We wouldn't be human if we didn't accidentally say or do something stupid and not realize the consequences of it until it's too late. Behold the awkwardness for those whose slip-ups were unfortunately big enough to end a relationship:
He Just Wanted The Best For Them
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“My best friend and his girlfriend were having problems. They had been together for almost 10 years and had started to drift apart. She was trying to make things better, but the more she tried to make him feel better, the worse it seemed to get. I had a chat with her one evening and told her it wouldn’t be selfish to put herself first for once because everything she was doing at fixing the relationship was centered on making him happy. A few days later, I got the news that she dumped him and my chat was brought up during the breakup. My friend was rather pissed off and blamed me for the split.”
His Mistake Was Actually A Blessing In Disguise
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“My guy friend told me he and his girlfriend were in an open relationship. He had HPV. I asked him how his girlfriend feels about it considering they don’t use protection. He tells me she doesn’t mind as HPV isn’t serious and can go away. His girlfriend was talking to me one day about how she hasn’t gotten her pap smear in some time. I go, ‘Oh, aren’t girls supposed to go more regularly if they don’t use protection while sleeping with someone who has HPV?’ She looks at me startled. ‘What? What do you mean?’ It turns out they weren’t in an open relationship, he never told her he had HPV and they weren’t using protection for the entire year.”
A Wild Night That When Way Too Far
“A few of my friends worked in the customer service department for a retailer. This retailer had another storefront about 50 miles away in a much more rural part of the state. They would hold corporate events and parties where the two offices would get together so my friend had a bunch of buddies living in that area.
One of these buddies was getting married and wanted to come to the city for his bachelor party. Well, my friend wasn’t very social and didn’t know what to do exactly so he asked me to help plan everything. I said we should go out to dinner, go bar hopping and then go back to our house to play video games, but my friend was insistent on hiring a dancer. I said, ‘Did you ask your buddy if that was OK?’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, sure. It’s fine.’ I told him I’d call around and see if I can find a dancer that does private parties. I found a moderately priced, good looking dancer that did private events. I set it all up.
The night of the party rolls around and we go out to dinner and my friend is talking loudly about how he got a dance and I can tell that the groom is super uncomfortable with this. He says over and over, ‘I don’t want this’, ‘This is gonna be weird’, ‘My wife is going to kill me,’ ‘Please, let’s not’, etc. So I call and cancel. My friend still won’t shut up about getting a dance. The groom’s married, enormous, active-duty military friend gets into it and says, ‘Yeah! Maybe we should get one!?’ Five seconds later, a girl from the bar comes over to our table and says, ‘I’m actually a dancer and I’d love to give you boys a private show. Come downtown to my penthouse and we’ll have a good time.’ The groom and I are like, ‘No. Red Flag. Mistake. Let’s not do this.’
My buddy and the military friend of the groom are way too gung-ho at this point and rarin’ to go so we go down to this chick’s penthouse and she does give the groom a dance. It’s not the huge mess I thought it would be. We’re all watching a basketball game on TV and partying a bit when we notice the married military friend and the dancer have disappeared. I thought that he was maybe getting a dance too. He can take care of himself.
They show back up about 10 minutes later and we all head out to go back to the groom’s hotel. We show up and the bride-to-be and the wife of the military guy are standing outside with their arms crossed. As soon as the military guy gets out, his wife runs up and slaps him and won’t stop hitting him and crying. When he went off with the dancer, he had slept with her. While he was taking his pants off, he accidentally butt-dialed his wife. She listened to the whole thing. They were divorced a week later.”
An Absurd Accusation That Tore Them Apart
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“I moved to Arizona for school and to hang out with my best friend who moved there after we both got out of the military while I stayed in California for awhile. I met his new girlfriend when I moved there. She sees us being so excited to see the other one and asked, ‘What is your friendship like, is it like this all the time?’ I told her that our relationship was indescribable since we have been through a lot of stuff together that she would not understand.
