When you are dating someone who has been divorced, you know they'll be coming with some baggage. How could they not? You also have to trust that whatever they say about their past relationships is 100% fact. Unfortunately, sometimes people lie and the person isn't exactly a reliable narrator. For the people in the following stories, the person they loved was more than just an unreliable storyteller, but an out and out sociopath which they ended up finding out the hard way.
A Liar And A Fiend
“Just got out of a four-year relationship with a guy. Last two years of the relationship we had been living together. He was very honest about being divorced and still getting over it when we met.
His reasons for the divorce were basically that as soon as they got married, she acted like a different person and never wanted to make love with him. Wouldn’t even do it with him on their wedding night. Then, even though HE was the one who was so unhappy and neglected, she’s the one that filed for divorce. Then she cleaned him out. Came by their house with all of ‘his’ friends and took everything they owned. This is the story I was told and I fully believed it. I thought she was such a horrible person.
Cut to us living together. I went through some health problems that killed my intimacy drive and made that stuff absolutely excruciating for me. Our 2-10 times a day (nope, not an exaggeration) screeched to a halt. He was not at all understanding and I ended up giving in and just doing it with him most days, even though it was so painful sometimes I would cry. Of course, that was my fault too; apparently crying isn’t attractive and really makes him sad. So doing that for months really damaged my idea of that and I still haven’t completely recovered mentally in that aspect. It was at this point I started to realize that maybe she wasn’t just refusing to do it for no reason.
Then we have the part where he claims he was the unhappy one but she filed for divorce. Who the heck files for divorce if they’re satisfied with the marriage? It couldn’t possibly be his tendency to constantly be unhappy and blame it on her, or his mental and emotional abuse. It couldn’t be the fact that even his mother warned me not to let him abuse me. It couldn’t be his claims that he does all the work in life and the relationship and that she does nothing. While he sleeps his days away, leaves dirty underwear and clothes were strewn around for guests to step over, leaves dishes to sit and rot, doesn’t take care of his body, doesn’t make an effort physically, emotionally, or romantically.
Then we have the part where she ‘cleaned him out’ when she left. When I left, he offered to pay me for all the work I did on his house. I invested countless hours, weeks, months into fixing up his house he completely neglected. I removed old peeling wallpaper, fixed walls, painted, installed new light fixtures, put on new cabinet hardware throughout, bought very expensive backsplash tile, did some extreme landscaping projects, the list goes on and on. I said I wanted $1000, he insisted on $3000. $3000 truly is a fair number, doesn’t even account for the labor aspect of things, which I, of course, would never want to be paid for. I also left him behind dishes, silverware, rugs, towels, sheets, curtains, things like that. Then what did he tell everyone? That I cleaned him out. I took everything and also took his money. Never mind the fact that I had to buy a new house, while he sat and didn’t have to change anything because of the breakup. I had to live with friends for over a month because he wanted me and my son out of his house within a week of the breakup and changed the locks so I couldn’t get my things or pack or see my dogs.
Anyways. Never again will I date a man who is willing to trash his ex. He also said nice things about her, but he’s such a convincing person that I didn’t think he wouldn’t be telling the truth. He has tons of friends and respect from people in our town as he coaches athletes, myself being one of them. People are incapable of seeing how messed up he is. His friends are nice, normal people. He preaches constantly about how others are living their lives wrong, and how he only surrounds himself with quality people. Which he does have quality friends, they’re just in a constant rotation because eventually, his ego gets in the way.”
That Took A Dark Turn
“So my mom got divorced from my dad my senior year of high school. She has always been the kind of person to be in a relationship, so she started immediately dating around (since my dad cheated on my mom multiple times). She met this guy on this dating website, who we are going to call Tom.
Tom was a successful marketing guy with no kids, a steady income, and was divorced because ‘his wife cheated on him’. Early in the relationship, my mom gets a message from Tom’s ex-girlfriend. She says that she needs to tell her some things about Tom, but my mom ignores her.
A year goes by and Tom seems normal. She moves in with him and so do we since he has two spare bedrooms. He’s a cool guy who seems chill and really nice. He’ll sometimes go through my mom’s phone (she told me), but she thought that all the good things outweighed the bad.
