It never really got started. Ive known this woman for many years, back to when we were both kids. We met through a friend of a friend over the phone, so for a while, I thought she was much older than she actually was. When i found out she was significantly younger than me, I had to tell myself no. And that “no” stayed in the back of my head for a long, long time.

Now its been many years, and we’ve stayed close for a long time. We had a few periods of fooling around once she got older, but between going away for college and both of us starting careers, it never worked out. A couple years ago she moved back and we had been spending more and more time together. We actually started getting intimate with each other in the last year or so, even if we saw each other barely once evey month or so.

I had a traumatic incident at work, losing my job, and spent about a day in shock, and she was there for everything for me. She didnt judge me or push me or do anything besides understand and comfort. I didnt know that was something I desperately needed until that point.

After about a week of pulling myself together, i turned to really pursing her. I asked her out on dates, I tried everything I could to make myself available to her. Weeks went by and she never has the time. Then she told me she’d asked someone at work out and how excited she was.

I was devastated. I didnt understand for a few weeks. Then we talked about it and she said she just didnt notice that I was even making an effort. She said it just felt like the old hang out and whatever between us, and that she had let those feelings go a long time ago.

Im still recovering honestly. Part of me entirely understands where she is coming from. I told her no when she wanted it most, and it bothers her that I would take her saying no so hard now. I asked her if she felt it would have been taking advantage of her to accept her back then, and she said she doesnt know, but wanted it anyways.

The intimacy over the last year is what confuses me most. We’d done some rough kissing a few times, but nothing like what we shared in the last 12 months. Part of that was finally having time and being close enough to each other, Part of that was growing as people and being more honest about being what we wanted. I just dont understand why she would want that with me if those feelings were really gone a long time ago.

I really dont know. A huge part of me just wants to wait for things to get better. I sleep a lot. Between the loss of work and the loss of hope, its hard to tell which one feels worse. I still message her. We share dumb memes. It hurts every time I see her notification pop up, but hurting is better than nothing sometimes. Its been a long time since I’ve been so deep in the hole, but I’ve always pulled through before. Just have to wait. Sleep is good for waiting. Dreams dont hurt.

Everyone copes.

Oh dear, to avoid revealing anything identifiable, and not write a novel, I’ll keep this shortish… but to answer the question…

My last relationship, she pursued me aggressively, then once she got me to agree to relationship with her, ended up screwing around with 3 other people behind my back not long after. slipped up her story with one of them, which made all 3 aware and her house of cards fell, and she had the audacity to come to me expecting there theres and head pats telling her it was all right from me, while telling me about all 3 and everything she did with them… I gave her a nice tirade about what I thought about her audacity, and her, and told her to never even think my name again, much less contact me in any fashion.

The relationship before that, another woman that kinda aggressively pursued me, got me to spend a lot of money for her, would emotionally manipulate me, and eventually started to physically hit me. When I finally stood up for myself in the smallest way, she lost her absolute shit at me, which resulted in me finally saying enough is enough and ending the relationship.

The “relationship” before that, that I’m just mentioning for a laugh over how ridiculous it was… another woman that approached me and asked me if I wanted to try dating her, I’d casually known her for a short while as a friend of a friend kind of thing, so I said sure…30 minutes later she was in another room with her dress hiked up bouncing on someone elses lap on a couch. Obviously this wasnt a real relationship, so its not like I had any hangups from this one, but its certainly a what the fuck moment.

So yeah, I’ve never really had what you’d call a healthy relationship, and honestly at this point in my life I genuinely thinking I’m giving up on women in general, as far as relationships go.

I moved across the country

I was unmedicated.

She decided she wanted to explore polyamory without telling me first. I probably would have been cool with it, or at least given it a shot, had we talked about it beforehand

She died…

Becoming a widower at 40 sucks.

I definitely don’t consider the end of the relationship a failure but the entire thing was the failure and leaving was the success.

He wasn’t abusive or anything. He was also very Christian and it took me a while to realize that he was fetishizing me for being “bad” while simultaneously putting me on a pedastal. I feel so gross when I even think about it tbh. He wanted kids, wanted a marriage, I convinced myself I wanted that as well. Thankfully we never even got close to that. He criticized me constantly for drinking/weed (I was in my early 20s and in college and definitely wasn’t partaking anymore than your average party person), but he criticized me for it in the condescending fucking way only a religious person would.

He also only brushed his teeth like twice a week… Something I only figured out when he stayed with me and my parents for a month and we didn’t have mouthwash for him to clean his mouth with daily??

Talked about his previous ex pretty often too, about how heartbroken she had left him blah blah blah. Honestly there were a lot of red flags but I was young and infatuated.

Last straw was when I had to cancel a trip to visit him to travel to my home country because my aunt was sick. He told me to “have fun” (in a completely serious tone, not sarcastically) and was sending me selfies throughout asking me which ones were better as I watched my aunt dying.

I spiralled very soon after that, faced some of the darkest experiences of my life. But at least I broke up with him.