Fast forward a month or so, he tells me he is going to propose. They’ve known each other for about five months. I suggest that if he’s truly committed to her then he will be with her forever regardless of whether he proposes now or next year, so why not wait and get to know each other a bit more?
I suggest buying the ring but not proposing until next summer. He agrees. Then he’s at Christmas with her family a week later and decides, ‘let’s do it live’ and proposes. She says yes. He calls me afterward and I congratulate him with dread in my heart. A few weeks later, he comes home after chilling at my apartment for a couple hours playing video games and catching up. As soon as he walks through the door, she grabs his man part because ‘she knows how it feels after he’s recently been pleased.’ In other words, she’s saying that she thinks we fooled around. He laughs it off.
A couple of months later, she asks him to pick up ice cream for everyone in the middle of her bachelorette party and he agrees. He was on the computer at the time and wiped the history because he didn’t want her to see the honeymoon trip he was planning to Europe. When he gets back with arms full of ice cream, he asks where everyone went. It turns out that she had kicked out the whole bachelorette party and was standing there, arms crossed. She asked, ‘Why did you delete your browser history? Were you looking at gay films?’ An argument obviously ensues where she accuses him of being gay. A lot.
Two weeks before the wedding, she breaks it off. She tells him she can’t marry a gay man and be his beard. She said she thought about when I said our friendship was indescribable every single day. The sentence I said was the match that lit the fire of her paranoid gay witch hunt. He paid $14,000 for the venue and it was non-refundable so he was out all that money, along with the $7,000 for the ring that she chipped at work.
I asked him if they weren’t intimate very often and/or if it was bad and maybe that’s why she thought all that stuff but he said no and that it was great and frequent.
I honestly wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t exaggerating until he sent me an audio recording he secretly made of her when she started the insane ‘you’re gay’ argument. It was the funniest and most mortifying thing I have ever heard. In the four-minute clip, she accuses him of looking at gay films, being gay because he always texts his friends and wants to hang out with them, and that when they hang out they have, and I directly quote, ‘man-part sucking circuses.’ She is absolutely insane.”
Oh, That’s Not You?
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“I’m a resident assistant at a medium-sized state school in the mid-Atlantic. Part of the job is working at the front desk and signing in guests of residents into the building. The software we use is actually pretty nifty. One of its best features allows us to sign in a guest of a resident that has been signed in within the last 24 hours, which saves us time entering in information all over again. So whenever I sign in a guest I always ask, ‘Are you so and so’ if there are a few names on the recently signed list in order to save time.
About a week ago, I was working the desk on a Saturday night. A guy walks in with who I presume is his girlfriend. He comes up to the desk asking to sign her in and of course, I go through my normal routine asking if she was one of the names on the recently signed in list. As it turns out, there was only one name on the list, so I assumed it was her. When I asked the girl if that name was hers, she flipped out because it was a girl she had suspected of him cheating with behind her back. This prompted her to scream and curse in our lobby.
Before she had to be escorted out, she dumped her soda all over his head and said she ‘never wanted to see that cheating jerk ever again.'”
Sorry Not Sorry?
“This was a slightly happy accident. I was hanging out with one of my friends and ended up at a house party of one of her friends. There was a girl there that I knew from school who was a grade below me and she was definitely 17. Three of my past boyfriends had cheated on me with her. I didn’t even know they knew her and I certainly didn’t talk to her.
Anyway, I’m partying on the back patio with the owner of the apartment we were in and my friend and I’m telling them about how I know this girl, gossiping about stupid stuff she’s done like getting the word ‘California’ tattooed on her forearm even though she’s never been there, or how she’s been telling men she’s at least 18 since she was 15 years old and then going to the police with assault allegations. The dude gets weirdly silent. I leave the party and go home.
The next day, my ‘cool friend’ calls me telling me how that the guy who threw the party was dating the girl and she had told him she was 21 but didn’t have an ID because she just moved here from California, had lost the old one, and just hadn’t gone to get a new one yet. He had moved her into his home two weeks prior. He kicked her out after the party had ended. I still feel like I had some sweet and petty revenge.
