45 Wedding Breakups That Were Messy, Emotional, And Completely Justified

A year after we met, he moved to another country for his dream job (would only be 2-3 year contract). I was still in grad school so I couldn’t move, so we did long distance for 2.5 years. Spent all our extra money on plane tickets, the whole thing. We got engaged while still long distance.

I then said I wanted to move to another country for my dream job. By this point, he decided he wanted to take a job back in our original country, and instead of being supportive of me, he tried to aggressively talk me out of taking the job, whining, being manipulative, telling me to take something lower level in our home country.

In the end, to mentally deal with packing up and moving without the extra stress I basically cut contact with him for two months, moved, and started my job. Then we talked and broke up on the phone. I mailed him the ring back and never looked back.

Mine was nearly 20 years ago now, but we were both heading in different directions in life after a few things suddenly changed. He was moving overseas for a massive opportunity and though I could have joined him I was still young and building my education and life and decided to put myself first. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done, but also looking back now I am so incredibly proud of how maturely and kindly we both handled it.

All these years later we are still living on opposite sides of the world, but we are incredibly close friends. We are both still single and just living our best lives. Every now and then we cross paths and catch up in person and it's always a great time. I will love him with all of my heart for the rest of my life, but I don't know what things will look like for us in another 20 years.

Mid 90s. Dated a friend of a friend. Ended up getting engaged, and buying a house together before we got married. He ended up beating the s**t out of me not once but twice. I gave the ring back to try to get my money out of the house. Ended up having to hire a Lawyer. To this day, his mom wears my
engagement ring as her wedding ring. Thanks, Rick the d**k.

We dated for 4 1/2 years. Marriage felt like the next step. But, I had so much resentment built up. He wasn't very responsible and he drank too much. I was paying all the bills and doing all the house chores. I dreaded our approaching wedding date. I just knew I would spend the rest of our relationship taking care of him. He was the best boyfriend I had ever had at the time, and he was very sweet to me. But, I wanted a partner/ not a dependent. I went to my dad and broke down and said, "I don't want to marry him." And dad said, "then don't." Dad told me if I felt that way the I would hurt him more down the road, hurt our future children and mostly hurt myself. I'm really grateful that my dad gave me the "permission" to call it off. So, I did.

I lost a lot of the friend group I had at the time. My ex liked to surround himself with other people who liked to drink and party like him. I like drinking and partying in college but at the age of 25, I was growing out of it. I felt kinda gaslight by a lot of them because I was made to be the villain in that relationship. I said to h**l with them. He can have them all!

Two years later, I found out that when we broke up, he made up a bunch of lies about me and said I cheated on him and all kinds of stuff I didn't do. Now, there are legitimate complaints about me to be had but he made up stuff that was just completely untrue. It made me question anything he ever told me.

A couple more years down the road he got addicted to m**h and into some bad stuff. He's in prison now.

I really dodged a bullet.

I met my now husband when I was 30. He's an engineer and he supported me in leaving my teaching job to raise my kids full time. We are now expecting our second child.

He decided to change his career goal 8 months after we got engaged. I had just graduated college (one semester before he was supposed to) and started working as an RN. His plan was to graduate the following semester and begin working a career in the field of his degree. A few weeks into new semester, his new career objective was to be a Chapter Advisor for his fraternity… aka a Professional Frat Guy. I broke up with him after he accepted the position because it just… wasn’t the future I signed up for. He wasn’t ready to leave behind the college lifestyle… and that’s fine, but I *was.* He wasn’t a bad guy and I hope he’s doing fine now.

My friend ended her engagement with her fiancé because it came out that he was ripping everyone off. He was an investment banker, charismatic guy, who had convinced everyone he knew (family, friends, her family and friends, businesses, anyone he could really) to invest with him, lying about the returns, robbing Peter to pay Paul situation. It all came to light along with the fact she knew and he was physically abusing her to keep her quiet. He ended up in prison.

I was 19 and he was my first boyfriend. Why the heck did I say yes? I still lived at home with my parents and honestly, it wasn’t even that great of a relationship. I really feel like he could have turned out to be an a*****e partner once it was just the two of us.

I ended up moving out on my own and getting an apartment (this was in 2002 when we could still afford to do this at a young age) and I got a taste of unlimited and unconditional freedom and I HAD A BLAST!! I told him I wasn’t ready to settle down, I felt like I had to live on my own for a while and be an independent adult and that I thought we should put a pause on our overall relationship, not just engagement. Well he started stalking me, calling me repeatedly throughout the day and night and showing up at my apartment and my job. Then he started calling my mother and saying I was out being a s**t and he hoped she was proud of me and a bunch of other silly little things.