I don’t think he was necessarily a bad person after all that, maybe just naive, but I will never trust any feelings of infatuation again. He’s probably the only person I’ve dated where I genuinely regret it.

She was a parasite, a substance abuser and a manipulator

She had never been in a “real” relationship before, in her late 30s, and I grew to understand why

She was mostly asexual and I was relatively inexperienced. We got along really well and moved in together. Unfortunately we just wanted different things.

We were polyamorous, had spent 8 years together, and then her other (new) partner decided she didn’t like me. So she put a wedge into our relationship by breaking the trust down between me and my partner, framing me as abusive, and eventually my partner abandoned me after the trust was gone.

The other gal turned everything I did into some manipulative scheme or way to control my partners. For example, the fact that I couldn’t suddenly drop $2k on a wisdom tooth removal for her became “financial abuse and control”.

I’m going to be angry about it for the rest of my life, I think.

She was religious to the point of being crazy, and she was absolutely obsessed with her dog, who was the worst behaved dog I’ve ever personally known.

I fell for her because she helped me become more of an adult, someone who could pay bills and be sort of responsible for myself. And like every super-religious woman I have ever personally known, she was an absolute horndog but felt really guilty about it, especially if she really enjoyed it.

We were on this yo-yo thing for years where she would determine that im too much of a heathen, so she would leave, and then she would see me talking with some other woman, and she would run said woman off. I was young and stupid and kept going back. We were even married for a bit, but she fell right back into the same pattern and divorced me two months later.

Not long after that she went and married someone else. Finally. Shes with this guy for three months and is trying to get her claws back into me. But by this time I had found the woman I am now married to. My current wife doesn’t have the same religious and sexual hangups, and she understands things like “dogs need to be housebroken” and “You have to train dogs not to bite children”. Well of course she pulled out all the stops to try and quash it, but I finally learned to say “would you kindly fuck off”.

And I have been happily married to a really amazing woman for 17 years.

She was an alcoholic with border-line personality disorder, and as a naive and lonely young Scotsman I foolishly mistook her for a bright girl with a quirky personality who liked a drink and had occasional violent moodswings. Took way too long to realise what the gravity of her condition meant. I was emotionally inexperienced and trusting. And I paid the price.

On the bright side, when i came out of that relationship and healed I met someone well-balanced and kind, who is now my wife. I’m so grateful for the love i now have and the relative stability of my life, and in a weird way I’m glad I went through what I did with my ex, as it makes me appreciate what I now have.

He died, which really put a damper on the whole thing.

She had “left” years ago but was hanging on for the money and the kids. Constantly yelled at me, refused to do any family activities together. I even funded her savings to escape ( all of our money was ours except what was hers) on the claim that it would reduce her anxiety. Eventually she filed, blames me for “not fighting for her”.

So much stress gone. So much more peace in my life.

My biggest regret really was not fighting for full custody. We have equal custody but for the first few years I was able to get the kids most of the time

10 years together. She was upfront about her long-term goal of never having children, and I was upfront about how I felt at the time, which was “meh, I could go either way.”

We met while I was diving into the depths of alcoholism. My first (and only) DUI was when we’d been seeing each other for a couple months, They wanted me to pay $300 or spend a few nights in jail, I said “Lemme text my girl so she can feed my cat.”

I broke up with her a few times, but kept coming back because she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever met, and we did genuinely care for each other. I said “I’m moving across country, you can come or you can stay,” She came. I proposed a couple years later. We married a few years after that.

I finally got sober, and immediately knew that we didn’t belong together. My alcoholism told me I wasn’t good enough to be a father, but I truly do want to be one. We had become roommates, neither one of us really sharing emotionally or physically. I remember how terrible I felt, when we’d be in the same room, and instead of talking to each other, we’d baby talk to our (amazing, wonderful) little dog instead. I remember feeling so jealous of that dog, because she was so physically affectionate with her, and never (ever) me.

This is an aside, but, For our entire relationship together, the only thing I ever really asked for, was a giant cookie for my birthday. It’s a family tradition, and I love them. 10 years I asked for a simple $7.99 giant cookie from the grocery store, with a Happy Birthday message, and for 10 years, she never did it. I did everything for her, took care of everything. The car, the house, the groceries, her health care, her mental healthcare… I realized that’s all she wanted, was a caretaker.

Well, it came to a head one night when we were randomly talking openly, and she told me the only reason she slept with me was so I wouldn’t leave her. When I sobered up, I started a mental clock of two years, and told her what I needed from her, and gave her those 2 years to fix it. She didn’t, so after two years, I told her we weren’t right together and we split up. I cried, so much. It was awful. I still very much love her, but, I was right. We just weren’t meant for each other.

It’s been 5 years since then, and I’ve been having trouble finding my person. I went to therapy, went HARD in therapy, really worked on myself. Got better physically, mentally, have a much better job, and just recently started texting a woman that lives a thousand miles away in Texas. She’s beautiful just like my ex-wife is, except she wants to have kids.

Pray for me, bros, I really like her, and don’t want to mess this up.