty
P.S. I should nominate this for Threadspotting - I nominated its opposite-themed thread, after all.
P.P.S. Wouldn’t you LOVE to know what the people talked about here were possibly thinking? I’d love to know what Dooku’s comedy/tragedy mask freak, Gundy’s Boston boyfriend with the dish-washing issues and Memory Gongs’ April Fool’s Day faux pregnancy test fruitloop would have to say for themselves. Have they wised up and are now rightly ashamed of themselves or do they still feel fine with this questionale behavior? FranticMad’s freak is just plain hopeless.
At the time, it was coming home to a half-empty apartment. Sort of thing that makes you begin to suspect that there just might be some sort of fly in this here ointment. But in hindsight, I pretty much had my eyes sewn, glued, and duct-taped firmly shut to avoid seeing quite a lot of flies.
He convinced me to pay for my own wedding ring with the promise that he would pay me back when he got his next paycheck. The ring was used and too big, so when it was time for him to get paid, he offered to get it resized. He was going to bring it back the next day along with the money to pay me back.
Found out he hadn’t worked in a month, and he sold my ring to get a new muffler for his truck.
On my wedding day, when, without asking me, she promised he rmother that in the event she was incapacitated or homeless she could come live with us. Actually, she didn’t say “you can come live with us”, shesaid “you’re always welcome to come stay with me”.
I ignored it because I was 33 years old and desperate to be married. justover 4 years later,mother-in-law had been living with us “temporarily” for over a year, (funny how the marriage started to fall apart when she moved in) she tried to commit suicide and left a note asking me to take care of her mother.
I think it was when she told me she was a lesbian and was leaving me and taking the kid.
I may sometimes miss subtle clues, but I picked up on that one right away.
The night he punched me in the nose.
The night he bashed me into unconsciousness, making me miscarry at 5 and a half months. He’d hit me before but I’d always excused it or told myself that it was a one off and wouldn’t happen again. It took losing my daughter to finally wake up and realise that he was never going to change and the next person to die would be me.
When she looked at me with her big watery eyes and said, “please, when we are in public don’t let me see you look at any other women because it would just kill me”. This was after going out only a couple of times.
Also, from the beginning I told her I was an atheist, and she acted like it was ok. She was a mormon on probation or on some black list or something. I said that I would not go to any church service or be involved in church activities. Later she told me that that bothered her.
Lastly, I told her I was not interested in having children (at that point in my life, and still don’t). We were talking hypothetically and she said that if she were married to someone who did not want kids, she would lie about taking birth control and get pregnant anyway rather than discuss the matter before it got to that stage.
Fortunately it ended when she stole $1000.00 and ran off to her ex. It was the best money I ever spent because it got her totally out of my life once and for all. The relationship was probably about three or four months in total.
When I realized that I resented his expectations that I spend more time with him. It was a reasonable expectation for two people who had begun to speak cautiously of marriage. We were trying to create romance in what was really just a very good friendship. We are still good friends, but he’s now someone else’s husband.
When her cats started pissing on my clothes.
Cool…first post ever and it gets nominated for thread spotting. This just might swell my ego.
After he went through drug rehab (to keep his job) and continued using afterward. When he spent all his money on drugs and I put myself in massive debt to keep up with the rent and utility payments. When he acknowledged the fact that, while we were engaged, he could have gotten another woman pregnant, and made it sound like a one-night-stand, but I found out it was definitely a relationship that lasted a while. When he cried to his momma over the phone that I wouldn’t give him a second chance and I’d given him 10 or 20 of them. When I told him I was moving out and he threatened to stab himself in our bathroom, and I was more concerned that he might hurt my cats.
But, now I’m happily married with a cute kid, and he’s in prison for armed robbery (coke habits are tough to finance). He used to be a corrections officer too–ah, irony.
When she tried to knee me in the groin, I thought that would be the end. But my family told me to forgive, and my friends told me it was OK for a woman to try to hit a guy.
But when she started waving kitchen knives around, well, that was a little too much for me.
Okay… This is my first post here, as well, although I’ve been reading for quite a while.
I think, for me, the big moment when I realized she wasn’t “The One” was when I found her in the newspaper for having been arrester after stabbing her ex-boyfriend in the throat and trying to jump off a bridge.
DCF
And here I thought that was a sign my wife and I knew each other inside and out. What did you expect to talk about? It takes a lot less than 15 minutes for Sue & I to run out of “conversation” - simply because there isn’t that much in our daily lives we don’t share already. In my experience, that’s normal for people who’ve been together a long time.
We’ve been married fifteen years, and I don’t see that stopping any time soon.
When I found out he had secretly run up a $40,000 credit card bill.
My ex (the one whose breathing annoyed me) and I had nothing to talk about either. It wasn’t because we knew each other so well, it was just because we really didn’t really have anything to say that would interest the other. Trying to think of something to say to him that wouldn’t cause a fight was hard
My SO and I have been together for seven years. We can still spend all night talking. Of course we don’t do that every night, but the fact that we can and sometimes do makes all the difference to me.
There is a difference between the not talking that goes on between a happily married, connected couple and a couple that has nothing at all in common.
True enough. But Jackelope made it sound like his relationship collapsed out of boredom.