The sad part of the story is that the girl had a traumatic upbringing: she was abused, mentally ill, and instead of getting the help she needed, turned to illegal substances, abuse, and craziness instead. I basically grew up around her and we have a similar white-trash upbringing. I do wish she would get better. However, she has made her choice to refuse help.”
“I Have No One To Blame But Myself”
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“My friend was transitioning from female to male and he wasn’t the happiest soul, to be honest. He hated his body so much that he refused to let anyone touch it. He didn’t have any money for surgery and doctors weren’t being very helpful with helping him get testosterone. Quite honestly, he was so rude all the time and his girlfriend had been with him for years before when he was still a female and long before he ever wanted to become a man. However, she stuck around and supported him as much as she could during the transition. We were all in our early 20s and she was feeling physically deprived. He actually gave her a full hall pass until he felt better about himself and she had tried to use it to actually get him more money for the surgery (yes, she was actually selling herself). She only agreed to it because she thought it would help him get where he wanted to go faster – but nothing ever came of it.
Fast-forward a little and one night, she sent me a Snapchat of herself with less than social clothing on by accident while she had been partying. I thought this probably happened because his name and my name were side-by-side on her Snapchat best friend list. We laugh and left it alone. A month later, she sent me another photo of her in full lingerie, with the caption, ‘I wore this to bed and he still said no.’ I had been drinking too much and messaged her back and said, ‘He is an idiot.’ That’s where things took a turn. They got into a huge fight while both of them were under the influence and they lived together at the time. She called me saying they were over and she really needed someone to talk to. I met her at her dad’s place and she was a mess. She said she was so embarrassed about their fight and so ashamed that she wanted to keep drinking and smoking to feel better.
I don’t smoke. She convinced me and I partake because I felt so horrible for her. I know sometimes when my friend gets mad he says some really underhanded stuff. She was crying and fell asleep on my chest. I fall asleep and next thing I know, I’m woken up to her holding my junk and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. I was still feeling messed up from the night before but from what I knew, they weren’t together anymore and I willingly participated. She continued the lie that they are apart and we fool around together one more time.
Weeks later, they ‘magically’ got back together. We were over at his place and I felt guilty beyond all measure as obviously, he doesn’t know. I’m supposed to be his best friend. Unknown to me, the girlfriend had been bragging about our encounters to her cousin – WHO SHE INVITED THAT NIGHT. Skipping the conversation, the plan was to get just bombed that night. We all drink up, and they convince me to smoke way more than I ever should have attempted. After about 30 minutes of trying to hold it together, I tell them I’m just way too gone and ask where I can put my head down. He says spare bedroom. Before I can even ask where it is, the cousin taken my hand and leads me into the other room and undresses me. She lays me down on the bed, gets on top of me, and full on assaults me. I was so not okay that I couldn’t even raise my arms or keep my eyes open. I was so unprepared and it happened so suddenly. I tried to call out for help, but my friends back in his room thought it was just a moan, and couldn’t hear me over her ‘enthusiasm.’ I black out. When I wake up in the morning, she is naked beside me. I realize what went down and that no one would believe me anyway. I dress myself, walk out to my car, and drive home before any of them wake up.
I tried to forget it and move on, but the further it got from the event the less I saw of any of them. This was because of my guilt about messing around his girlfriend when he was vulnerable and shame I let someone take advantage of me. He gets very sad that his best friend won’t keep in contact with him anymore, and he breaks down one day and is crying to the cousin. The cousin comes clean about me and his girlfriend. He loses it. He goes completely off the deep end and has an ‘Eff (insert my name here) Party’ where he invites everyone he has ever known to tell everyone about how horrible a person I am, even has a cake made with my name on it and a noose around one of the letters.
He and his girlfriend obviously break up. They both moved on to much healthier relationships and are extremely happy with their lives without me – which is fair, to be honest. Still, I broke up a six-year relationship, and can’t blame anyone other than myself. Needless to say, I don’t really party anymore.”
