People Are Sharing The Wildest Breakups They've Ever Witnessed Or Heard About, And I Am So Glad I'm Single
Recently, Reddit user ScarTissue5 asked people about their wildest breakup stories, and they did not disappoint. Here are 33 stories about relationships falling apart that made me glad I'm single.
Note: There are mentions of murder, violence, assault, child sexual abuse images, and incest.
1."My ex was seeing another girl behind my back, but he and I lived together. I guess she wanted him to leave me so they could be together. Well, instead of just breaking up with me, we went out to a bar one night, and he roofied me. While we were there, I got kicked out when I started walking funny. We made it to a gas station, and I collapsed. He called 911 and put a weed pipe in my purse. I got arrested for public intoxication after waking up from a coma caused by being roofied and possession of a paraphernalia for the pipe. I did a couple of weeks in jail while he moved in with that other girl. A week or two later, he collapsed on the floor and died. His liver and kidneys were shit from drinking. He was 29. I got out of jail the day he died. That was the wildest breakup I've ever had or even heard of."
2."The husband was eating breakfast when he noticed a new tattoo on his wife's wrist. It was the name of her new boyfriend. She also would drive down toll roads in his car without paying. When the bills came in, she threw them away. He was on the hook for thousands of dollars when he figured it out!"
3."My whole life changed in a moment. I had just had my sixth anniversary with my husband. Our child was five. I sent him to work with a kiss. By 11:15, I had found a video from a hidden camera in our bathroom showing my 14-year-old niece nude. By 11:20, I had called the police and had emotionally separated from my ex. I was shocked when I realized he wouldn't go to jail that day. I figured out how to get him to agree to stay with his parents. I let him come get whatever he wanted, but I called his dad to come to pick him up. The next day, I got protective orders, but he never returned home. He is in prison and will be a sex offender for life."
4."Two of my old high school friends grew up and got married. Both are women. It turns out one was verbally and/or physically abusing the other, and the victim divorced her and married her abuser's father. They're still together. I found this out on Facebook."
5."It was their wedding day, at a big reception with all their families and friends before hitting the city hall and the church later. The groom made a speech, but not the one you'd expect. He exposed the bride for cheating on him all along with the best man (the best friend of the groom until then). He told everybody the wedding was off and she could go to hell. ... This happened for real to my friend's brother."
"The brother took years to recover from depression after that."
6."The pretty girl in my class got married and had a kid with a decent guy. She was cheating on him with another local dude. The married dude found out and went to confront the other guy. The other guy shot at him and hit him in the back; the married guy escaped but died on the side of a road from the gunshot. The shooter claimed self-defense and got off; the victim's family told the wife and dude to get out of town, or they would get wasted. She took the kid and left town with the guy. I feel bad for the kid living with their dad's killer. As far as I know, the wife has never returned."
7."I broke up with my boyfriend because he constantly gave me loyalty tests. A few weeks later, I found out that he had died from an overdose while taking pills from his home medicine cabinet. I felt horrible, like it was my fault, but I didn't feel comfortable trying to contact his family or go to his funeral. One day after the ceremony, I received a text from his cellphone, and it turned out HE WAS NOT DEAD! It had been another of his tests to see how I would react. The guy literally FAKED HIS OWN DEATH…and then sent me a message that said, 'Just so you know, I'm over you.'"
8."This couple at my school had been dating since middle school. They were stereotypical teen sweethearts, and everyone thought they would get married. One day, she wasn't at school, and he wasn't doing great. She'd tried to kill herself the night before, and he wouldn't say anything about it. It was odd since she had no history of depression and was an all-around happy person. She finally started talking to people, and what happened got out. Her mom had been fucking her boyfriend from the beginning. The whole relationship. It destroyed her parents' marriage."