Cut to Election Day, where things aren’t going so well for my mom and Tom since they’re both liberals. They drink and Tom throws a remote at the window. He calls the police on himself. My mom forgives him.
This is where things start to get weird. Tom starts acting weirder towards my mom, mostly via text message. On Christmas day, she decides that we don’t want to go to his sister’s house because she was inebriated. We open the trunk to his car to get the presents out and he drives away, with stuff flying out the back. He apologizes. My mom is super weary at this point.
Cut to New Years where Tom is out of town. She texts him that she wants to break up with him because he’s saying that it’s my autistic brother’s fault that the carpet on the stairs is falling apart. He says, ‘Get your kids out of my house.’
So the next day, we have eight people come over to move the furniture that’s my mom’s while he threatens us over the phone. That was in January.
Over the next few months, and still to this day, he sends crazy threatening messages to my mom. He also found out where we live so he could ‘take the shared BMW that they owned jointly and sell it,’ even though my mom has been begging him to take it.
She finally gets in contact with the lady’s boyfriend at the beginning of the story. They share stories and she apologizes for not listening sooner.”
That Escalated Quickly
“Well, I didn’t marry him, but my ex-boyfriend was divorced, and he made it seem like his ex-wife was just horrible. He said that he gave everything to her, even quit his job to move to Georgia with her (they both previously lived in Minnesota). He said he had paid for all of her bills and makeup and clothes and even paid for couples trips and she took a different guy with her on a lot of them, leaving her husband behind. The marriage ended when she went on a trip to New Orleans with her friends and didn’t come back.
About a couple weeks into our relationship, he began to get extremely possessive over me. I figured it was because he had been through so much with his last relationship, so I tried to overlook some of it, but it got so intense that he printed out a list of rules that I was to obey, which I obviously refused to accept. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere without telling him, he had to have visual evidence of my work schedule. It was ridiculous. So, logically, I broke up with him. But he was relentless. He kept showing up at my house and work and it was just embarrassing. Finally, I threatened to get a restraining order and he left me alone.
A few months later, I got a Facebook message from this random woman who asked me if I’m okay. I’m like, yeah why? Who are you? It turns out that she was the ‘ex-wife’, except that they were never really married. They were dating for a bit, and when she refused to let him pay her rent, he bought the house from the owner and would not accept her rent money. He bought a lot of trip tickets and used his key to get into her/his house to put them on her coffee table. She never went on any of the trips. She moved, but he found her apartment and would leave love letters in her mailbox. He threatened her friends on Facebook, forbidding them from ‘stealing her’ from him. Finally, she got her own restraining order and moved far away.
So yeah, this still creeps me out because sometimes I get a feeling that he’s stalking me, but I know it’s probably just paranoia.”
He’s Got His Quirks
“When I initially asked him why they divorced, his response was that she turned into a bitter person, gained 120lbs, and was taking money without talking about it first. They weren’t very well off at first, and she ended up ghosting him after draining their joint account.
We have both joint and separate accounts, five years into a relationship and four years after moving in together. We have a kid together. When I withdraw money from the joint account, he forgets about it, then has a ‘sticker shock’ reaction upon checking the account balance. It’s definitely draining, but keeping post-it notes on our closet mirror helps to remind him so he doesn’t flip out about it.
He had horrible eating habits before we met and his mother said he was always that way. We both have high metabolisms, but when we’re tired and it’s dinner time, my idea of a quick meal is tuna salad and fruit, while his is a double quarter pounder. I can see how she got lazy about her eating habits – he gets very burnt out at his job and often gives up after work on cooking healthy. He’s a lot better about it now since we have kids and that stuff won’t fly anymore.
He’s also pretty cynical, but so am I. She didn’t know how to take a joke, was constantly overanalyzing everything he said and taking everything personally, even if it wasn’t meant to be. I can understand that too if you’re not used to and like that type of personality.
We all have our quirks, and I love him more every single day. Sometimes personalities just don’t match, and that’s okay. Stealing someone’s life savings and indirectly forcing them to file bankruptcy after losing a house to foreclosure by lying about making house payments though?”
