He Refused To Eat Veggies, And That’s Just The First Red Flag
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“I had heard nothing but great things about him from my best friend, K (we’d been each other’s best friends since elementary school so the Force is strong between us). However, I met him and IMMEDIATELY all my red flags went off.
First off, he refused to eat any form of fruit or veggies because he’s allergic. But I then proceeded to watch him eat stuff that was definitely veggies without any problems. My ex was a doctor and thought it was weird.
Secondly, he springs out that he has a nine-year-old daughter. That itself isn’t concerning. What was concerning though was that he claimed his ex-wife was crazy, that he hadn’t seen his daughter in years because his ex-wife wouldn’t let him, and that he didn’t HAVE to pay child support but he sent them a check every month anyway because it’s his daughter and he loves her.
I naturally had questions about this. Like…why didn’t he just insist on his visitation rights?
He claimed he didn’t have any.
Why don’t you have any?
‘Because the court gave my ex-wife full custody and told me I can’t do anything without my ex’s permission.’
Why did they give your ex FULL custody that bars you from seeing your kid? (Note: crazy meter was FLYING by now)
Cue some story about him being a war vet, ending up partially paralyzed from the waist down (which he is not anymore because he went through robust physical therapy with his daughter as his inspiration), and the judge deciding that since he can BARELY take care of himself, he can’t take care of the kid and blah blah blah.
I just looked at K and then mentally made a note to have a word with her later.
Oh, and, he adds, he’s a registered offender because his wife’s family prosecuted him for assault.
WHAT?!
He then claims that his wife was sixteen/seventeen when they got married. They slept together after they were married. Her parents hated him and so called the cops. He was arrested, tried, and put on an offender.
I’d say you can’t make this up, but he CLEARLY did, so I was flabbergasted.
I then proceeded to try to warn K that I don’t think he’s honest or good. She kind of shrugged it off, saying she wasn’t sure they’d work out anyway.
Fast forward four years to her marrying him and I’d stopped warning her because I was afraid she’ll just avoid me and stop communicating with me. When the fallout happened, I wanted to be able to be there for my best friend. I couldn’t do that if she started forcing me out of her life for constantly telling her to leave him
It took two months after they got married for the bombs to just start falling one after the other. He stole her identity, got in trouble for fraud, was cheating, etc. We’re not even sure if he really did the jobs he claimed to do.
I helped her through the divorce process. At one point, he almost assaulted her. Another time, he threatened to post up explicit videos of her as revenge. All in all, it was incredibly rough.
There’s more stuff, obviously. About six months ago, he called me out of the blue to tearfully confess he just got out of jail for kidnapping, domestic violence, and child endangerment. He even lied about aspects of that.
Truly, he is the scum of the earth.”
Things Moved VERY Fast And Then Went Downhill
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“When I hadn’t heard from my friend for a few days, I called her up and found out that she had met this dude at a wedding. In four days, they had taken a trip together and he had already introduced her to his kid. Moving so fast is kind of a red flag for me but whatever, she just got out of a life-sucking relationship and she couldn’t stop raving about how great this guy was. Sometimes this happens.
I met him and while I tried to play nice, the guy gave me a bad taste in my mouth. Everything he did was subtle and I couldn’t explain to you why I didn’t like him but a bunch of little things, like how easily offended he was and how to mean he could be under the guise of, ‘It’s just a joke!’
She got pregnant a few months in and that’s about when it all went bad. At first, they both seemed thrilled but after a while, he started accusing her of hanging out with other men and he ripped doors off the hinges when he was mad. He called her all sorts of names and said that if she was so quick to get knocked up, maybe the baby wasn’t even his. He left her to walk home on the side of the road as punishment for claiming to have seen her with other men and then suddenly he just kicked her out. I helped her pack her stuff up and saw that he had written down all his insults and hung them up like it was something to be proud of.
She and I don’t really talk anymore but last I heard the kid is doing fine. She and the dad don’t seem to have much contact. I hope she’s doing well.”
He Said “Jobs Were Beneath Him” But Really He Was Just Lazy
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“I always thought this guy was a loser and it turns out I was right.
