50 People Reveal The Exact Moment They Realized They Were Dating A Psychopath

1. When he told me. Had been dating this guy awhile and (I thought) things were going really well. I’ll never forget the day because he took me to see Aladdin. We get back to my place and everything’s normal. We’re conversing and suddenly he gets this weird look in his eyes.

He says, ‘I can’t see you anymore. I’m afraid I might hurt you.’ I’m thinking hurt, like cheat on me, you know – psychologically. I kind of laughed and told him not to worry I was a grown up and whatever happened we could try and work it out.

His voice changed and he looked even worse and said, ‘You don’t understand. I’ve been having these dreams where I hurt you. I mean really hurt you.’ Then, he jumped off the couch and ran out the front door. Never saw him again. Never tried to call him cause it really shook me up. I guess I should be glad it stopped there. He just seemed so normal up to that point.

2. Well, we were on the freeway one day, I was driving. I said something mildly teasing, and she put her hands over my eyes and said, “Apologize or we both die!”

I did apologize, and soon after that, I extricated myself from that relationship.

3. One day I woke up to find all the men missing from my Facebook friends list. Including cousins and uncles. My ex didn’t think I’d notice.

4. Dated my psycho for about 8 months. Used to like to role play, and all that. She had a thing with being tied up, and so one night she asked to reverse roles. I was ok with that. Except after she handcuffed me, and tied my ankles to the posts, she gagged me with a bandana, got dressed and left me there. Came back an hour later with two guys and slept with both of them in front of me several times. When she finally untied me and I was able to speak, I asked her, “What the hell was that?” She said she knew I was cheating on her with a girl at work (I wasn’t) and that was her way of paying me back. I moved out the next day.

5. When in the shower he casually mentioned he had 2 kids (dating for a month), was 14 years older than me (not 5) and his kids mom had a restraining order on him. Before this he was just a slightly eccentric hippie with a kind heart and a love for spontaneity and bike trips.

He ended up pouring patchouli oil all over my door (its a love oil), leaving cursed voodoo eggs on my porch and sabotaged my bike so when I went down a steep hill the brakes fell off and the bike crumbled (he had just returned it)..

6. He’d get out his guns and (with the safety on) point them at me and go “Bang!” And when I’d jump, he’d laugh and laugh and say, “that’d be funny if the safety was off, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?”

And then the next day he’d gaslight me and tell me he didn’t do anything of the sort the night before. He was the king of gaslighting. It got to the point where I was seriously doubting my own sanity because he would deny everything.

7. He invited a bunch of people over to hang out by his fire pit one evening so I could meet his friends.

I managed to hit it off with a few of his guy friends (same taste in movies, etc – no flirting whatsoever).

As the last person was leaving, he and I were standing in the backyard by the gate.  He grabbed my by the belt loop and pulled me towards him.  I thought he wanted a hug.  He didn’t.

Turns out he was unhappy that I hit it off with his friends because now they might steal me from him (what?) but this was all my fault (again… what?).  He had a large stick he had pulled from the fire (maybe about an inch diameter) in his hand.  He wasn’t pulling me close.  He was pulling my pants away so he could “brand” me with the still red-hot stick I hadn’t noticed in a place no one would see.

I still have the scar, but I don’t have him.

8. Kept talking on the phone and texting his mother during the date. She died years ago.

9. Was seeing a girl for a while I thought I really hit it off with, We were into the same stuff, etc. but something in my gut was telling me something was off, so I broke it off and tried to remain friendly with her.

Found out later from her roommate that she was playing a long con with me and was only pretending to be into everything I liked in an attempt to domesticate me. Also learned once I broke things off she got so angry she smashed a shot glass against their door, and when her roommate went to sweep it up said, “No, leave it. Those are the shattered pieces of my heart.”

Safe to say I have no regrets and have never doubted my gut instinct since.

10. Driving a girl home from a nice date, she started crying right before we got home. I asked what was wrong and her response was, “This is who I am, I’m drama.”

11. I was driving my ex and I somewhere, and the Lady Gaga song “Bad Romance” came on the radio. I turned it up a little and started singing along. He. lost. His. Shit.

He started scream crying in the car, saying that I was sending him a secret message about our relationship.

I tried to calm him down- it’s just a song I liked! No, he was convinced that I really just thought we were in a “Bad Romance” and that this was a telltale sign of some impending breakup. He was still inconsolable 15 minutes later when we got back to his house, and his parents had to intervene and talk some sense into him.