It’s All About Him
“My ex of about 2-ish years was in the process of a divorce when we met. His wife was batty and the reason for everything wrong in his life (this should have been my first clue to get out but I was young). He had kids, and I would go to sporting events for them and his ex-wife would be there the vast majority of the time too. We started to get along and he HATED that. I didn’t get that – wouldn’t it be easier for the kids if she and I had a good relationship? No way! We would compare notes on HIM and it would ruin OUR relationship! (We quite literally never talked about him). My eyes started to open here.
I was using his computer once and his Google calendar opened and there was an event on Valentines Day the next week, which he had told me we were not doing anything for due to money (which of course was his ex’s fault). So I opened it (okay, I shouldn’t have been snooping) and the event was ‘Day Ex-Girlfriend Broke My Heart’. Now this ex of his was prior to his 20-year relationship with his now ex-wife. So I figured out that he never let anything go – apparently ever.
A couple months later our relationship was starting to decline on its own (he went over to a friends house without me, in the middle of a planned date night), we got in a fight and he told me I was starting to sound like his ex-wife. To which I responded, ‘If we are saying the same exact things, and are such different people don’t you think the issue is YOU?!’ I realized at that exact moment that he was a narcissistic jerk who was never going to change or grow up. I moved out a week later. I still miss the dog.”
A Textbook Case Of Emotional Abuse
“Many years ago, I found a charming man on the internet. He was divorced, but his ex-wife was completely horrible. To keep the story somewhat brief, I visited him and going with my ‘I have to explore this value and against my gut feeling,’ I moved to be with him.
He ended up being an emotionally abusive person. Which, one of the tactics for emotional abuse is isolating the victim from friends and family. What better way to do that than to ‘import’ someone from somewhere else?
Anyway, my first inkling that there were two sides of the story was when we were at his best friend’s house. The wife mentioned that she saw the ex-wife and implied that she seemed like she was ‘doing better’. She started saying that she told her, ‘I just thought you were…’ and trailed off, quickly changing the subject. I absolutely think the ‘I just thought you were’ was finished by ‘a jerk’. But the implication is there. Why was she one before and not now?
I’ve been free from him for years. And now that I’m much better without him, I know exactly what happened to that ex.
Another thing that made me take pause fairly soon in our relationship was at a dinner party his two best friends told me that I had changed him. ‘He’s so much better than he used to be.’ I was still pretty new to the group, so I didn’t ask any pressing questions and accepted the compliment, but in the back of my mind, I was wondering when I was going to meet the real him.”
It All Makes Sense Now
“My husband had an engagement that ended before we met, and the reasons always seemed weird to me – something about her trying to get rid of their dog and getting into a huge fight with his mom when she made a snarky comment about the dog thing, and then getting her mom and sister to call and harass his mom about the fight. Big, ridiculous argument that ended with them deciding they weren’t going to work out. They’d been together for like four years.
Now I completely get it. Well, not the part with her mom and sister, but the rest of it. The dog was awful – peed everywhere, was very dominant and aggressive (like biting/drawing blood aggressively at times), and old enough that he was very difficult to train since they hadn’t done anything about it when he was a puppy. The dog now lives with my mother-in-law because it’s not safe to have him in a home with babies. And my mother-in-law is a nightmare, but my husband and his ex saw her multiple times a week whereas we see her once every couple of months.
At one point about a year in we had a big argument where I told him we were heading down the same path as them if he didn’t get his stuff together, and that if you have the same problems with two long-term relationships in a row you need to consider that you’re part of the problem. And that I was out if he didn’t set serious boundaries with his mom and get some training for the dog. Fortunately, it was apparently a wake-up call because that was seven years ago and neither is an issue.”
The Signs Were All There
“I had my wife cheat on me… ended up meeting someone who was ‘perfect’ and just thought I had hit the karma jackpot. She liked literally all the same things as me.
When I asked about her past, I’d hear stories of what sounded like abuse – but it was always implied (like, ‘I was so scared, I thought he was going to hit me’). Then one night she went ape on me. She started getting mad at me wanting to visit my daughter who was in the hospital. She wanted to go on a date instead and started throwing glasses at me and it was like rain. I went to get away and she came after me and clawed the crap out of the back of my neck, then yanked me backward by my collar where I ended up on top of her – I pushed her away and just got out.
She called and started threatening me; since I had ‘hit her’ (in falling on her) my options were, come back to the house or she would call the cops and report me for abuse. I hung up on her and called the cops instead.