He was a snake whispering in my friend’s ear while she was in a relationship that she deserved better. She did but that didn’t need to come from someone using it as a manipulation tactic to get her in bed with him.
He lived with his parents and had all his expenses paid, didn’t have a degree, wasn’t pursuing one ‘but is a genius, he was tested, no we don’t know where the paperwork is.’ He did not have any advanced education or job training. He was/is a pothead and couldn’t get a better job (many were offered to him) but he couldn’t get clean long enough to pass a test and would say the jobs were beneath him.
He wanted to lose weight and do keto but literally couldn’t be around any food that wasn’t in his diet; if there were chips in the house he would find and eat them and then yell at her for ‘bringing that junk home’ so she basically had to be on keto as well even though she was bordering on dangerously underweight herself.
He tried to get her to set up me up with his horrible friends in an attempt to get them to live off my money. I was an engineer with 1.5x my annual salary in student loans. I was neither interested nor were his friends when they found out I can’t/won’t/wouldn’t ever pay for them.
They eloped and moved to Colorado so they can grow and smoke as much pot as they want. He still doesn’t have a real job from what I understand.”
Bossing Her Friends Around Was Only The Beginning
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“Two of my good friends were sisters, one year apart. The older one is C, the younger one is E. We were kicking it at E’s house and C came over with her teenage sons and her new boyfriend, let’s call him Richard. All was going just fine, we’re hanging out, I played waitress when I went to the kitchen for a drink (ie get everyone a drink who wants a drink). I sat down and 20 seconds later, Richard said to me, ‘You, go get me a drink.’
Excuse me, what did you say to me? He repeated himself, ‘Go get me a drink,’ and tried to stare me down.
Ummm, forget THAT noise. I let him know exactly what I thought. The evening ended with him trying to convince my friend that I was jealous and had tried to come on to him. Seriously. I told both C and E that this dude was bad news.
Fast forward two months. C had lost her job, was about to be evicted, and Richard had totaled her car. She lost her job because he had been secretly slipping her Ambien for over a month, therefore she couldn’t pay the rent. Richard wasn’t working or interested in paying any bills, and he was on a date with another woman in C’s car, driving hammered, and totaled her car. She found this out when the police came to her house. He was convicted on several charges for this and went to prison.”
She’d Had A Bad Feeling About Him, But She Never Would’ve Predicted This
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“She wasn’t really a friend but she seemed like a genuinely good person and we had a few classes together my freshman year of college. We were working on a group project one day and went to the store to buy materials. On our way back to campus, she asked if I could stop to pick up her boyfriend from her apartment who was visiting from out of town. In the 10 minutes he was in the car with us, I got such a bad vibe from him that I couldn’t and really still can’t explain. It was just like he seemed shady, trashy and like the type with nothing going on in his life and nothing to lose. We parted ways and I rarely saw her after that year. After the fact, I found out that a lot of girls she became friends with during the first semester no longer spoke to her because her boyfriend was a huge idiot to them and she didn’t do anything about it, which obviously reinforced my opinion of him.
Fast forward to senior year of college. I still don’t know the exact details of the story, but I believe she had recently broken up with him. She was at one of her guy friend’s apartment (not sure if they were romantically involved) when her ex showed up pounding on the door. He barged into the apartment and started yelling at her. Apparently, her guy friend tried intervening when her ex shot and killed him. He then shot her multiple times before killing himself. She somehow survived even though one of the bullets hit her in the face.
Of course, this was breaking news in our community. When I found out the names of the individuals involved, I cried and got massive chills because I just knew he was bad news. Obviously, there was nothing I could have done; we weren’t friends and I had no influence over her life or her decisions. But it’s still upsetting to think she was blind to something everyone saw until it was too late.”
Her Friend Thought She Was Crazy For Not Liking Him, Until They Saw This Picture Of Him
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“I had a bad feeling about my relative’s ex-boyfriend. He was perfectly nice and polite when I met him, even charming, and was delivering furniture for a company he worked for at the actual time I met him, so he had a job and everything. I just didn’t like him though, right off the bat – got that slimy feeling from him and told her. She was crazy about him though and felt he treated her like a queen.