12. Well it starts at the bit where the police called me and asked if I had gone out on a date with her and then named every dinner and movie we saw tougher because she kept all the receipts and was trying to use me as some kind of romantic alibi.

And then they asked me to check the front page of the paper and I discovered she had been accused of throwing a 4 year child out of an apartment building to her death. And that she claimed dating me showed she couldn’t have done it because she no longer had feelings for the child’s father.

It was about then I realized she was a psycho.

13. After two extreme blowups, one where he destroyed half the house and the other where he took a hammer to my car; he sent me a text explaining that this is just the way he was and no form of therapy would likely help so if I wanted to stay with him I would just have to accept him and all his foibles and realize that every so often he would lose his temper.

I realized then that he’d completely rationalized away his psychotic behavior and he’d eventually rationalize away abusing me. So I left.

14. When I locked him out of the house and said you’re a psycho and he smiled knowingly.

15. Decided she was pregnant when I tried to break up with her. There were lots of red flags beforehand, but that was really the icing on the cake. She would send me pictures of positive pregnancy tests, but refused to take any tests while I was there. We made a doctors appointment to confirm and she cancelled it behind my back. She was also pulling the whole suicidal shtick while this was going on, I should have known better but I was young(20) and stupid. Turns out she pulled all of this on her next boyfriend when he tried to break up with her.

16. When she started calling me little brother during sexual activities.

It’s one way to lose wood real fast.

17. I tried to leave after yet another heated fight. And he said if I didn’t come back right now he’d throw my cats outside (middle of winter in Canada). So I went back to get my cats before I left. He flipped because I cared more about my cats (well duh). So he grabbed a steak knife put it to his throat and demanded I watch. I called my mom went into a panic and she raced over scooped me up and brought me home. He never did it, he just wanted the control.

18. First boyfriend in college, we had only been exclusive for one week before the psychosis started.

First thing, I noticed food was going missing in my house. We didn’t live together. He was throwing out my food he didn’t want me to eat.

Next, a boy from my class who didn’t know I was dating (we’d only been exclusive for a month at this point) called to ask me out. My boyfriend answered and accused him of being a home wrecker.

Third and finally, we were walking and I was almost hit by a car, but he pushed me out of the way. I later found out his friend was driving the car and he orchestrated this so I would feel I owed my life to him.

19. I went for a shower and he was in my college bedroom along with my phone, came back to him saying he’s leaving and was visibly upset. I asked what was wrong and it turned out that he had looked through my phone while I was gone. He went into my deleted pictures and saw a picture of my male housemate that I had deleted along with more in order to free up space on my phone. He knew my housemate and knew we were friends (very platonic) and yet this caused a huge fight about him believing I was cheating. Tried to break up with him then but he changed completely and begged me not to.

Been free of him 2 years now and I’ve never been happier!

20. Dream-cheating. She’d dream I was cheating on her then get mad at me in real life. Look, if you have dreams like that, don’t hold me responsible. I should be the one mad at you for having such an incredibly low idea of me.

21. He tried to make me apologize to him for not being “enough” after he cheated on me, wanted me to buy him and his lover a pizza to make up for it…

22. Once he asked me to shoot him a text at 5 AM as an alarm because his ringer was so loud. I usually got up at 7 so this was sort of asking a lot to have ME get up at that time to wake HIM up. Well, I set my alarm and sent him the text, to which he replied, “Yay! You passed.”

I went “huh?”, and he just went on about how it was a test of girlfriendhood, to see if I was obedient and loyal… I said BYE!!!

23. When I noticed a injured bird on the ground, he walked over picked it up and threw it against a wall. I walked away and never spoke to him again.

24. We had a whole bunch of trust issues, add to the fact we were long distance. One night she went out and expected me to wait up so I could talk to her over the phone when she got home. I told her I was sleeping instead cause I was incredibly exhausted. The next morning we spoke one of the first things she said to me was, “Do you know how many people I could’ve slept with last night?” That was just one of many incidents but was so jarring that I called it quits. It’s been almost a year single now and I couldn’t be happier, cause I’m depressed.

25. I’m male and she hit me on a regular basis, love makes you not see the bad sides and just shrug stuff off, I finally saw that I needed to get out when I was crying one day on the floor.. damn I’ve come along way since then.