By the time the cops showed up, she had bruises on her neck; she self-inflicted them to claim I had done it – just hadn’t called the cops yet – my hands showed no signs of aggressive force, plus the back of my neck earned her a trip to prison.
It was at that point I realized how duped I was – I KNEW she was the reason for her previous divorce.”
When You’ve Got A Type You See Some Things
“I have dated three divorced girls in the past. The first one was too young to marry so it was a natural progression for her to get divorced. The second one’s divorce happened because the guy cheated on her. I didn’t date her long enough to come up with a reason to say ‘so that’s why!’ About the third one… Oh my God! She was possessive, obsessed, jealous, manipulative and so smart that most of the times, she made it seem it was normal. Thank God I opened my eyes and saw her for what she really was and totally understood why her marriage and post date life was a failure. Funny thing is that now I’m dating a new woman who is also a divorcee, but this one got divorced because she is a very successful and hardworking woman, which made her former husband be a bit jealous and competitive. What’s more, the fact that she didn’t want to have kids made it all the worse. But with me, it’s going perfectly fine since we are so different workwise ( she’s the client manager of an automotive company, I’m an English teacher/photographer, brewer, musician).”
Once A Cheater Always A Cheater
“About a year after I signed the divorce papers (divorced my ex-wife for cheating on me), I met the guy she’d cheated on me with. I actually didn’t know him by sight, but apparently, he’d seen a few pictures of me – like the ones in my bedroom.
He walked up to me, introduced himself, and then started apologizing for being the one to break up my marriage. I was pretty much over it by then, but I was still pissed off enough to say something like, ‘Yeah, well, man it wasn’t like you were the ONLY guy she was cheating on me with. I’m pretty sure she was with a dude named Brian the whole time she was with you.’
He got real quiet, apologized again, and then left. A few weeks later, someone told me that he had moved out and was in the process of divorcing her. I’ll never know for sure if it was my telling him about the other-other man that was the tipping point for him, but I like to think it was.”
You Can’t Save Them All
“My ex-boyfriend had been married previously and his wife took her own life. When I met him, I assumed his late wife must have had a lot of problems with depression or something and didn’t think he had any impact on her decision at all.
It took me a year and 8 months to leave him. He was emotionally and verbally abusive. He became angry easily. He would make hurtful ‘jokes’ and then say I was being too sensitive and that he’s just a blunt person so deal with it.
Now, I know a person’s death cannot be entirely due to someone else because it is ultimately that person’s decision, but in that year and 8 months, I realized it’s feasible she ended her life because of his emotional issues impacting their relationship.
I realize now that I began dating him with the idea I could save him. Some introspection and reading have helped me get over my savior complex. Save yourself.”
So Many Red Flags
“My parents are divorced and both got remarried. My mom found it beneficial to attend a ‘divorce care’ group at her church. She ended up going out with the guy who ran the group and seemed like a great dude. When I asked her about him, she told me he had been divorced himself 2 separate times already which was a pretty huge red flag to me, but apparently not to her. Fast forward 12 years and he’s been unbelievably emotionally abusive to her. There was also a point when my brother and I were teenagers where we literally weren’t allowed to live with them anymore (because he felt threatened he wasn’t the man of the house). She says she’s happy, which is truly all I want for her, but it’s pretty frustrating when a 13-year-old can see the red flags my 40+-year-old mother couldn’t.”
Someone’s Trying Too Hard
I briefly dated a divorcee. Till a common friend told me he was still married and often used that as a sympathy card to get women.
This guy is 26. He got married very young to a woman 7 years older than him and apparently instantly regretted it. He had been building up the marital troubles story for a while now and recently started telling everyone at work he got a divorce. I work with him and had no reason to doubt it. Unfortunately for him, I am good friends with someone in his university circle who knows his wife very well. When I found out, I confronted him and he started claiming he was in love with me and hadn’t had the courage to ask his wife for a divorce yet but would do it soon. Pretty much the exact same line he had used on another girl a few weeks ago.”
One Heck OF A Way To Find Out
“I dated a divorcee for quite some time. She never told me she was divorced, which really wouldn’t have bothered me. I ended up finding out about her past from one of the several people she was cheating on me with.”
(Points edited for clarity)