He Found Out The Icky Truth
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“I went to a local bar on a Thursday for a drink special. The place was empty but my friend and I decided we would stick around and play pool since we had the place to ourselves. About five minutes later, two girls come in and we hit it off. We end up back at my buddy’s place fooling around with them. The girl I was with was cool and we keep in touch.
A couple days later, she asks me for a ride to her place. I take her home and she invites me in for round two. We are walking down the hall and she stops and tells me to wait a second. She goes into her room and I hear things crashing for a second. She invites me in and we fool around again.
The next morning when she is in the shower, I see what she was crashing: pictures of her with her husband. He was deployed. I was military too at the time. I get his name and his ship pretty easy and find out that I knew a guy on his ship from school. She had been planning this party that week that she was telling me about, turns out it was her husband’s homecoming party. That one made me feel icky. They split after he found out.”
She Never Expected This To Happen
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“I’m married in a monogamous relationship, but have many friends who are polyamorous and my wife and I would party with them regularly, but not in the open relationship stuff that would go down. We introduced another married couple that was friends of ours to some of these polyamorous friends and they started getting invited to various gatherings. The wife in the couple got really interested in the whole polyamory thing, but the husband did not. They weren’t communicating well and she started doing things with other people and getting mad that he was being so strict. At some point, it went too far for the husband and they ended up splitting. I know that they probably would have ended up having problems eventually, but I do wonder how it would have gone if we would never have introduced them to those people.”
Better To Not Have That Conversation Over Text
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“My friend was cheating on his wife. Another friend and I spent one night laughing about it over text messages about what an idiot he was and how he needed to just leave his wife because they really hated each other.
The next morning, the wife of the friend I was texting went through his phone and found the conversation, took a screenshot of it and sent it to our other friend’s wife, the cheat-ee.
The friend who did the cheating claimed it was all our fault that he was getting divorced.”
“Everyone But Him Knew”
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“My best friend was having a ‘sounding board’ conversation with me about his girlfriend who he’d been with for almost five years from high school through most of college.
They had actually been broken up for the better part of a year at that point, but they apparently had an occasional friends-with-benefits thing going and were getting back together after having spent the last month or so discussing their issues and figuring out if they were right for each other. He told me they had decided to get back together with a plan of moving in when their leases were up. I asked him how he could get back together with someone who had cheated on him. He didn’t know that she had cheated on him. It was one of those cases of everyone but him knowing, and because they had been broken up, I assumed that he knew and that it was the cause of the original break up, but that was very much not the case.
I had found out very randomly a few months after their original break up, but only visiting our hometown once a year or so at that point, had never had a chance to talk with him about the relationship. I let him know what I knew and told him to ask the other person in our best friend tripod (she was best friends with his ex). He immediately called her, got a confirmation, then called his ex to tell her that he knew and it was over. She got thrown out of the bar and the bartender refused to take my money for the rest of the night. My best friend is in a very happy relationship now. Win-win-win.”
Unintentionally Sped Up The Process
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“Some years ago, I was working on a project with a guy from a different company. We became friendly, talked about family, friends, etc. He told me he was married, had a couple of kids, had inherited a plot of land in Spain and always said he wanted to retire early and move out there. Time passes and we finish the project.
Six months later, I get a call from an estate agent, asking if I would fill out a reference for the guy as he is leasing a house short-term. I said yes, filled in the form and then remember he had his identity stolen and it took him a year to sort it out. So I ring him and the operator puts me through to his wife who worked at the same company. I tell her hi and we chat for a few minutes (I knew her as well) and then I ask her ‘about the house they are renting.’ She asks what house I’m talking about. Aaah. I tell her I’ll ring her husband and check what’s going on. I can’t get him.
Forty minutes later, I hear him come down the hallway (we worked on the same site). He walks in my office and I say ‘Hi, have we got a problem?’ He says, ‘No, don’t worry, I was going to leave her next Friday, you just brought it forward eight days.'”
Talk About Yikes
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“A few years ago when I was in college, I was at this small club watching a local band play when I see a friend’s girlfriend walk in while her boyfriend was out of town for the weekend.
