Met while I was overseas for a year, continued the relationship part of the way through law school. He was willing to come here, but ultimately I didn't want to be responsible for that and wasn't ready to get married. And I didn't think we'd really survive because we had been long distance for much of our relationship. Took me almost ten years after that breakup to meet my husband, but we've been together now for almost 20 years and I don't have any regrets.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Different life vision and life goals. I felt like he wasn’t going to be ready to have kids until he was like 40, and since we were the same age that wasn’t going to work for me.

Same. He just got married last year after 5+ years of dating her. We have mutual friends and see each other occasionally. I wish them well but I made the right choice when I broke up with him.

Me too. Although I never see him except mutually exchanged Christmas cards. I was still very much in love when we broke up. But it was the right decision. He didn’t end up getting married until he was 39.

My ex makes me weak in the knees.

He had a lot of emotional work to do … very complicated family situation. I had emotional work to do, too, but he was the more volatile one.

Some possibility that he is gay.

He wouldn't have been the right one for me, but I do miss that connection.

A year or so after college I was crazy about a guy my age who had it all, looks, smart, ambition...all of it. But I wanted to get married because it was what my friends were doing and he wanted to wait for career and other reasons so I broke up with him, met a guy and got married at 26 and I've spent the last 26 in a marriage that has really gone nowhere. My ex has been very successful. I should have waited.

Wow I don’t have an ex that makes me weak in the knees.

Anonymous wrote:I was madly in love with a wonderful guy but my parents were sadly racists and he just couldn't deal with them which was understandable. I hated my parents for that but they were my parents. They would say things and he just went right at them in a way I never could which made me love him more. But he finally decided he didn't want to have to deal with them ever again. He's gone on to be incredibly successful and I've never found the happiness I briefly had.

Sounds like the plot line to Jane Austen's Persuasion. Almost.

We were young and dumb and too damn immature. Had we met later in life, we very likely could have been happy together but I'm so glad we didn't "make it" back then. We'd already established some really bad routines and toxic behavior that would have been difficult bordering on impossible to stop.

I think the breakdown of the relationship forced us both to do a lot of growing up and made us better people, even though it hurt like hell at the time. I know at least on my end, it made me a much better girlfriend and now wife to my husband.

He broke up with me on Valentines Day. Over the phone. Said I wasn’t wife material. That hurt like crazy. For a long time. He did marry and his wife cheated on him so much he insisted on a paternity test for their kid.

Once I got out of that fog of caring for him, I was able to see he just wasn’t a great judge of character.

While it was incredibly painful for me for a couple of years, it ultimately was for the best. I know that’s cliche.

We don’t keep in touch.

I don’t have an ex who makes me weak in the knees to think about. I’m a little envious of those who do.

We clicked immediately. I adored him, we were doing things together everyday, and I thought I had found the one. He cheated on me, admitted it, cried like a baby and wanted a second chance. I couldn’t take the chance he wouldn’t do it again and broke up with him. He kept coming back to my parents for years, even after he was married with children. I never saw him or contacted him during that time, even though I wanted to desperately. The last time he came around my mom told him I was happily married with a baby on the way. He never came again. I still think of him occasionally but am very in love with my husband who treats me like I am the most wonderful person on earth.

We met right before he was moving cross country for grad school and going back to his home state. I was 24, he was 29. We did long distance awhile but he got tired of it. I didn’t want to move unless we were headed toward marriage, because I liked where I lived. I was also young. But I was soooo in love and for a long time felt he was the one who got away. We both married the next people we dated.

Anonymous wrote:I was madly in love with a wonderful guy but my parents were sadly racists and he just couldn't deal with them which was understandable. I hated my parents for that but they were my parents. They would say things and he just went right at them in a way I never could which made me love him more. But he finally decided he didn't want to have to deal with them ever again. He's gone on to be incredibly successful and I've never found the happiness I briefly had.

So- you chose your parents over the guy? Yike.

He partied too much and we drank too much when we were together. I knew I wouldn't grow up or evolve with him, but boy was he fun and we loved each other deeply. I moved to a different country to escape that life and him. I met my husband and he is the opposite of the other guy and we are married 20+ years. Saw ex about 2 years ago and quickly could see that the alcohol had aged him.

To 22:27 (from 22:28)–thanks for sharing in such detail. The tingling/lingering emotions are exactly what I felt the last time that I saw my ex, and why we can’t be friends.

He was a serial cheater and probably a sociopath. But mostly he was a horrible, small person who went out of his way to diminish me so he could feel important.

He was insecure and intimidated by me, and felt inadequate, so broke up with me. At least that was his explanation when we talked about it; that he didn’t think he was ‘good enough’ for me. I was shocked that he would think that because I thought we were equals (went to the same college but I had a professional degree and he didn’t). I think the problem is that he had a crush on me for years before we started dating, and thought I was out of his league. The breakup was devastating; I, both sets of parents, and ourfriends, thought we would eventually get married and that a proposal was imminent. Interestingly we both ended up getting married (not to each other) almost exactly three years after we broke up. His wife is gorgeous, definitely more attractive than I am, but less academically accomplished. We are no longer friends because the attraction never went away and I felt it would be bad for our marriages to maintain a flirty friendship.

We could have gotten back together — he tried to woo me back before I got serious with my now DH — but I was afraid to set myself up for another heartbreak. I wish we could have found a way to remain friends, but think doing so would have been disrespectful to our spouses.