A lot of relationships end badly, but some end in far more devastating and scandalous ways. While we all make mistakes and have relationship regrets, there is a big difference between a regrettable relationship and a fall-out with a pathological liar.
Some relationships end in such destructive ways they deserve to mythologized as cautionary tales and examples of just how toxic love can be. But also, some stories stand out because truth can be infinitely weirder and messier than fiction.
In a popular Reddit thread, people shared the craziest things they've ever experienced or witnessed in a romantic relationship.
1. From OP:
Last weekend, one of my girlfriend's best friends got married to a man she had been dating since high school. He'd converted to Judaism, she'd given up a permanent teaching position to move for his new promotion, and by all accounts, they were quite in love.
The story goes (as was told by my gf), he had started acting a little distant about three weeks before the wedding. She (the bride) wrote this off because he had already moved down for his new job, and this was the first time they had ever been "apart" from each other in those 8 years, and she just "invaded" his new private life by moving in before the wedding. So, wedding time, everyone is pretty happy, the ceremony was beautiful, their vows were quite good, especially his. He choked up a few times, she could barely hold it together, but they made it through, alright. The reception was quite fun (as most Jewish weddings are) and we go our separate ways.
Last night, I get a call from my girlfriend saying the bride is in shambles, as the groom had just told her that he no longer loves her. He spouts out every cliche in the book, "It's not you, it's me," "I love you, but I'm not in love with you," etc. His initial story is that there isn't another woman, and that it's just crazy, but it seemed like he wanted to work his feelings out. Today, the bride decides to check on their phone bill, and lo and behold, there are a bunch of texts and calls to the same number. When she checks his phone, all of the texts were evidence of an affair, including many texts espousing his love for "new girl." (I actually don't know new girl's name, but she's his coworker) Many of these were sent while they were on their honeymoon, and many of the calls were immediately after he had called the bride, usually saying goodbye with "I love you."
Mind you, throughout this whole process, the bride had sensed strange things going on with the groom, and even offered to postpone the wedding, or cancel it altogether, but the groom still went through it it...while he was schtupping this co-worker of his.
I nominate this groom for the Douchebag of the Year award.
And I'm gonna ask my girlfriend if this should be turned into a Lifetime movie, at some point. Seriously qualifies...
UPDATE 1: My GF is currently assisting the bride in removing personal items from the bride and groom's apartment. They're still going to "work on this," but yeah, he's an asshole, so he's most likely just trying to save face. Also, his mom (who was previously unmentioned and quite a monster-in-law leading up to the wedding) has apologized to the bride and is now working on trying to sort this all out. Good things DO come from tragedy, but this whole situation just bites.
A year or so after marrying my great-great-grandmother, my great-great-grandfather received a telegram informing him that an uncle of his had died, leaving him a handsome inheritance and a few acres of semi-developed land in the Philippines. My great-great-grandfather promptly parted ways with his pregnant wife to visit the plot and, if appropriate, oversee construction of a property where he planned to move his spouse, future child and several miscellaneous, unattached family members.
A month after his departure, his wife received a telegram in broken English detailing her husband's sudden death from Spanish 'flu. She and the rest of the family were understandably shocked, but soon undertook the appropriate funeral rites and settled his affairs in England. My great-great-grandmother eventually remarried to a widower whose spouse had also died from the Spanish 'flu, and her first daughter went on to give birth to my grandmother.
A few years ago, however, my uncle, who has taken to cataloguing our family history in obsessive detail, found that no death certificate was issued at the time my great-great-grandfather supposedly died besides the one they requested in his absence in England. Moreover, he found a marriage certificate and a death certificate that all but confirmed that my great-great-grandfather had married another woman in the Philippines not long after arriving and lived there for another thirty years or so.
TL;DR: Newlywed great-great-grandfather fakes death, starts new life seven thousand miles away from his wife and unborn child.
Found out a year after breaking up with a girlfriend that she'd been cheating on me through most of the time we were dating. It explained all sorts of little things...the random bursting into tears toward the end, her general insanity, and hypersensitivity to me doing anything with anyone else.