9."This happened to my cousin. She met a guy online. They dated, then eventually married, and were together for about 10-15 years. She already had two sons from a previous marriage and eventually had one daughter with him. Things were always kind of rocky with them, but life kept moving until she started doing very well. She got her master's degree and got a nice promotion to assistant director at her job. He didn't like this. He was a barber and felt intimidated by her. They got into an argument, and she decided enough was enough. The husband left. A week later, she was sleeping and was awakened by her husband stabbing her multiple times in the neck. He figured, 'If I can't have her, no one can.'"
"Their daughter ran into the room and screamed, startling the husband. The husband left the house. One of her sons ran into the room and applied pressure on the wound, then called 911, saving her life. The husband walked to the police station and told them he murdered his wife, not knowing she actually lived. He's currently in jail, awaiting sentencing. My cousin is still in therapy and is doing well and trying to move past her trauma."
10."A friend of mine walked in on her boyfriend sucking his brother's dick. As in, the boyfriend's brother. As in incest. While trying to de-escalate the situation (yeah, uh, good luck with that), her boyfriend said it wasn't really incest because they were both men, so they couldn't have a baby."
"She was completely horrified and disgusted. He kept texting her, trying to apologize and begging her to come back. She shared everything with us in the group chat. ... This happened several years ago in another country (not the US). I'm not sure what the laws are regarding this sort of thing over there, but I don't think she would've notified the authorities anyway because they were both adults in their mid to late twenties at the time. Gross, but no one was getting hurt."
11."They were high school sweethearts. He was her first love. They got married and had three kids. He had a well-paying job high up in tech for the government, but it required him to travel. She was a stay-at-home mom. They were married for a long time — if I had to guess, I'd say probably over 15 years. Over the years, he came back from traveling for work less and less. He seemed distant, even with the kids. She was suspicious and Googled his name — a photo came up of him at a father-daughter dance with a little girl who was not theirs."
"She came to find out that he had a whole other life — a girlfriend, a child, a house, etc. — in the city he had to travel to for work. The other woman knew about them and apparently didn't care.
She took him to court in the divorce, trying to get alimony and child support. She borrowed tens of thousands from her family members to help pay lawyer fees. This divorce process lasted years with all the appeals. In the end, very little alimony was awarded, and some child support for the one kid who was turning 18 in a year or two (the other two children over 18). It turned out he had friends in high places, including in the courts, and had a lot of money to pay for the best, most despicable divorce lawyers.
Even after the grueling proceedings were over, he simply refused to pay alimony or child support. She didn't have the money to take him to court again. She took a lot of money out of the 401k account she got from him to get by while she tried to find a job as an unskilled worker who hadn't been in the workforce in 15+ years. The two younger kids refuse to speak with their father unless they need money (which he usually doesn't provide, regardless). They hate him. The oldest has a decent relationship with him (he was around more during her childhood than theirs)."
12."My friend was an underwater welder. It's a terrible job but pays well; they won't let you work after a certain age, though (maybe 40?). My friend and his partner had bought an amazing house in the Philippines near where he worked, and every dollar was now going into his retirement savings because the career was so time-limited. Work was a couple of weeks out at sea, then a couple of weeks back, and so on. One day, he got home from a shift and discovered his partner had sold the house. She'd put all the proceeds — as well as all the contents of their (his!) savings — into HER parents' names and then bugged out. Yes, she had been cheating on him."
"My friend tried but couldn't get any substantial money back due to everything having been in both their names. And nothing obvious was in the ex-partner's accounts anyway. The in-laws were somehow untouchable. So he went from being close to retiring and living the sweet, comfortable life in a glorious home he owned outright to being nearly washed out of his career and also totally penniless. He moved back to Canada, lived in a crowded shared house with a bunch of twenty-somethings, and started from scratch as a construction worker at 40."
13."My friend's boyfriend was building a house. He moved in with her during construction. The plan was that she would move in with him when the house was ready. He asked for her input on architecture details, etc. Moving day arrived. They were all set to move in; she went to work with the movers coming that day. She came back, and the movers had only taken his stuff, not hers. She called him in confusion, and that was the first time he told her he was having doubts and didn't want to move in together. She was completely in shock and crying. He didn't even have the courage to break up with her; he just moved out and never called her again, and she was like, 'Well, I guess we're over now.' It could not have been done in a more chickenshit way."