A little while after she found out she was expecting his child, she ran across an ad in the newspaper from a local church with a picture of him, his pregnant wife, and their two kids. I think someone in the church was congratulating him for something, I don’t recall what. And yeah, I said it – pregnant wife. My relative’s son and the boyfriend’s youngest son with his wife are the same age, I think weeks apart.
Of course, she separated from him right away and they set about co-parenting. Side note – at the time, I worked at a court and not long after all that went down, he came in with a ticket for disorderly conduct. When I looked into the details, turns out he had gotten cited for hooking up in a park with some other random woman. And yeah, he was still married.
Thankfully it turned out okay. It took some trial and error but he is a very involved father with my relative’s son now (a beautiful young man, at that), and the son is super close with his half-siblings. Even the guy’s wife has come to love and support the son, although that took some time of course. Kudos to her AND to my relative for working together.”
First Bad Sign: He Was A “Former” Nazi
“My best friend’s ex-husband was was a former Neo-nazi, owned a motorcycle repair shop, was very aggressive and possessive. To this day it boggles my mind what motivated her to start dating him in the first place, and then to marry him. She is the complete opposite: is a policy writer for an international organization, works with NGO’s to promote human rights and anti-corruption policies, is a very classy and kind lady. Definitely a feminist. She’s one of those experts you see being interviewed on political talk-shows, or invited to comment on government policies on the news. I’m so proud of her for achieving what she has, and yet she married a guy with actual swastika tattoos on his body that he ‘hasn’t gotten around to removing.’ He was still racist, used the n-word and other derogatory terms for other races, even though he claimed to not be part of the movement anymore.
Honestly, I don’t know what she was thinking, maybe that she could ‘change’ or ‘save’ him? I have no idea. He made her life horrible, he was so possessive that even when I wanted to have a drink with her, he would ‘join us,’ then awkwardly sit next to her staring at his phone not making eye contact with me. Or he would wait outside the cafe in his truck. He even crashed her bachelorette party! As far as I know, he wasn’t physically abusive (maybe he was afraid of her lawyer friends who would put him in jail if he did?), but definitely verbally and emotionally abusive. She had PTSD after finally divorcing him after seven miserable years of marriage. Luckily she’s safe now, away from him, though he’s now dragging out the divorce settlements (they had property and cars together, luckily no children or pets) for as long as he can, just to spite her.”
She Sensed He Was Manipulative But It Was On A Level She Never Expected
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“I met both my now best friend and her ex-boyfriend in college. The ex and I had a class together and he was the dealer at our dorm, so we would smoke before class sometimes and walk to class together. I noticed immediately that despite being a little scrawny, average looking, he had this way of speaking that was extremely motivating. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this guy could lead a movement,’ or what a great salesman he would make, his knack for persuasion – everything about the way he spoke from his word choice to ton of voice and volume, seemed incredibly powerful and I don’t know why but I didn’t really like it. I felt like he was full of it. I saw him interact with other guy friends and he was manipulative. It just kind of disturbed me.
So I didn’t totally understand why my friend had this crush on him and felt kind of frustrated when they started dating, but she said, ‘When he looks at me, it’s like he can see my soul. Like he can read my mind sometimes, he always says exactly the right thing I need to hear.’ Hmm, well as long as he has your best interest, I thought…
Two years into their relationship, my friend started experiencing some weird things that would later be pinpointed to a sleep disorder. Sometimes when someone would wake her up, she would have a rage, screaming, hitting, just flipping out completely. It would last for 3-5 minutes and then she’d just fall back asleep. My friends and I quickly saw that it was connected to drinking – it would only and always happen when we’d had late heavy drinking nights and was exponentially worse if she had blacked out which did happen sometimes – usually when she had been hanging out with this guy before meeting up with my friends and I later in the night. At the same time, she stopped wanting to hang out with us and spent all her time with her boyfriend, to the extent I never saw her for a month or two.