I waved her over and noticed she was with some guy but I thought nothing of it. The three of us partied for a little and watched the band play. The next day, my friend calls me and tells me she confessed immediately (presumably she thought I would tell him I saw her with another guy) and they had broken up.
I was genuinely surprised because I totally thought the other guy was gay. It never even occurred to me. It made things especially awkward for me later when I started dating one of that chick’s friends a few weeks later.”
She Isn’t The One To Be Blamed
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“This is one of the sadder but funnier things I’ve ever done. About a year ago, I had a guy friend I’d known for a couple months and I started hitting on him, thinking he was single. I knew he had an on-again, off-again girlfriend but at the time I thought they were off. I was only looking for a friends-with-benefits situation.
We only hung out a couple times, went on a date or two, and things were nice and chill. I liked him, but I certainly wasn’t looking for anything serious. Who I thought was the ex-girlfriend randomly talked to me one day asking what she should get the guy for his birthday. Me, being genuinely ditsy and ignorant, just smiled and said, ‘That’s so nice of you to do that!’ She asked, ‘Do what?’
I told her it was cool that she could still be friends with an ex and that it was something I sure struggled with. Of course, the look on her face was horrified. That’s when I learned they’d never broken up. Up until she went to confront him. She lost a boyfriend and I lost a friend. I still get blamed for it even though I truly thought he was single at the time.”
A Big ‘Why Did I Just Say That?’ Moment
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“There was this middle-aged dude named James who hung at my local pub several years ago. He was always hitting on girls half his age while drinking at the pub and would say really inappropriate things. I found him quite entertaining, honestly. Hideous but entertaining.
Anyway, he finally started a relationship with a woman his own age. They’d been together about six months when my mother and I bumped into them. I was really ill at the time but was in a great mood after drinking for a bit. James introduced himself to my mom who said, ‘Oh, we have already met James’ while giving a sort of disapproving laugh.
When she went to the bar, James looked at me with some apprehension and said, ‘Oh God, I can’t remember meeting her! Did I embarrass myself?’ then his girlfriend looked at me sternly and asked what he did. I laughed and said, ‘He met my mom about six months ago and the first thing he told her was ‘Everyone wants to fool around with your daughter.” I cackled thinking it was a hilarious story. Stupid me. I bumped into him a few months later and he told me she broke up with him over it.”
European Fling With A Sketchy Twist
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“So back in my Erasmus (A European University Exchange Program) days in Spain, I was dating this Italian girl for a couple of months. While we were going out, she would occasionally get calls from her ex, who apparently wouldn’t stop pestering her. The calls were in the Neapolitan dialect so I never really understood what they were saying, but she seemed curt and impolite so I thought, ‘Whatever, this guy needs to take a hint.’
Cut to a few months later, and the girl and I have since broken up. She asks me to come to a house-party, and that her ex will also be there. Apparently, he’s come to Spain to win her back. As no one else at the party speaks Italian, she asked me to help keep him entertained and that she would even throw in a fancy bottle to sweeten the deal. So being 23 years old and a big partier, I agree and go to the party.
When I meet the guy, he actually seems really sweet and not the boorish, misogynist I had in mind. The evening continues and we’re getting on like a house on fire. We decide to head out as a group and because I was feeling the effects of the pregame, I decide I should try and impart some advice for the poor fellow so that he won’t mess things up. I tell him that she’s having fun in her Erasmus year and that maybe he should wait until she’s back home before trying to win her back, you know ‘boys of summer’ and all that. He gives me the strangest look, and then starts thanking me profusely and walks off. Regardless of feeling a little confused, I continue dancing and having fun until five minutes later when my ex and her friends grab me and start shouting in my face, ‘What did you say to him?!’ then, ‘Did you tell him I’m single?!’, etc. Needless to say, they were furious. As you probably guessed, it turns out the poor guy thought they were still in a relationship. He hadn’t come to Spain to win her back; they were supposed to go on a road-trip across Spain together the next day. I was a pariah in their little group after that night, even though it was totally her fault for being both a cheat and an idiot.”