9 Signs You Dodged A Bullet By Breaking Up With Him

When you get dumped, sometimes you start really romanticizing your ex and your relationship. It’s very easy to create a mental montage of all the good times, but in reality, you dodged a massive bullet. Here are a few signs that this guy wasn’t a good long-term fit.

  1. When you tell your friends, they congratulate you. Sometimes friends are upfront about not liking your significant other; other times they feel weird saying something and possibly jeopardizing the friendship. They’d prefer you to figure it out for yourself. If your friends want to take you out for celebratory drinks after hearing the news that you split from this dude, it’s a pretty big sign that they always thought he was a massive loser.
  2. You’re suddenly a lot more financially well-off. You never realized it until you noticed your bank account had a lot more money in it. He was always borrowing money for stupid reasons and it got to a point where it all just became second nature. A decent boyfriend would have paid you back at the very least.
  3. Suddenly, you feel a sense of freedom. There’s something great about being single. In fact, it’s in your single years when you really get to know yourself and figure out what you want in a relationship. You might miss this guy a little bit, but your overall feeling is joy that you can finally go back to doing the things you wanted to do. That means this guy was suffocating you a little bit when you were together.
  4. He’s already started dating someone else. That means one of two things. One, he wasn’t being faithful and started dating or flirting with this girl in the midst of your relationship. Or two, he didn’t care for you as a person. He just wanted someone to fill the role of “girlfriend.” If you really cared about the person you were with, you’d at least give the breakup some time to actually settle in.
  5. Your relationship was more or less focused on sex. Sex is a good thing and an important part of the relationship. However, if that’s all you did and he barely got to even know you as a person, you dodged a bullet. This guy probably never even considered you to be an actual girlfriend—you were just a hookup. You can have sex with other people who actually care about what your day was like and what your job is all about.
  6. He’s yelled at you more times than you’d like to admit. Nobody likes getting yelled at. Sometimes that’s someone’s natural reaction to an argument, but if the yelling happens in public or there’s pushing or shoving that accompanies the yelling? This guy was bad news. Those pushes and shoves would have escalated into something much scarier if you continued letting him stay in your life. Never let anyone treat you poorly, and know that any sort of yelling match should seriously come with an apology after both of you have cooled down.
  7. He still had dating apps on his phone. Even if he swore he never used them, they’re still there and he acted like you were crazy if you asked him to get rid of them for good. This means that in the back of his head, he didn’t think you were “The One.” He was already planning his exit strategy the second someone else answered his messages online. He literally wasted a ton of your time and he’ll probably waste the time of the next girl he cons into dating him.
  8. He couldn’t hold down a job. It was always someone else’s fault and it seemed like every time he got canned from a position, he had a long sob story prepared to make himself look like the victim. In reality, a situation like this may happen once, but even so, it’s very rare. This guy was really into self-sabotaging every opportunity handed to him as a way to make people feel sorry for him, and that’s just something an actual adult shouldn’t do.
  9. Your parents hated him. Like, they barely even remembered his name. They knew from day one that this guy wasn’t right for you and they weren’t afraid to let you know. If you have loving parents, their goal isn’t to make you miserable — in fact, it’s just the opposite. They saw something weird in this guy from the very beginning and didn’t even feel comfortable when he was in their house. Next time, trust your parents. Seriously.
Karen Belz is a New Jersey native who is currently living in Maryland. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Speech Communication with a focus in Broadcasting and Print Media Studies from Millersville University of Pennsylvania. Since graduating, she has written for sites like LittleThings, HelloGiggles, and Scary Mommy and is currently an e-commerce editor at Bustle.

When she's not writing, she enjoys making her phone run out of memory after taking too many photos of her dog. You can find her on Twitter @karenebelz or on Instagram @karenbelz.
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