26. I took her and her four year-old boy to a carnival, and the kid won a pair of goldfish. They were in a clear plastic bag like pet stores use. The boy was super excited. On the way to the car, without saying a word, she slammed the bag on the pavement, bursting it, and then stomped on the flopping fish. The boy was instantly hysterical. When I asked her why she did it, she replied, “They probably would have died anyway.” Then she called a few weeks later to ask why I had not called her…

27. He threw me across the room by my neck. Then proceeded to threaten that he would accuse me of attacking him if I were to tell anyone.

28. We were eating dinner at a restaurant. He got up and started yelling threats. Stuff like “I’m gonna shoot down all of your windows!!” It was because he caught a waiter glancing at me.

He also tried to hit me, claimed he was younger (he hid his ID from me – I realized why later on), lied about pretty much everything and hid unregistered guns at his house. He was shady as shit. Left him after he kicked our kitten out of anger. Took the kitty with me.

Man young me was dumb.

29. My ex-girlfriend would wake up in the middle of the night and wake me up just to accuse me of cheating on her.

30. I was married to one…he said he was going to the woods to shoot himself, I called police, told them I thought he was having a military PTSD event, they stopped him, took his gun, and informed me he was NEVER IN THE MILITARY. FOUR YEARS into my marriage. WTF. I took photos of all the holes in my walls & got myself a restraining order and a divorce. Courts don’t much appreciate Stolen Valour being your excuse for violence and emotional abuse/manipulation.

31. I shaved my vag and he accused me of cheating because of it.

32. He came to my house and accused me of cheating because the cat dish had been moved. I asked him to explain that one to me. He said “Obviously, the man you’re sleeping with is allergic to cats and you had to put the cat somewhere else while that man was here.”

Another time my daughter cut her toenails in the living room. Ex found one of the toe nail clippings and flipped “because that’s a man’s fingernail! You had a man here that is so comfortable in your home that he cuts his fingernails here; So you must be cheating with him.”

33. An ex of mine was pretty controlling and showing psycho behaviour for a long time but I largely passed over it thinking I was happy (I wasn’t). She then got too drunk one night, hit me to the point I had bruises and blamed it on me the next day. Noped outta there after that.

34. Woke up one morning and she told me that she kept having dreams where I was dead. Then said the kicker, “And, I wake up happy.”

Engagement over shortly after that.

35. We were riding the train home from a date. I look over and she’s logging in to her ex-boyfriend’s Facebook account. I asked her what she was doing and she straight up told me that she was logging in to her ex-boyfriend’s Facebook account. When I asked why, she said “I’m just checking up on him, I want to make sure he’s ok. He never changed his password”. Her checking up on him became reading through not just his statuses but also his private messages. I asked why she couldn’t just look at his profile normally, she said he blocked me. When I asked why she couldn’t just text him if it was that big of a deal, she said he blocked her number too. I had so many more questions, but she started getting pissed off and defensive and I still had a long train ride home, so I let it be

36. We were long distance. While visiting him I found handwritten love letters that were VERBATIM what he had written me. Except different women’s names on each one.

37. My ex once memorized my Facebook password and then logged in, going through my old messages until he found one where I had picked up an older conversation with one of my male coworkers. He then proceeded to pretend to be me and hit on this guy, eventually taking it so far as to plan a time and place for us to fuck.

Then he texted me asking what these messages were about and why I was cheating on him. I was so confused initially I didn’t realize it was him who had hacked me, I just pleaded my innocence and begged his forgiveness because I had no idea where the messages were coming from.

Eventually he told me that he was the one coercing my co-worker for sex and that somehow because my co-worker agreed that clearly meant we had fucked before?

I have no idea what his thought process was through all of this, but I stupidly stayed with him for a while after that. And it did permanently wreck the friendship I had with my co-worker.

38. Probably when she spent an entire night sobbing and begging me to propose to her, screaming for answers as to why I would not propose to her, and threatening to kill herself if I didn’t.

39. She was just manipulative. Should’ve listened to her friend who warned me not to date her. But I did… twice. Just all sorts of stupid shit to get me to buy her things. When I finally just closed her out of my life, she threatened to get her dad involved, she was in her mid-twenties, come on.

Then she bragged about using me for money to mutual friends. I don’t generally hold grudges, but for her, I made an exception.

40. My friend found a psycho. Met her at the bar and ended up taking her home. She decided it should be more than just a one night stand and suggested a date the following weekend. He obliges. Their first date was meeting her parents, where she told them how they were going to spend the rest of their lives together, where they were going to buy a house, the names of their two children etc etc. He dated her for about a month and after they broke up, she started stalking his friends, not him..his friends. She’d somehow find out where we would be and threaten us with law suits for ‘ruining her life’.

