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4a515de38295fce4244ca46562f86d86

4a515de38295fce4244ca46562f86d86

4a515de38295fce4244ca46562f86d86

My ex had a bunk bed frame in his bedroom, but a mattress on the floor, and he was like 38 years old. He lived in a college town and also just didn’t shower. I once genuinely worried I had to get a tetanus shot after falling and cutting my hand on an unknown object in the filth on the floor in his disgusting home.

-T.J.

When we’d walk down the street, if I was closer to the road than he was, he’d grab my upper arm so hard it would bruise and physically YANK me to his other side so hard I would stumble, and tell me “a man makes sure a woman doesn’t walk next to the road. You could get in an accident.”

-T.J.

He referred to licking my clit twice before jackhammering my cervix as “going down on me.”

-T.J.

I once drove over an hour in a horrible snowstorm to hang out with my boyfriend. I spun 360 degrees in the middle of the freeway at one point, risked my life. When I finally showed up, he was playing a video game with that dumbass headset on and wouldn’t even acknowledge me. He would sit at the tv to play video games after work before he even took his coat off and not get up for hours. There were cans of half-eaten fruit sitting around the tv, and if you tapped one, fruit flies would come storming out.

-J.A.

This guy I was hopelessly in love with borrowed my car, but locked the keys inside. This was in New Orleans after Katrina, and Triple A was hard to get. It took forever, I was so stressed, I thought I was gonna miss work. The AAA guy came and jimmied my car, I paid him, but there were no keys in there. They were in my dude’s pocket and he was shitfaced drunk and laughed in my face.

-V.C.

When I brought home a guy after our first date, things were going REALLY well. When we started to make out, he started growling. Like a cat. Like a big cat. And had a tiger tattoo. Which is fine on its own, but the sexual cat growls made the combo concerning.

-V.L.

The first red flag was that one of his Bumble profile pictures was of him sitting on top of his car, very obnoxiously. The second was that our first conversation (on Bumble) was about Chipotle, and he said he wanted to lick sour cream off my ass. Later, he ditched me because he was on a Xanax bender for an entire week. Jesus take the wheel.

-D.E.

This dude chose to pick me up for a date in his beater car that could only turn left. He wasn’t embarrassed at all that we took left turns all the way to dinner.

-J.M.

One week into dating my college math professor, he got insanely mad at me because I wouldn’t go to New York to be at his dying mother’s bedside.

-L.L.

My ex cheated on me, and when I told him I’d prefer he not cheat on me, he told me I had “insane Disney-movie expectations” for what a real relationship is. When we finally broke up he would text me about how he was nervous to go see the girl he cheated on me with, because she’s so smart and pretty. When I said we can’t talk about those things together, he asked if I was on my period and if that’s why I was acting so crazy and emotional.

-E.S.

My ex wouldn’t tell his ex, who he hadn’t been with for more than 3 years, that he had started dating me in fear that she would stop talking to him.

-X.R.

My ex worked at a rehabilitative high school for kids coming out of juvenile detention and he told me that he thought Black kids and Hispanic kids were stupid. He ran into one of his students outside the school one day, and got him high. And he wouldn’t let me put a BLM sign in the window of our third-floor apartment because he was afraid of being attacked. Also once he took my sandwich out of my hands and threw it on the floor because he had dropped his own sandwich and was mad about it.

-N.D.

My ex wouldn’t let me drink during college. If I went out he refused to kiss me for DAYS. I missed out on so much during college. One day he broke up with me by just completely cutting me off. No explanation. Didn’t even tell me we were breaking up. Just literally refused to talk to me LOL. Oh and he never went down on me.

-G.P.

My ex straight up told me he thought he was a sociopath, and I was just like tra la la la la. He also wanted to be cryogenically frozen and even joined the society and paid dues.

-A.L.

My ex used to fake being diabetic in order to excuse passing out drunk every night. Not even sure how that one computes.

-L.M.

He had a binder of used ladies’ panties in his closet at his parents’ house. A binder.

-A.L.

He had a bunch of Funko Pop figurines still in the boxes displayed like actual art in his home.

-D.C.

My ex told me he was curious about cannibalism. He really wanted to know what human flesh tastes like. I thought it was … a joke?

-A.B.

I dated a guy who once stole all my Vicodin after I had had a surgery. Then he cheated on me. Then he dumped me when I was visiting him across the country.

-A.K.

I once dated a guy who truly, truly believed he was a vampire. Lol.

-A.S.

An ex once told me, “I only date cute or pretty girls. I don’t want to date a beautiful girl that every other guy is going to be looking at.”
I also found a suicide letter he wrote to his ex after she dumped him, along with an old Valentine’s Day card and her old lipstick.

-L.M.

I had an ex who lied about his mom being dead! I only found out because she tagged him in something on Facebook. When I blew it up on my tv screen, he tried to say someone was managing her account. I had his bags packed up at my house and told him never to talk to me again.

-M.M.

He was married. Like actively married. He had sworn up and down he and his wife didn’t even sleep in the same bed any more and that they had an agreement. He had two kids with her after we “dated.”

-D.C.

I dated my chemistry professor in college. After a few weeks of dating, he was crying and said “I just want you to tell me you want me, that you need me, and love me” because I didn’t call him to hang out early enough that day. It took 2 tries for me to break up with him because the first time he cried and begged so much.

-S.F.

A graffiti boy I dated said “I don’t consider myself a feminist” and then told me he listened to the Joe Rogan Experience.

-M.H.

One time I told a guy about my childhood trauma and subsequent adolescent wild ways, and then he told me about how he had murdered someone as a teen. He then said, “oh, but what was that about you fucking older men?” and then it turned out he was LYING. But first, my dumbass was like ooooooh teen murderer!! gotta collect ’em all.

-V.C.

He used shaving cream as hair gel.

-S.W.

I dated a guy who did NOT like tattoos, which is chill, I guess to each their own, but he didn’t make this known until AFTER we’d been dating for a few months. Despite my very visible tattoos. He would constantly judge me whenever I got a new one, and when we finally had it out over it he was like “well it’s not your-body-your-choice when I’m the one who has to look at it” (L-O-L). He would also do weird negging things like tell me I had beautiful straight teeth but that I needed to quit smoking because they were too yellow. I forgive him because it’s clear to me now that he just really disliked himself but damn. Never again.

-J.S.

He told people we were in an open relationship. We weren’t.

-S.S.

I had an ex tell me that I was possessed by a demon and that I needed an exorcism.

-T.P.

He had no real furniture, he slept on a mattress on the floor, and there was kitty litter in the bed which he was like “oh just sweep it off, it’s fine.”

-D.C.