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Reddit user u/Secure-Seat-409 posed the question, “Why did you break up with your previous partner?” The thread promptly filled with hundreds of breakup stories — some of which were particularly wild, intense, or unique. Here are some of the more “extreme” and jaw-dropping reasons people dumped their previous partners.
1.
“He had a female best friend who was always all over him inappropriately and acted horribly towards me. After nearly two years of asking him to please make her stop being so mean to me, and him shrugging and saying, ‘She just doesn’t like you,’ I told him I could no longer live like this, and it was me or me. He picked her. Happy ending though. I met my now-husband just two days later. And, once my ex was single, the female friend had no interest in him as she had ‘won,’ and she stopped talking to him entirely.”
3.
“He had a serious bedwetting issue. Ruined my Tempur-Pedic mattress and refused to either seek medical help or wear incontinence briefs because that was somehow more embarrassing than knowingly allowing your partner to wake up soaked in piss.”
4.
“We were at dinner, and he said he’d spoken to his realtor about selling my house because it was too small for him. We didn’t live together, and I’d never discussed his moving in because I’d already been thinking of breaking up with him. So…I dropped the bomb right then at the table.”
5.
“His mother is the reason we broke up. And his lack of a spine. She developed a dislike for me, probably because I am antiracist. I couldn’t listen to her spewing the n-word and screeching about Confederate statues anymore. When she began to scream at me about ridiculous things, and her son just utterly refused to stand up for me, I just walked out.”
6.
“Her filing for divorce to marry a priest she had been flirting with was the last straw. I had to put my foot down and say that if she continued on that path, I just didn’t think I could be with her anymore. Probably a bit harsh, but you have to respect yourself, you know?”
7.
“Oh, this is a fun one. My ex firstly lied about having leukemia, said she had a brother who died because of it, and that her condition was getting worse and needed to go abroad to get treatment. She then proceeded to say that she had gotten involved with some bad people at a party she had attended. ‘They think I stole their drugs and now are asking me for money,’ she said. Foolishly, I trusted that and decided to help her slowly by sending her money here and there. Something in me told me it was suspicious AF, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt. $7k later, I found out she was lying about EVERYTHING. Got my money back thankfully, but boy was that a whole stressful experience!”
8.
“I had found a used mask with makeup a different color than what I use, and a used condom in the toilet that didn’t get flushed properly when I came over unexpectedly one day. He made 101 excuses, then, a few days later, he accidentally answered a call on speaker that let the rest of the cat out of the bag. He was cheating on me with his ex-girlfriend, who lived on his street, unbeknownst to me, the entire time. She would watch from her window to see when I would leave to go home and call him to see if she could come over. Only this time, she didn’t watch long enough to see that I got in the car, and he came out about 10 minutes after I did and got in too.”
9.
“She got into a car with two men she met at a bar on a whim and drove 300 miles with them to a party city. Later, she bragged to me about how adventurous she was. I’m glad she was okay, but I knew at that moment that she wasn’t right for me.”
10.
“He downloaded Tinder, met a girl, texted with her for over a month, told her he was living with his cousin (we were living together), and then went on a date with her.”
11.
“My previous partner was my secretary, and she ended up leaving me for my wife. I knew my wife was bi, and we were open, but I didn’t know my secretary was also bi and had a crush on her. It all worked out in the end. My wife moved to the UK, and my secretary got married, but it actually sort of hurt my feelings at the time.”
12.
“We were together for three years, and I broke up with him because he had been having an affair for many months and decided to tell me at the beginning of our three-month trip to Central America. He said he wasn’t sure if he loved me or her, and he also blamed me and said his reason for finding someone else was my depression and the fact that I didn’t go to concerts with him. So, I broke it off and traveled solo for the rest of the trip.”
13.
“He cheated with a colleague/friend from my workplace. Told me about it and said he’d understand if I broke up with him. Silly me kept hoping our love was real. A year later, I found out he had kept cheating with different women at different ages (including one who was his mother’s age), and that pretty much sealed the deal. Four and a half years of my life down the drain…”
14.
“He wanted someone to go to raves with. I always wanted more peace, like staying at home, cooking, and going for a walk in the nearby park. He just randomly messaged me, ‘I found a girl for a threesome,’ to which I responded, ‘Good, now find a second one,’ and that’s how it ended.”
15.
“He was still in contact with the ex he cheated on his previous girlfriend with, and he wouldn’t cut her off because ‘she was a big part of his life.’ That was more of a situationship, but it hurt like hell to end it.”
16.
“She lied about stopping by my house and taking care of my cat while I was out of the country.”
17.