41. I’m in med school and she threatened to stab my hands so that I could never do surgery in the future.

42. Laying in bed one night after a fight (most likely over something trivial), my girlfriend fell out of the bed; Maybe she rolled out, but it seemed like a fall. She then stood up, and started running into walls. Bloodied herself up real good, and I couldn’t get her to stop.

Downstairs neighbor heard the commotion and called the police. Police show up, and see her sitting on the couch all bloody. Police become very interested in me. I try to explain to them she is running herself into the walls… they do not believe me (who in their right mind would?). Fortunately for me she stands up and runs across the room, right into a wall, practically knocking herself out.

Police provide me an escort to the hospital (still don’t trust me I suspect). After the hospital staff take her into the back by herself (to ask her if I was hurting her, I’m sure) they allow me in the back room. While waiting she gets out of bed and grabs a bunch of gauze from the cabinet and starts wiping the floor with it. I ask her what she was doing, and she tells me that she is cleaning the floor so the fish can see out of it.

During her 2 month stay on the top floor of the hospital I continued to visit her.

43. Didn’t really understand how unhealthy she was until after our breakup. She proceeded to key “WHORE” into the side of my car about a week later because she assumed I had already started seeing other women. She tracked down every single person I know on Facebook (including family members and the CEO of my company) to send them a fairly unflattering and risqué picture. The picture also came with a page long story of how I couldn’t be trusted, as I’d beat her, raped her, stolen money from her, etc.

Had to get a restraining order and take her to court over trying to sabotage my life/career. It was super messed up and I genuinely hope she got some help. Thankfully, I haven’t heard from her in almost 4 years, and I now live on the opposite side of the country.

44. Stabbed herself in the leg, blamed me, and got my ass whopped by her dad.

45. When she got angry that my family would still be in my life if her and I broke up.

So let me slow that down. She would be angry… if/when we broke up… my family would still be in my life and she wouldn’t be. As if I just poofed into being the minute we started dating and didn’t have 25 or so years of history with those people before her, with them giving birth to me and raising me and whatnot.

46. Stopped in the middle of riding me, to get off and punch me in the groin. No explanation, just laughter.

47. Went out to eat at Buffalo Wild Wings one night with a few friends and I told her about this, see a couple of her friends come in and sit at a table near us and they never ordered anything. They just drank water and sat there, occasionally glancing at us.

After we’re done eating we walk outside and sure enough I see my girlfriend’s (ex now for obvious reasons) car in the parking lot. Her drivers seat was leaned all the way back and I could just barely see that she was in the drivers seat trying to hide. So I’m already kinda weirded out at this point so me and my friends leave and as soon as we back out, sure enough her car starts and backs out as well, she began to follow us through the parking lot. At this point I’m texting her asking her what’s going on but she kept saying she was with her mom hanging out.

Needless to say I ended things shortly after that.

48. I had my eyes closed once while we were having sex and he was rubbing my clit with something. He asked, “Do you know what that is?”

I looked down and it was the handle of his knife.

49. Wanted me to text him my work schedule and then would call me on the work phone and wait in the parking lot for me to come out of work. Wanted to know how much was in each paycheck. One time I texted him my work schedule and he misread it and freaked out non-stop for 6 hours searching for me called my whole family and was about to alert the Police. It was his own fault he misread what I had texted him. I broke up with him in public because he would not believe it when I broke up with him in private. It was finally to the point where random people who were nearby were like “you just got dumped.”

50. It was a normal Sunday evening. My ex-husband had been without a job for going on a few years now. He was well aware of the fact that I had to approve several dozen employees’ time-cards before Monday so I could submit payroll. I did this every Sunday evening for three years and the process takes about an hour and a half. Another thing that was common was that he was an alcoholic with a very bad temper. Apparently this evening he had some severe issues with me completing my employees’ time-card approvals after I had spent an hour cooking him and my son dinner. So I’m sitting there on the floor of my living-room because I couldn’t afford a couch because I was fucking dirt poor. As I’m eating dinner and working all I hear is him yelling at me to put down work and pay attention to him. Before I could say, “I’m almost done, just a few more moments” he comes up to me with a full plate of food, takes a huge bite of tilapia, chews it up nice and good then spits it out all over my face……keyboard and all. I was in complete and total shock. I couldn’t fucking believe the man that I was married to would spit food in my face and all over my work. I just sat there in awe of it all.

I am so glad that piece of shit is out of my life.