A few months after that all began, she broke down to me and told me she was abusing her boyfriend and he was stuck in an abusive relationship with her in denial of it all. She also apparently had a drinking problem. I was super confused but just let her talk. Later that night. I decided to go meet her and her boyfriend and his friends instead of waiting for her to come to meet me. He was literally feeding her shot after shot in the sliest way, oddly could have come across as ‘caring’ like he was just looking after her. She blacked out and needed to pass out, so I said I’ll take her back to your room (because I knew they slept together every night) and he said, ‘No, let’s take her to her room and I’ll come to get her later and bring her to my room.’ It didn’t make any sense, her room was much farther away. He was SO pushy about it and completely ignored my objections, changing the topic, trying to make a joke, turned it into, ‘Oh you’re such a good friend don’t worry about it go have fun I’ll take care of her.’
I finally put together what was happening – he was getting her wasted, purposely waking her up, she would have a rage, he’d do it with other people around to see, and the next day he would tell her all the terrible things she did, what so-and-so said about her afterward, add some manipulative words of his own into her story, and made her feel isolated, and like a monster. She stopped hanging out with us because she was afraid she would ‘abuse’ us too. She told me she would have to sleep with him in order to make it up to him. Obviously, he was the one abusing her, the manipulation was pretty astounding, and he’s just as creepy as I always found him to be.”
Her First Thought Was “Cool Boots” But After That She Had Nothing Nice To Say
“I was about 8 when I met my aunt’s fiance for the first time. 8-year-old me thought he had cool boots but he sneered when the adults weren’t looking and he’d say small things to take my aunt down a notch. During the course of the evening, I was sitting on the carpet because it was a holiday gathering but the adults had nabbed all the seats and he deliberately kicked me. He made it seem like it was an accident but it wasn’t because he made eye contact with me beforehand.
Anyway, my aunt married him and after a few years, she just kind of faded from the vibrant person she had been and withdrew. Luckily my grandmother is tenacious and no matter what, made sure she kept in contact because my aunt finally admitted that he’d started abusing my aunt after the wedding. It took her years and financial help from family to get away from this guy and divorce him.”
She Looked Him Up And Found The Horrible Reason He Changed His Name
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“My former best friend had started dating a guy she met online who lived about an hour away. I met him when he moved in with her about a month later and I knew something was off with this guy. The fact that their relationship moved so quickly was of no surprise to me because my friend would latch onto any man that showed her attention. Another month went by, I still didn’t like him. His ‘cousin,’ who came along with him like a piece of luggage, was living with her, too, and he was even creepier. Anyway, I found out what his last name was and I started doing a little research. He wasn’t using his real name but told her it was due to him being ‘adopted’ and hating his real name. Yeah, okay… I discovered he was a twice-convicted offender who’d violated teenage girls and was fresh out of prison, as was his ‘cousin’ who had been convicted of violating a 4-year-old boy.
I was shocked and called my friend so I could show her what I had discovered. She immediately went to his defense saying it was his ex-girlfriend and her parents that threw him in jail because they didn’t like him dating their teen daughter, saying it was basically statutory assault. Funny, not what the offender’s website showed, but she wouldn’t believe anything I showed her… I knew then it was already too late to talk sense into her, regardless of the court records I’d found and the news stories that did not match up to what he’d lied to her about. She didn’t know about the ‘cousin,’ who wasn’t really his cousin, and she did kick him out. Unfortunately, by the time the police found out they’d moved without updating the offender’s website for the address, the ‘cousin’ was long gone, never heard from or seen again.
She blamed me for ruining her reputation with our friends, trying to destroy her relationship with a man who ‘loved her,’ etc. In reality, I told two people- one who was my friend that lived with her already, and the other was her mom because I just couldn’t get her to see reason and they needed to know who she was around to keep her safe. She thinks I told everyone and even called the cops on him and got him thrown back in prison for violating the offender registration- which I had nothing to do with.
It was hard to believe someone who had been my best friend for 15 years could be this way to me, but in the end, I refuse to put myself and my children anywhere near someone like this or in a possible situation with an offender. So there went my friendship. She’s now married to this creep and has a daughter with him, which I find disgusting and sad. She’s obliviously happy from what I hear, and has her perfect little family life now, which is what she always wanted.”