What makes it really f*cked up, though, is that she cheated on me with....my father.
I've posted this here before, but it's still a complete mindf*ck every time I think about it.
It's been two years, and I've barely spoken to him since. Just hearing his voice still induces a white-hot flash of rage. It's a good thing I live an ocean away, cos I don't want to think about what might happen if he lived close by.
I have a friend, who is "The other woman" the guy she is having relations with spent the night before his wedding with her, is still married and still boinking my friend, 3yrs later! She still believes he's going to leave his wife and they'll be happily ever after.
Similar to the OP, I know a girl who had been cheating on her fiancé for a long time. She went through with the wedding, then dumped him afterwards.
Why did she go through with it? She didn't want to spoilherbig day.
My childhood best friend of more than a decade got married a couple weekends ago to a gold-digging succubus whom we all hated. His own family offered to take the financial hit in the week leading up to the wedding if he called it off.
Her family business is marrying rich, and he alienated tons of his friends are regularly fought with his family over her.
I refused to attend the wedding, but at least half the wedding party (including his sisters; this girl had no friends, so her only bridesmaids were her sisters and his sisters) also couldn't stand her.
Her oldest sister, who was her maid of honor, turned her toast into a narcissistic rant about her own recent divorce, and apparently his family as a whole was shocked how her family conducted herself.
He realized on their honeymoon just what a terrible person she was and how she would ruin his life. She told him that she had no intention of ever working again (she had quit her job right before the wedding) or going back to school (she went to 5 undergrads in 6 years, is nowhere close to graduating from any of them), and that she wanted nothing to do with his family ever again.
So they got married on a Saturday, and he asked for divorce on the following Thursday. Their marriage lasted 6.9% of a Kardashian.
A friend of a friend grew up in a really tight knit community of Christians. She and her husband waited until their wedding night to have sex, etc. Cut to a few months after the wedding and they mysteriously break up and she moves out. Turns out she'd started sleeping with her personal trainer who helped her get in shape for the wedding. She's also pregnant.
I had a friend whose Mother had a very serious stroke. After a long time recuperating in hospital, she got to return home. She promptly found out that her best friend and husband had bonded by her bedside and had been having an affair throughout her recovery. Her husband and her best friend left her severely disabled and on her own to be together.
I was in a long distance relationship and applied for several jobs in my boyfriend's city with the intention of moving to be with him. I got a verbal job offer from a company and called to tell him. I was ecstatic. He used the phone call to inform me that my moving to be with him would be the biggest mistake I ever made and promptly dumped me. Well f*ck. Cue two weeks later...I decided he doesn't own the West coast, and I will be moving to California in 7 days!
My ex and I were living overseas together and he convinced me to quit my job, pay off the rest of the lease and move back home with him because he wanted to start a family. He dumped me seven days after my plane landed. I had no job, no place to live, and had sent home my pay checks to him so he could find an apartment. My boss had wanted to take me on permanently but I spent the last of my money on the flights home. I'm still in credit card debt over it.
When my best friend's boyfriend confided in me that he wanted to leave her because she had been acting "so sad" lately, that was kinda douchey. Mind you, both her parents had just died, and her brother was being taken away from her into foster care. F*ck YOU Zach.
I had a female friend we'll call her Legs, and I played World of Warcraft- I used to post funny WoW related pictures on Facebook and tag my friends according to what character they played. Anyways, I tagged her and another friend in one. They started talking and really hit it off! He came up from the states and spent the weekend with her and her daughter. A week later, she is crying and going on about how she thinks she's pregnant!
I sh*t you not. A WEEK LATER.
My friend is calling me. FREAKING OUT. And I'm all, 'Joe, she wouldn't know she was pregnant that fast and if she is, it's ain't yours.'
Same day, I head to Future shop to get a new mouse or something. I see Johnny, a mutual friend of mine and Legs. I'm all, 'didja hear, Legs thinks she's prego.'
He looks at me, "No she's not. She was asking for a turkey baster of my s*men so that she could have another baby."
