I’ll try to keep it short. I’ve been with my husband almost 33 years, but before that:
Boyfriend #1 was way more good-looking than me. He seemed to feel the need to make fun of my looks for some reason, maybe I wasn’t ashamed enough (to suit him) of being, shall we say, plain. Anyway, in the end we parted amicably enough and stayed sort-of friends, until on one voicemail at my home number he made fun of my outgoing message. Never returned the call, never talked to him again.
Boyfriend #2 I moved in with right after leaving #1. Not so much rebound, he was kind of needy and maybe that appealed to me after #1. As soon as we established housekeeping, he acted like we were an old married couple who didn’t need to have sex. I was too young for that. But I stuck with him for 6 years. I left him when I met #3. Not the best ending on my resume. I wish we could have stayed friends.
#3 was a long-distance relationship, and I told myself that I was really in love for the first time. He seemed enthusiastic. But he was 14 years younger than me, just out of college, and was making very little money, so if I wanted to see him, I had to pay for the travel, either me to see him, or him to come see me. After a couple of years I realized that he wasn’t really that into me. He wasn’t a gold-digger, he didn’t expect expensive gifts or anything, he just expected me to pay for everything we did together, and he seemed to be only tolerating my presence. After his last kind of disastrous visit to me, I broke up formally by letter (this was before the internet).
Then I had 2 glorious years of living alone, I was forty and in therapy. At the end of that time, when I met my husband I wasn’t really looking for a relationship, but we clicked. We met on Memorial Day weekend, and moved in together (we had to find a new place) by the Fourth of July.
I didn’t feel attraction. In hindsight, she had really great character, and it was superficial of me to ditch her good character just because I didn’t like who she was externally/physically on the outside and didn’t feel sparks.
After having what I thought was an amicable breakup, my ex blocked me on Instagram and then attempted to extort me out of $200 as “repayment” for concert tickets because I (allegedly) ruined the experience of seeing her favorite band perform live.
First hardly qualifies, an impossibly beautiful girl that liked me back? We went on a couple dates before her family moved away after 8th grade.
Second, we were together a few months but despite the mutual attraction weren’t compatible. In modern terms, she ghosted me, by disappearing from the high school we attended for two weeks.
Another girl in our junior class comforted me in my grief, then asked me out. 29 years later…
I’ve only been married once (now for 32 years), but I had two long-term relationships in college, both of which lasted for about two years.
The first one was probably doomed from the start, due to the age difference, if nothing else: I was 18 when we started dating, and she was 32. We had wildly different life experiences: I was a goofy college kid, while she had been in the Air Force, and married and divorced twice (with two kids) by the time we had met. It was also a physically-driven relationship, and she eventually got a wandering eye, and dumped me for another guy (who was also younger than she was). We stayed cordial, but were not terribly close after we broke up; I haven’t heard from her, or heard anything about her, in at least the past decade.
The second one was with a woman who was much closer in age to me: when we first started dating, I was 20, and she was 18. It was a great relationship, we had a lot in common, and we were starting to talk about marriage. She then, quite suddenly, broke it off; her stated rationale, at that time, was that she was pre-med, and planning to go to medical school – due to that, she felt that she would have to devote most of the next decade of her life to that as her sole focus, and didn’t feel that she could be the partner and spouse which I deserved. What she didn’t vocalize back then, but which became clear within a few years after our breakup, was that she was more attracted to women than to men. The two of us have always remained friends, and there’s still an emotional (but now platonic) closeness that we share; ten years ago, I attended her wedding, and her wife was thrilled to get to meet the guy she’d heard about for years.
First ex-wife, to this day I don’t know. We had our ups & downs like any married couple, but I have to say that 12 years later I’m still shocked that she was as unhappy as she apparently was.
Second ex-wife - there were expectations of blending families that some of the adult/near-adult step-children were not on board with, which turned out to be irreconcilable.
Actually, she did not. I’ve told the story in another thread here, about the “recovered memory” movement in the late '80s and early '90s; she wound up suffering from some mental health issues about two years after we broke up, and her therapists convinced her that she was suppressing memories of her parents being in a satanic cult.
It took her several years to move past that, and rebuild her relationship with her family. She explained to me that a history of psychological issues was going to make medical schools unlikely to accept her, which put an end to that ambition for her. She eventually went back to school to study social work, earned her PhD, and is now a college professor.
First ex-wife: I was too young to be married, and too stubborn to listen to anybody counseling caution. (As I’m fond of saying, I was married and divorced before I was old enough to drink to celebrate either.)
Second ex-wife: she spent most of her time drunk and/or high while I took care of the kids and was generally the sole breadwinner. Eventually, just prior to COVID, I (finally) decided enough was enough. Called it quits, she ran off with Joe Barfly and ended up getting into meth and eventually getting locked up; luckily my (step)kids chose to stay with me at the end and were spared having to deal with that.
My first wife cheated and left me for someone else. She became an alcoholic and died of cirrhosis of the liver. Awful person. I guess that makes her my ex.
I only had a couple of short-term relationships before getting married at 31. First girlfriend I was desperate, and it shouldn’t have gone past a first date. I was desperate for a relationship, and she was desperate to get married. After a few months I woke up and decided it was unkind to let it go any further. She was dating someone else within a couple of weeks. 8 years later I was dating someone I was very interested in, but she decided after a few months she didn’t want to be in a relationship after all. I don’t think she ever got married.