There are many things that would make you break up with someone, but let’s skip the obvious things like cheating, horrific lies, stealing. Have you had something that wasn’t on that scale, but solidified your decision to break up?
This is brought to mind by one of my dad’s stories. He was a pretty new MIT grad, and dating some woman steadily, but apparently shakily. They were driving, and there was a sign saying, “Spirit of '76”. This was in about '63, so not near the bicentennial, but when she said, “What’s that mean?”, he thought, “I cannot go through life explaining all this stuff.”
My mom was an RN student when they married, and now she’s a Nurse Practitioner, and even so they get a bit frustrated sometimes, with his misconceptions about medicine, and hers about physics or chemistry. Well, you can’t know everything…
I’d like to be cute and say that it was the dirty underwear on the dining room floor all the time, but it was the cheating.
Specific moment: when I found out about the cheating by reading his email. He had left the screen open when he left the house. I read it all. He wanted to be caught. He also left a card the skank ho sent him on the counter for me to read. Dunbass.
I’d been dating this guy for about three years when the Prince album with the symbol came out (1992). It has the sexiest song ever written, “Damn U,” and I realized that every time I heard that song – and I was listening to that album a lot – I was thinking about my old BF, not my current one.
We were having yet another argument, in the middle of which I said, ‘THIS (the arguing) is what’s wrong with our relationship’. She replied, ‘Well at least we’re communicating!’.
We were on the phone and it felt like he was purposely trying to piss me off, like he thought it would be funny if I were really angry or something. When I realized this was happening and got kind of quiet while I was trying to figure out why the hell he would do that, instead of asking me what was wrong or commenting on the fact that I got quiet, he started making jokes about animal cruelty. I hung up on him and called him back a few days later to let him know we wouldn’t be seeing one another any longer.
We fought all the time. I never knew what would cause a fight. Once it was my body language told her I had a bad time on a special weekend (even though I told her over and over that I had fun.)
Finally, after a short break up, we got back together and she tried to throw a surprise party for me. But my friends didn’t know we were back together, so they didn’t answer right away. She tossed a fit because I hadn’t emailed everyone with the news. She flamed all my friends.
I realized then that we would always be fighting about *something *and I didn’t need the stress.
Even though I’ve been alone since then, I’d make the same choice today.
He was over at my house. I was sitting in my car in the garage trying to configure the garage door opener. He was pottering around taking out the garbage. Without my realizing it, he left the door from the house to the garage open–and I opened the garage door. Ten minutes later I realized that both doors were open and my cat could easily have run away. And it was his fault, because he didn’t have his shit together enough to close the door to the garage.
It doesn’t sound like much, but this dude could never remember to pull that door all the way shut. Mice were getting into the house that way. It wasn’t secure. My cat could get loose. We’d been on shaky ground for months, with a bad long distance situation and him becoming increasingly jealous and controlling, telling me that I couldn’t go out without him because “I’d be raped”, showing up places to take me home because it was late, insisting that I call him at certain times, give him my computer passwords, badmouthing my friends, etc.
So yeah. I cracked. I screamed at him. He got in his car and left. He never came back.
Oddly enough, it wasn’t the cheating (though I am still kicking myself that I didn’t dump him for that), or the laughing in my face when I mentioned the idea of living together after dating for 2+ years, or his refusal ever to stay at my place or give me a key to his place. (And there’s lots more where that came from.)
The final straw was when I went in to my ortho for injections of synthetic cartilage into my screwed-up ankle joint, which is not a fun thing under the best of circumstances (the stuff is very viscous, and they have to use a HUGE syringe and give you a local anasthetic first). I reacted badly to the injection, and ended up back on crutches for another week.
At the end of that week, I limped back onto the train with a cane. Nobody gave up a seat for me on the train, so by the time I got to work, I was very sore and grumpy. I called my boyfriend to tell him, and his reaction, instead of sympathy, was “wow, and you look so visibly pregnant, too!” (I’d gained maybe 10 lbs. over 2+ years of multiple leg surgeries, rehab, etc.)
That was when I told him to fuck off, that I didn’t care to speak to him again until he learned to treat me with respect, and hung up on him. Should have done it at least a couple of years before I did.
When I had a heart to heart with him and told him that not only were we not having sex anymore, I found that I really didn’t ever want to have sex with him. I just couldn’t “get it up” so to speak. I saw this as a problem, given that we were married. His answer? “I think that’s just what happens when you’re married to someone for a long time.”
We’d been married a year, and were both under 30. We were divorced within six months.
We were living in different cities, and both flying in to his parents’ home town to spend Thanksgiving with them. It was my first time meeting his parents.
We went to church on Thanksgiving Day (apparently this is “done” in his religion - the place was packed). People were standing up and sharing things that they were thankful for, and it was pretty standard stuff - family, friends, prosperity. Then he stood up and went into this rambling story about how he’d left two hours late for the four-hour drive to the airport to get there (at which point I went " :eek: you almost stranded me here with your parents and without you?"), and that he’d thought about turning back and just skipping the visit (" :eek: :eek: yes, you did!"), but then he felt an awareness that God wanted him to continue driving, and when he got there, his flight was three hours delayed, so he made it anyway.
As an agnostic with atheist tendencies, I was already a little uncomfortable about marrying a religious person, but that sealed the deal right there. Call me crazy, but even if God exists, I don’t think he really concerns himself with whether I make my plane flight, especially if I’m late due to my own stupidity.