14."I knew this couple where the woman packed up everything — furniture, rugs, food, even the ice cube trays — and left. The full Grinch. She did leave his clothes and stuff and the bed. But he had no clue why. Was she cheating? Did he do something so wrong? It drove him bonkers — drove us ALL bonkers because he wouldn't stop talking about it. Every time he got drunk, for years, he would inevitably start in about that woman and those damn ice cube trays. Years later, she came up to me at IKEA, and I hardly recognized her. I was expecting and in full waddle, and she chatted at me like a happy, tiny, perfectly manicured bird. I finally asked, 'What the hell happened with you and my friend? That was pretty cold.' She deadass looked me straight in the eye and said, 'Oh, I was just so over him. You know what I mean?'"
15."My ex, who I lived with for something like seven years, had encouraged me to stop drinking, and so I had. But on my birthday, she brought home a bottle of red wine, a bottle of white wine, and some food for me to cook. Instead of cooking, we drank both those bottles of wine and went out on the town. We went to a bar on a pier and got pretty drunk, then went to a karaoke bar and drank a little more. After that, I wanted to go play pinball, but she was done for the night. We got into a HUGE argument, and both stormed off in different directions to walk home. I got home first. I was upset and drunk, so I locked the door so she wouldn't be able to come inside (this was fucking idiotic, and I can't defend it, it was a huge mistake). She banged on the door for a while, and I eventually let her inside. She then called the cops and told them I had abused her (I hadn't touched her)."
"The cops came and took me to jail for domestic violence on my birthday. It was my first trip to jail, and this was Long Beach/Compton County. On the way to jail, the cop said this happens all the time, and he was sure she'd call and clear things up when she sobered up, and I'd be out.
Instead, I spent two weeks in jail while she got on a plane and went to MY FUCKING BIRTHDAY PARTY, where she said I had to stay home for work. She gathered gifts for me and even blew out my birthday candles. (I never got the gifts). All while I was in jail.
There's more to the story, but the long story short is that they let me out of jail and never pressed any charges (because nothing happened). And that's how that relationship ended."
16."Idiot X was seeing two women (A and B) simultaneously. He married Woman A while still seeing Woman B (who knew X was marrying Woman A). The marriage lasted a year and a half and ended because Woman A found out about Woman B. X divorced Woman A and married Woman B, and another year and a half passed. X then cheated on his current wife, Woman B, with his former wife, Woman A. They went to a hotel on a weekend, left the hotel, and got hit by a truck right outside of it. Woman A and X ended up in the hospital in bad but not life-threatening condition."
"The hospital contacted a friend of X because the nurse on shift knew them both. He was told that X and his wife were in an accident. The nurse missed the 'former' part. The friend of X called his current wife's mom to tell her her daughter was in an accident with her husband. The daughter, Woman B, was right there with her mom. Hilarity did not ensue; a second divorce did. Idiot X remains an idiot to this very day."
17."My ex broke up with me at the beginning of a 10-hour flight. We lived together, and his mother picked us up from the airport."
18.Similarly..."I used to know a girl whose ... boyfriend of five years broke up with her at the beginning of a long flight. They made up by the end of the flight and had sex after arriving home. When she woke up in the morning, he was gone and had left her a text thanking her for the night and saying that after thinking better, he had decided to break up for good. A week later, he was officially dating a girl who was a mutual friend of theirs."
19."I don't know if they broke up, but this was how someone I know found out her pilot husband was cheating on her. When a family in Canada adds a child, they receive a monthly tax benefit. It's a monthly payment dependent on your income, but for a while, one wasn't income-tested (it was universal). Mrs. Pilot got a higher-than-normal check, so she called our Revenue Agency to check (the CRA). They said it was for a baby girl [with her husband's last name]. ... What happened was her husband had a kid with someone else, the other woman gave the baby the pilot's last name and listed him as the father, and the payment accidentally got added to the wrong file."