I look at him, and he's serious. He shows me the text messages. LITERAL: 'I want to have another baby. We don't even have to do it, I just need a turkey baster and your s*men.'
She was a single mom, who struggled to pay her bills.
I...just...wut.
TL;DR: Former female friend told her boyfriend she was pregnant, while asking another mutual friend of ours to impregnate her.
A friend of mine told her boyfriend (of less than six months) that she wouldn't be interested in moving in with him unless he would agree to get married. He said they could talk about it, and she immediately told all of Facebook. Two weeks later she's shopping for dresses and tells him where to get the ring she had picked out. They're married now. Oh - and she made him change his last name to hers. Otherwise she said she wouldn't marry him.
One of my best friends exes told her after they had broken up that he wants her to be her wife...but not now. Now he wants to f*ck as many girls as he can before he settles down.
Weird.
I was at a wedding where during the ceremony the couple lit a candle together to signify the coming together of two people or some such theme. The problem though was that they could not get the darned thing to light. So they stood up there for like 2 minutes with everyone silently watching them clicking a stove lighter and trying to get the wic to catch. Finally a guy from the audience runs up with a leatherman, flips outs out of the knife part, and starts hacking away at the top of the candle.
To everyone's audible relief the couple was able to light the candle and get on their ceremony. After the wedding there was a general hushed agreement that the candle bit was a poor omen for what was to come. Sure enough 2 years later they both got hit by a truck.
I had an acquaintance in high school who was a little too attached to his girlfriend, an overly attached boyfriend if you will. He was texting her one night when she got mad at him for some reason and decided not to answer him anymore. A normal person would think that she might have fallen asleep but he decided the best course of action was to go in to her back yard, take a picture through her window of her room, and send it to her with the caption "your TV is on so I know that you are still awake."
A girl my sister went to school with found out her boyfriend was cheating so she gave some lucky guy a bj and kissed her 'boyfriend' with the s*men still in her mouth.
A few years ago while our unit was in Afghanistan, this idiot that I used to work with was sleeping with this Army chick (we're Air Force) on the regular. Well one day towards the end of her deployment she tells him she's pregnant. He freaks out and tells his wife about the whole thing. His wife decides to forgive him. Meanwhile, he gets orders to a new base, coincidentally about 20 minutes from where his Army girlfriend was stationed.
Good, because now he can take care of the kid, right? Well they move there and come to find out Army chick was never pregnant at all, and the whole thing was made up so he would stay with her. Idiot's wife is once again pissed and hurt, but decides to forgive him again if he gets her face tattooed on him. Guess what he has now? A giant portrait of her face right over his heart.
My boyfriend, who was living with me and sharing a bed with me at the time, broke up with me through my sister two weeks before he moved out. Then he couldn't understand why I was upset/felt awkward the last two weeks he was living with me.
To echo someone else on here, this is why having cats is better than having a boyfriend!
In college, my rich friend was planning her extravagant wedding. About three months before the big day, she finds out she's pregnant. For the first few weeks, she went around happy and excited about the baby. Then a few weeks later, I see her drinking at a bar and I was like, "What about the baby?" And she cheerfully replied, "Oh, I'm having an abortion tomorrow. I won't fit into my wedding dress if I'm pregnant!"
Now, anti-abortion people would like to have you believe that all abortion decisions are this frivolous, but they are not. Please don't construe this story as me being anti-choice, because I"m not. Still, this was truly shocking to me...she wouldn't be showing her pregnancy THAT much at her wedding, and she certainly could afford to buy a new wedding dress. Her fiance completely supported this decision to not let their baby "ruin their wedding".
Fast forward six months - the abortion happened, the big, perfect wedding went off without a hitch, and she's bragging about being pregnant again. Wondered why her all-Catholic pack of friends weren't jumping for joy for her.
But this was also the same girl who, years later, called me to yell at me for leaving my abusive husband. She angrily tutored me that "as Catholics, our marriages are supposed to be forever" and that "all men hit, and as long as they don't put you in the hospital, that's what we have to endure as wives, as long as it doesn't happen too much." Yeah, she was the one to judge if I got hit "too much" or not.