“He got a sex worker pregnant while he was stationed in Germany. The only reason I found out about the whole situation was that he and his buddies were regulars at the brothel, and I guess word got around that this girl was pregnant. I’m sure she kept the baby because he was in the military, and good on her, so he can pay up the ass forever. His bunkmate told me about the whole thing (he liked me, so I don’t know if he thought that by telling me, I would want to be with him). I confronted my partner, and he denied it, but he eventually owned up to it. We tried working through it, he proposed, I accepted, but I couldn’t forgive him. So, we ended up breaking up.”
“I was around 19 or 20, and he was 25. It was too much for me. The only reason I stayed with him so long after I found out was because he was my first EVERYTHING and I didn’t want to lose that. I’m fine now. I still have trust issues, but I do my best not to let that carry into any other relationships.”
18.
“I lived alone with my ex partner, just us and two cats. We both woke up to shower and start our day. She showered first and went on with her day (she worked from home). As soon as I peeled back the shower curtain, I found a big, human-sized turd sitting on the shower floor. I was astounded! I was already pretty much done with her for many, many, many reasons, but this sealed the deal. I confronted her politely (for the most part) about the poop. We went into the bathroom, and I showed it to her, to which she claimed she had no idea how it had gotten there. Furthermore, she tried to blame it on one of our cats. Like, how does a whole turd come out of your ass and you had no idea? You didn’t see it or smell it? She just birthed a whole turd on the shower floor somehow, truly claimed to have no idea, and just left it there, and then was wild enough to try and blame the poor cat? WTH!!!!”
19.
“She was using me to make her baby daddy jealous. She would post pics of us together and call me her kids’ new dad. I told her to quit that childish behavior, but she wouldn’t stop with the pics and passive-aggressive posts. One night, I just texted her that it was over and said I couldn’t deal with her BS anymore. She messaged me a year later on my birthday. I told her to stop messaging me, and I haven’t heard from her in 10 years.”
20.
“We couldn’t eat any meal or go anywhere without spending hours taking the perfect photo and posting it on Instagram, where he had many followers. I later found out some of those followers were sexting him, and he was reciprocating. He was also a narcissistic, manipulative person. I laugh about it now, though.”
21.
“She called me ‘husband’ multiple times three weeks into dating. Not only to me, but to people in public. ‘This is my husband!’ ‘My husband got me this.'”
22.
“The girl he was cheating on me with tried to surprise him by decorating his room for his birthday. I showed up early to do the same.”
23.
“She cheated on me with a coworker and with another guy I thought was a friend. She was unable to comprehend why I’d throw away the four years we had together. Yeah, that was her frame of mind. She was not sorry about what she did, but upset that I couldn’t just accept it and move on.”
24.
“We were on FaceTime, and I told her that I had to go to the bathroom, so I was going to hang up. She then asks, ‘Are you breaking up with me?’ I told her no, I wasn’t breaking up with her, I just had to go to the bathroom. She then said, ‘That’s a breakup, so now we’re no longer together.'”
25.
“The woman I broke up with before I met my wife got caught sexting another man and agreeing to send him photos. This was only three or four days after we decided to actually be in a relationship, not just date. I caught her when my phone took a crap on me, and she loaned me a spare phone she had. When I went to text her on it, I saw some suspicious messages. I opened the text messages, and sure enough, there were messages between her and another man, and they were only a couple of days old. The strange thing is that she texted me about 10 minutes after leaving my home, and, strangely enough, she apologized for the text messages on the phone. ‘I forgot to delete them before I gave it to you,’ she said. She knew she had screwed up and was gonna get caught. This was hard for me because I had never broken up with anyone before, so I didn’t know if I could do it or not. I know how much it hurts to get broken up with.”
“I will say that while I was trying to figure out how to break up with that woman, I ended up meeting the love of my life through it all, whom I married almost 12 years ago. Because I met such a wonderful woman who is now my best friend and wife, I was able to easily break it off with the other woman. Needless to say, the woman never got the phone back either.”
26.
“My ex lied to me about their finances when we started dating. Wined and dined me, took me shopping, and bought me gifts. Once we started dating seriously, I found out they had been maxing out their credit cards and were actually quite broke. Despite the lies, I stayed, and we moved in together to get them back on their feet. They would spend my money on video games and cryptocurrency while lying to me that they had been paying the bills. We almost got kicked out, our power almost got turned off, etc. The kicker was that they had been emotionally abusing and gaslighting me the whole time they were abusing my trust/funds. I broke it off and took the L. I met my current partner, and we now live together in that same apartment. We’ve been together for almost two years.”
27.
“She brought a random dude home, got in MY BED, had sex, and had the audacity to tell me not to come home to MY HOUSE until she said so. I came home anyway and kicked the door down to throw them both out.”
28.
And: “I wanted to get married… I mean, 17 years together, I felt I deserved it. He, on the other hand, wanted to sleep with his best friend’s wife. Five years free this coming January.”
Have you ever ended a relationship for an extreme reason? Tell us in the comments or share anonymously using this form.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