Well I ended up moving to another place (same complex just another apartment but he didn’t know that), and threatened him with a restraining order. And then called HIS mother and told her the same. He stopped after that. He did leave me one more tearful voicemail about how he still loved me and would wait for me until I decided I was done whoring around. Aww 🥰

Funny enough, I did not w***e around. I dated exactly one more guy after him and then married *him*. Here we are 20 years later.

Literally like something out of a movie. Wasn't gonna be a big wedding by any means, we were just gonna elope overnight pretty much. The day we were supposed to get married he slipped on the ice, hit his head, and had amnesia. He didn't even remember who I was, thought it was 2025 (this was back in 2022) but that Obama was president, and got stuck in a loop. We ended up completely breaking up afterwards. I'll never forget the shock of it all though. Probably for the best in the long haul, we were barely together before we planned to marry, but it stung no less at the time.

I ended it after he moved his racist sister into our house while I was visiting a friend across the country.

He was a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Life of the party, nicest guy in public. At home, controling, gaslighting, verbally and emotionally a*****e. Tried to destroy my career and friendships so that I was reliant on him. But I was the crazy one! I was immature, poor, going to cheat on him so he cheated first. And he abused alcohol and d***s, but no, that was me. He is on wife number 5.

He was controlling and immature. He wanted to buy video games and CDs rather than paying rent. He emotionally manipulated me to make irresponsible financial decisions. The straw that broke the camels back was when my mom left a stern message on the answering machine saying the bank called her because I was $700 overdrawn. When he told me I had a message he said, "Your mom called. Haha, you're in trouble!".

He told me we would be moving in with his parents and I would be dropping out of college to support him. I was taking 18 credit hours a semester with a 3.6 GPA. He was taking eight credit hours a semester with a 1.9 GPA, having to retake many of his classes so he had been in college for over eight years at that point. I realized that as cute as he was the life that he wanted to live was not one I wanted to be part of.

My ex and I were about six months from getting married. DJ, photographer, venue, save the dates. There came a certain point where she wasn’t enthusiastic about the planning and I knew something was up, but I was still stunned when she said she wanted to call it off. She could tell I wasn’t ready to start a family like she was and that I was going along for the ride. It hurt like hell at first and I went off the deep end for a while, but eventually I felt relief because she was right, I wasn’t ready for kids. We briefly got back together and ended it again more amicably the second time, and two weeks after splitting for good I met the woman I would marry. We’re happy and child-free and my ex is a mom of two kids, and divorced but seems to be doing well. I’m grateful to her now in retrospect.

We bought a house together before the wedding and then realized I was marrying an alcoholic!! He peed in the dresser, down air vents, and the last straw was I came home from work and he was drunk off his a*s and dressed in my panties. I guess you can not know a lot about someone until you live with them . He had a steady well paying job. Never got super drunk when we went on dates or had sleepovers at each others houses. Only after we moved in together did it turn crazy.

We were together for 5 years. I think we just got too comfortable with the idea of each other. When it came down too it, i realized we hadn’t actually grown, just got used to each other. That’s not love, that’s the fear of starting over.

We got engaged because it felt like the next step, not because we were truly ready. Looking back, we were trying to fix a rocky relationship with a ring. The closer the wedding got, the more I realized we weren’t partners—we were just two people afraid of starting over. Calling it off was brutal, but staying would’ve been worse for both of us.

His family didn’t want him to get married.

It’s as simple and complicated as that. And it sucked, hard. I wanted to die for about a year. And then I just…woke up one day and moved on.

I’m currently married (after a few false starts) to the absolute love of my life. If something happened to this man, I’d never date again. We’ve got three kids, two cars, one house, one dog, and an entire lifetime ahead of us. It’s not a huge, travel everywhere, White Lotus kind of life but it suits us both I think. Last I checked, my ex was still single. I doubt he’ll ever marry at this point.

And from this distance- I’m actually grateful to him. He made the right choice for himself, and I can’t fault him for that. He also saved me from a lifetime of misery.

Not the right fit, for either of us. He had a hard time accepting me for who I am and the way I want to live my life (the way I want to eat, raise my kids, run my house, how I want to dress, etc.), and I didn't have energy to help him work through all the emotional baggage from his childhood and deal with his focus on appearances (which was extremely h**h compared to my own, since I really don't care what other people think of me most of the time).

Somewhere out there, there's a woman who is going to make him feel like the luckiest man in the world, but I am not her.

Her family was way too much. She was amazing and everything I wanted, except the family. I figured maybe it would eventually grow on me but it grated me and I’d been married before, as well as she wanted kids right away due to our age. I knew there was way too h**h a likelihood that I’d want to leave and didn’t want to have kids and so that.

He was a serial cheat. Well is.
Who regularly now cheats on his husband of 10 years who he has 2 kids with. His husband knows he made out with someone from a bar. He still stayed.
He openly talks about it with me.
He has no remorse. He says he loves him. He's cheated on everyone he's ever been with. He doesn't know what love is.
I tried to warn the husband but he blocked me on everything.