Moons and moons ago I dated a girl I absolutely knew was the most beautiful of any in existence. She was Indian, tall, with light coffee-colored skin, huge black eyes and hair down to her hips. Long, painful and, in retrospect, ridiculously obvious, story short, one day I found out she was married with two small children. I broke up with her the same day.
Wait…it gets stupider.
I went back to her. We then clandestinely had a month of the best sex I’ve ever had in my life, before my feeling like an absolute creep became too much for me and I broke it off, this time for good.
My nightmare didn’t end there, and I eventually had to move away, but I did the right thing in the end, which doesn’t at all excuse my bad behaviour.
As he (again) interrupted me to bitch (some more) about the same petty problem he’d been bitching about nonstop for weeks, I realized that nothing was ever going to make him happy, nothing was ever going to be resolved, nothing was ever going to be his fault, he was never going to pull his head out of his ass, that he didn’t even *see * me (or anyone else) there, and that most horrifically of all, he was never going to shut up.
We got into a stupid argument over whether or not J-Lo and Pam Anderson were legit celebrities in their own right or just star-f***ers.
This was a very odd argument, we never fought to begin with so we didn’t really have an arguing style figured out. I couldn’t have cared less about professional bimbos like Pamela Anderson, but for some reason he was all torqued up about people like them. Viciously demeaning them, as well as a host of male actors, but the misogynistic overtones, the way he demeaned and belittled the females…it was just odd. Like alarm-bell going off type of odd. Irrational anger not being my gig, I bailed.
I was really hungry and he was cooking me dinner. I love to cook and I love to eat home-cooked food so I really appreciated the effort. I also try hard to respect other people’s kitchens, and don’t like to be a busybody, so I don’t help unless asked.
I watched him put the pan on the stove and refrain from turning on the burner. My belly rumbled. I offered to help him but was refused. I watched him … sloooooowly … carrrrefullllllllly … ever so slooooowly … slice the onion. I watched him put the slices of onion in the (still quite cold) pan. I watched him hunt down a utensil with which to stir the slices of onion in the pan. I watched him rummage … hunt … rummage … rummage … dig … find the garlic. I watched him fumble … fumble … peel … pick … fumble … try to peel the garlic. I watched him chop … chop … chop … chop … the garlic and put it in the (still cold) pan. I watched him drizzle oil onto the (still cold) pan and stir … stir … apparently unaware of the way oil and onion blend much better when the pan is actually hot … and the fact that it cooks faster that way too …
What the fuck was he doing? I could have had the entire dinner cooked in the time it took him to chop the onion. He couldn’t cook and didn’t want to learn and wasn’t at all concerned about the fact that I was ravenous with hunger.
I feel really shallow but I can still remember watching him stir those onions and oil in that cold pan, and I came so close to gnawing his arm off that I realized that our relationship could never work out. People who can’t cook remain the prime undateable category for me.
This isn’t why we broke up, but why I never talk to him any more.
My first SO and I broke up amicably enough, and I moved on to someone else. We kept in sporadic contact over the years, and a few years later when I was on my own again, we were talking. It was this conversation that was the penultimate cue to cutting him off. In it he told me that he had decided that he wasn’t actually gay (despite our 5 years together and numerous other male-male sexual contacts), that all that was just a phase and that he was going to pursue relationships with women. I wished him luck, and thought to myself all the thoughts that you’re probably thinking now.
A couple of weeks later he left me a voicemail, which was the final straw. The first thing he did in the voicemail was to make fun of my outgoing message. Then it hit me - he had spent our entire relationship making fun of me, mostly of my appearance, or my intellectuality, and so on. My self-esteem was low enough that I took it as a matter of course. Now I was in a lot better shape, and I realized that I didn’t have to take that any more. So I didn’t bother to return his call, and he never called me again. I don’t miss him.
Roddy
Not the straw that broke the camel’s back, but one that made the blind girl see: we watched Jerry Maguire together.
Ok, a little backstory: Me, single mom to a son. Him, really really nice guy who loved my son. My son. Not me. After 2 years of dating, infidelity, heartbreak, lather, rinse and repeat, we watched Jerry Maguire together, realized that was what we were facing - minus the last half. He wasn’t my best friend, I didn’t complete him, he didn’t have me at hello. What he was was a really great guy who loved my kid, and liked me a whole lot. And so we were finally able to face it and split up for good.
Summer vacation after freshman year of college. I’m at my parents’ house, he’s at his father’s house. I’m starting to get second thoughts, but he’s invited me to spend a week with him at his dad’s house, so I figure I’ll see.
But then I have to call him and tell him that I just can’t come right now. My grandmother has just died.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” he says…
…“Were you close to her?”
This seems like a really silly reason compared to some here, but it was one of those moments of clarity when I realized I just couldn’t make it work. (With an ex-BF, not with my now-husband just so no one gets confused!)
I’m a very neat and organized person, and while I knew that my ex wasn’t, I put up with it because it was a long-distance relationship and it didn’t impact me too much. But we’d been together for a while, and he bought a house that we’d picked out together, and he was starting to make sounds about something more permanent.
I’d visited him in October and bought him a grill for the new house, and we used it while I was there. I didn’t visit again until the following March. (He came up for Christmas and again in early February.) When I got there - in March, 5 months after I’d been there previously - the grill tools that we’d used in October were still sitting on the counter, unwashed in all that time.
And I realized that I just couldn’t ever live with someone who could live with that level of uncleanliness and disorganization.