20."My preschool best friend had a very cookie-cutter white American family. The dad was a long-haul trucker; the mom stayed home with the kids. They had a big house and a beautiful backyard. They took the family to Disneyland every year. One night, the husband apparently called my mom drunk and inconsolable. He confessed to her all the sins he had been committing on the road — amphetamines to stay awake, which then progressed to shooting up, sleeping with 'lot lizards' (women who loiter around truck stops), etc. He said he needed to get it off his chest and didn't know who else to call. A few years later, he just up and disappeared. He left for work and never came back. He changed his phone number. Nobody has heard from him since, as far as I know. This was all 20+ years ago."
21."I had an old coworker who was almost retired and did one of those DNA kits with her husband. He was an M&A consultant who had often traveled for work for at least two decades. They found out that he had fathered three kids that were now adults and who knew how many more. She divorced him after 42 years of marriage. I remember her crying in the office very vividly."
22."One of our managers at work sent a COMPANY-WIDE email when he quit, citing a coworker that his wife had cheated on him with. We're talking multi-thousands of employees. It was awkward, to say the least."
23."When I was in my early twenties, a friend of mine had a girlfriend who had bipolar disorder and took medication for it. One day, they decided to take mushrooms, go to the art museum, and enjoy the high. Well, little did he know she had stopped taking her meds. Their high was dying down, so they got in the car to leave. She was driving and started asking if he loved her and how much, and if he would die for her. She started speeding. They got up to about 60mph and smashed into the back of a car stopped at a red light, which pushed that car into traffic, and the driver was killed instantly. Both my friend and his girlfriend were injured but okay. The entire time they were pulling her from the car and hauling her away, she was trying to take her clothes off and grab her boyfriend to have sex."
"She was taken away to a mental health facility, and he SOMEHOW came to my birthday party a few days later and told me this whole story when I asked where his girlfriend was. Needless to say, they broke up. I have no idea what happened to her, but I'm sure she was charged with manslaughter."
24."A friend and his girlfriend got a two-bedroom apartment with a mutual friend. My friend and his girlfriend took one room, and the other girl took the other. Over time, the other girl found a boyfriend who moved in, so it became two couples sharing a two-bedroom apartment. Time went on, and both couples started secretly cheating with each other. Eventually, all four of them realize they've been fucking the other one's SO. So, yep, you guessed it, they swapped partners and continued living together. ... Both (swapped) couples eventually got married, had kids, and divorced years later. When I explain this to people, I usually have to draw a diagram."
25."A coworker told me the story of a married couple who managed two regional offices of our consulting firm in the same major US city that had their marriage dissolve during the merger of our company with our competitor. During their absolutely bitter divorce, the combined company began consolidating the two offices, and the battle lines between the spouses were drawn. Staff were fired if they took direction from the wrong spouse. There were bitter shouting matches in the office nearly every day. When one spouse was selected to head up the consolidated operation over the other, it triggered a lawsuit by the jilted spouse, who cited a hostile work environment, etc. Four or five folks were fired for backing the wrong spouse, and more quit because the environment was so toxic. Our company now has a strict policy that spouses cannot work within the same company division."
26."A friend of mine (A) from high school had a girlfriend (B) for a while. They were living together, but truthfully, none of us in the group of friends really liked her. In any case, one day, she got pregnant because 'she forgot to take the Pill.' ... The baby was born, and a guy friend of hers (C) lived with them for a while to help with caring for the baby. That guy, by the way, was super religious and gay. ... Things between A and B grew sour, so she moved out. I think she tried to take the baby with her, but she was deemed (by the authorities) not to be mentally fit to care for the baby. A and C were now taking care of the baby, and to everyone's surprise, A rediscovered his sexuality and officially got together with C."
"I visited A and C a long while after the drama, and they were loving parents to a smart and healthy daughter. Oh, and then a few years after that I randomly saw B on TV, telling her story about being a pathological liar. That was bizarre, to say the least."
