HIS FRIENDS
About five months into the relationship, I asked him why I hadn’t met any of his friends. He said, “Well, I think you’re hot but I think they would say, ‘She’s not that attractive.’”
—Angela
AFTERMATH
It took me another month or so before I realized I couldn’t forgive him and broke up with him via instant message.
ONE, PLEASE
He picked me up, drove us to a movie theater, stepped up to the ticket window, and said, “One, please.”
—Shannon
AFTERMATH
No second date.
CHICKEN AND LOTION
He called me up and told me to bring him chicken dinner and also to bring over some lotion so that I could give him a foot rub and a hand-job! I only knew him for a week.
—Jenny
AFTERMATH
I got off the phone with him and changed my number. I only saw him once after that. He tried to flag me down and I floored it.
PERFECT
One day he looks over and says, “You know, you’d be perfect…with green eyes.”
—Lucy
AFTERMATH
We stayed together a year and a half to two years. The comment was made pretty early on, but it stuck with me through the end.
TOO LATE
I was in the hospital miscarrying our child and he told me he’d “be there later” after he got done doing whatever.
—Ladibuggc
AFTERMATH
Things lasted only long enough for me to grieve and then he was done!
A STRETCH
A month into the relationship, we went to the pool and afterward he asked me why I had stretch marks. I said I was probably forty pounds heavier before he knew me. He proceeded with the question, “Did you have a baby?”
—Kat
AFTERMATH
I was seventeen. I was not pregnant, I was just fat. I dumped him a few days later.
WAITING BY THE PHONE
He said he’d call me in five minutes. Five minutes, five hours, five days, five weeks, five months, five years went by and I never heard from him again.
—Maria
AFTERMATH
I guess that was that.
JEALOUS OF A DEAD GUY
Two days after my best guy friend passed away, my boyfriend said, “Now I probably won’t feel jealous anymore.”
—Jessica
AFTERMATH
“Probably”? He’s dead. A week after he got mad at me for continuing to mourn the loss of my friend and said that I should be over it by now. I stopped talking to him that night.
AWKWARD
We had been out on a few dates and I wanted him to meet my best friend and her boyfriend. Everything was going fine until he opened his phone and started showing my best friend all the porn he had downloaded.
—Jillian
AFTERMATH
It was over two weeks later.
YOU GONNA EAT THAT?
My blind date ordered ribs and I ordered chicken. After eating the ribs, with BBQ sauce still all over his face, he started trying to break the bones to suck out the marrow. Then he reached over and started eating from my plate before saying, “You’re done with this, right?” He finished our dinner.
—Kat
AFTERMATH
I left him while going to the bathroom.
SNAP
He snapped his fingers at the extremely swamped bartender.
—Jer
AFTERMATH
This was merely a portent of the boorish and exceedingly rude behavior to come that night. After exchanging a horrified look with the bartender and mouthing, “Sorry!” I hurried the date to its conclusion as quickly as possible.
SIZZLER
On our first date, I let her decide where she wanted to eat dinner. She picked Sizzler because she wanted some “good steak.” While there she asked the waiter for a job application and proceeded to fill it out at the table during our date.
—Jeremy
AFTERMATH
We still spent the night together, because…well, I’m a guy. But I never talked to her again after that. The whole thing was odd.
DEAR SUBSCRIBER
I was out of town for a close family member’s funeral and he wrote me: “Dear subscriber, I know you’ve been out of town, but your sex balance is past due. Your account will reach virginity status…Please f*ck to avoid disconnection. Thank you. ^-^”
—Kyya
AFTERMATH
That was his sympathy…That was definitely it. We had built our relationship on sex, not much else.
DON’T S*** WHERE YOU EAT…I MEAN…
I had only been married a couple of months and decided to prepare a nice meal for my husband. He was hungry but needed to use the bathroom. So he took his plate into the bathroom and ate it while he was pooping.
—Michelle
AFTERMATH
Divorce!
PARKING NAZI
On our first date as he drove around looking for a parking spot, an elderly couple was slow getting out of their spot, and he started screaming and swearing at them about how slow old people are. He finally gave up on them and proudly pulled into a handicapped parking space as he showed me that he had his “Granny’s” parking tag that he can use.
—MLJ
AFTERMATH
I was so embarrassed to be seen with this guy that I ended it quickly after that.
TAINT MY FAULT
He scratched his taint and smelled his fingers.
—Casey
AFTERMATH
Hand sanitizer.
SORRY, BUDDY
I think it’s gonna be over since I found ItWasOverWhen.com written on a piece of paper.
—Kenny
AFTERMATH
Still waiting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert K. Elder is a Web entrepreneur and the founder of ItWasOverWhen.com: Tales of Romantic Dead Ends and its sister site ItWasLoveWhen.com: Tales from the Beginning of Love. In June of 2009, Elder started the Web 2.0 company Odd Hours Media, LLC, which launched the user-generated sites. Both went viral very quickly, attracting more than one million hits within a few months.
Elder is also a journalist, author, film columnist, and regional editor of AOL’s Patch.com in Chicago. His other books include The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors on Their Epiphanies in the Dark and Last Words of the Executed.
His work has appeared in the New York Times, MSNBC.com, the Los Angeles Times, Salon.com, and many other publications. For almost a decade, he served as a staff writer at the Chicago Tribune. Elder also teaches multimedia journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School.
A Montana native and graduate of the University of Oregon, Elder lives and writes in Chicagoland with his lovely bride and their twins.
He has been known to carry a digital voice recorder.
You can follow ItWasOverWhen.com via Twitter for daily updates @overwhen, and you can follow its sister website @lovewhen. Elder’s own Twitter address is @robertkelder, and you can also reach him via his website at www.robertkelder.com.
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