It sickens me to think that he was cheating on me with the ex he supposedly ended things with. He assured me he was totally over her then proposed to her while he was still with me. What the hell?
- He tried to wash away my doubts. I knew he was still seeing his ex a few weeks before he got with me, and that cast a shadow over our relationship. However, he made it clear that things were over with her and I actually believed it. He really seemed genuine when he told me how much he wanted to be with me and create a new beginning. I really thought he was over her and he’d moved on from the past. Hey, maybe it happens at a different pace for different people, right?
- He was obviously lying to me. Of course, I only discovered later that he was totally full of crap. When he was “working late” on an important project at work, he was actually with his ex. Yup, it’s one of the classic lies guys tell they have someone else firing up their texts and spending time with them.
- They were still dating. It wasn’t like he was just hanging out with his ex because legitimately they decided to stay friends. That would’ve been a bit hard to deal on its own, but what he was doing was much worse. He was still with her while he was taking me out on dates, and their relationship was getting really serious.
- Then he threw me a plot twist. During one date, his phone kept ringing and he kept cutting the call. It struck me as weird, especially when he put his phone face-down on the table. I asked him about it and he came up with a “crazy ex” story. She was apparently chasing him hard because she wanted to get back together but he made it clear to me that he wasn’t interested in anything with her. Their relationship was dead and buried, or so he said. Meanwhile, the jerk was just trying to get off the subject so I’d stop questioning him.
- Things were going well with us. I believed the things he said. Why wouldn’t I? He was being a totally amazing boyfriend, except for a few red flags like the working late thing and how he could never see me on Saturdays because he had to—you guessed it—work. Still, overall, he was a great guy to me.
- Then he hit the brakes. There I was thinking that things were great for the most part, but then he called me up one day and said we needed to talk. I could hear from his voice that something major was wrong and I knew that it was probably going to wreck our relationship.
- He broke up with me. He gave me a sob story about how he wasn’t in the right mind to have a relationship and perhaps he’d jumped into things a little too quickly after getting his heart broken by his “crazy ex.” (FYI: I’ve now learned the hard way to never trust a guy when he says his ex is crazy.)
- I asked him if his ex had something to do with the breakup. I really thought that I was stupid and his ex must have been the reason behind our breakup. Even if he wasn’t keen on having something with her, maybe he was still thinking about her and it was bringing up old baggage? He denied it, of course, insisting that he was just ending things because he wanted to end things, not because someone else was on the horizon. It made me feel the tiniest bit better, but that feeilng wasn’t going to last long.
- Then I saw what he posted on Facebook. After our breakup, I got into the bad habit of checking up on his social media accounts almost daily to see what was going on in his life. Big mistake. I saw that he proposed to his ex while we were still an item. This was clearly why he never wanted to be friends on social media when we were together. He was hiding his double life.
- I was in complete shock. He couldn’t wait to get into an engagement with her. Clearly they’d been having a very serious relationship while he was pretending to build something real with me. It was sickening. I had to scroll through the romantic proposal pictures on Facebook, all the while biting down on what I wanted to do.
- I wanted to burst her happy bubble. This poor woman had no idea who she was getting engaged to! She had no idea that he was with me during their relationship. She needed to know, but I knew it wasn’t my place to tell her. Hopefully, the clues I got that he was with someone else would become apparent to her too. Maybe she ignored all the red flags that pointed to him dating someone on the side. Whatever. All I could do was look out for myself and say good riddance to my ex, who was clearly the biggest loser on the planet.