27."I knew an Olympic athlete who experienced both a break-up and a divorce after his wife and girlfriend, who did not know of each other's existence, showed up to cheer him on. They met in the stands. To make matters worse, he was so stressed out to see them that he lost focus and tanked in the prelims."
28."I know two people whose partners cheated on them with their cousins. The first one was at her grandpa's funeral, and she brought her boyfriend for emotional support. He disappeared halfway through, and she found him having sex with her cousin in the toilet. My other friend went to a family party and ended up sharing a bed with his girlfriend and cousin because the bed was so big and there wasn't enough space for everyone. He woke up to his girlfriend riding his cousin."
29."The man got caught cheating from going through a red light with a camera. The photo got sent to his home address, where his wife opened it."
30."I worked with a woman in an office, and we got close enough for her to confide that she was being stalked. Threatening messages, mailed photos of her taken through her windows, etc. It was all pretty frightening. Then, a few weeks later, she wasn't at work for a few days, and I got a bit worried. When she got back, she told me she found out it was her husband playing a 'prank.' She took the kids, moved out, got a restraining order, and served him divorce papers."
"We lost touch when I left that job, but I know through mutual connections that she's now married to a pretty successful guy and has had more kids with him. Good for her!"
31."A coworker was caught cheating with her superior. In retrospect, it was rather obvious. One night, I’m assuming when her husband found out, he got a hold of her work laptop and BLEW UP every Slack channel we had. The company had about 200 employees. He was tagging the owner of the company, CTO, head of HR, notifying the whole channel, etc. about how he 'hopes you like sucking his tiny cock' and other very explicit language. The next morning, both were fired. This was two days after our work Christmas party."
32."A teacher I worked with got invited to her former student's destination wedding in Mexico. She went, and he ended up dumping his bride to run off with her. They got married and had a couple of kids."
33."My ex told me one day he had to move back to his home state because his little sister, who was 11, had terminal brain cancer. We broke up amicably because I respected him wanting to move back to spend her last days with family. Fast forward a few weeks, and I got an Instagram DM from someone. Turns out it was his fiancé. He did have a sister but she most certainly did not have brain cancer. The wild thing is, he still texted me after saying how much he messed up and missed me."
34."She was partying with a male friend and needed sleep at his place. She asked her boyfriend if it was cool if they slept in the same bed. He was like, 'Sure, why not, I trust you.' She fucked the other guy and get this: she blamed her former boyfriend for her cheating! Because he 'should‘ve known that this would happen.'"
And finally, let's end with some stories that are just ridiculous and a bit more light-hearted.
35."This dude I knew in high school was dating some chick. ... One day, he was driving her home after a bunch of us hung out at the local coffee shop. She lived pretty far out in the country, so it was a fairly long drive (45 minutes or so, if memory serves). He had the radio cranked right up to the point they couldn't even speak. After about 15 minutes of driving like this, she turned the radio down and asked, 'What're you thinking about?' To which he replied, 'Eh, just trying to figure out how to break up with you,' and then proceeded to turn the music way back up and keep driving. For 30 more minutes. I can't even imagine the awkwardness."
36."I heard this one from my old hairstylist. She had a female friend who was dating a guy with a pet pig. It was huge, like a full-grown pig. The pig hated the woman and pushed her out of bed to take her place next to her boyfriend. One day, she had enough and told him, 'It is the pig or me.' He told her that the pig was there first, so he dumped her and stayed with the pig. Man, that must have been a blow to her self-esteem."
37."A couple I knew in the blue mountains west of Sydney were climbers (indoor and outdoor). They climbed all day, every day...it was their life. He left her because he was at level 45, and she was at level 41. (I can't remember the numbers. But I remember they were close.) She was holding him back. So.....adios."
What's the wildest breakup story you've ever experienced or heard? Let us know in the comments or via this anonymous form.
Submissions have been edited for length/clarity.
