Well, happily, none of my stories are anything near as bad as the bad ones in here. Then again, I also don't have that many of them, since all my relationships have lasted a long time. Really, I only probably have one breakup that counts. Thankfully, for purposes of this thread, it was a badish breakup.

So near the end of my first semester of my senior year, I started dating this girl that I met during the play we were both in. It went really well for a really long time. We decided to stay together when I went to school (I'd call this mistake number 1, but since I'm currently dating someone that I stayed together with after graduating college, maybe I shouldn't..); I'm from Phoenix, but I went to school outside LA, so it was a short flight (hourish) and a medium drive (5 and a half hourish) to visit. It went well most of the time, even though distance sucked (and still does..).

So anyway, about halfway through my second semester, we had a fight and broke up. I already had tickets home for the next weekend, so I visited anyway. It did not take long for us to, um, un-breakup. I'm a bit of a hopeless romantic, so given that this was my first real relationship (sorry, Sierra, if you're still here, but you know it's true ), I was sort of head-over-heels. I was glad we got back together, and it was great. Unfortunately, during the one week we had broken up, I had to decide if I was going back to Phoenix or staying in Claremont for the first half of the summer (there were summer courses I was debating taking). And, well, since we had broken up, I picked summer courses.

Now, everything still went fine, but it kind of sucked that I extended the long distance time by 6 weeks. But I endured, until, well, about a week before the classes were ending when I got a message on my phone that was something like, "Hi, Kevin, we really need to talk. Can you call me back?" (<-This is always a great thing to hear.)

So, I did, and she told me that she thought we should break up (nice of her to wait until I was juuust about home to tell me). She asked if we could, um, refrain from seeing each other for a few weeks so that we could give stuff time to heal. I was okay with this, but given that this dumping came literally out of nowhere, I was still super totally in love. Hooray. Anyway, during this time, she starts spending a lot of time with this other guy Michael (he had been one of her friends before; I knew the guy) (she posted this stuff on her Livejournal; we were friends, and she knew I could/would read the entries; it wasn't me stalking or anything).

Now, I'm actually decently perceptive, and even though she told me repeatedly they weren't dating (a red flag, given that I was never dumb enough to ask), it was obvious enough to me that they weren't. Which was fine, except that when she broke up she told me she just didn't want to be in a relationship (ahh, cliches). Even that was fine, except for the fact that she kept lying to me about it. And even THAT was fine, except that she kept leading me on and acting as if she still was super-interested in me. That's the part that actually pisses me off. ****ed up things like she'd be hanging at my house; I had to get some work done, so she borrowed my laptop to get some stuff done. She gave it back to me and had accidentally left herself on her LiveJournal page (I didn't realize this entry was protected against me until later) where she was telling people she was at her boyfriend's house while he did homework.

But, basically, she kept me dangling for a good eight months with shit like this over and over. Even after she finally (four months later, once I was back at school) admitted that she and Michael were dating (she never admitted it, but I found out from one of my friends who told me later that they had been since a couple of days after we broke up. For all I know, she was cheating on me while we were supposedly still dating. And even after that she kept treating me like I was her boyfriend. Which did oh so many great things for me in the whole trying to move on business. Also, this completely nuked any shot I had of dating someone I had met at school that I really liked because I still wasn't anywhere close to over my ex (she's still one of my best friends, but we had pretty much based permanently into the friend zone at that point.

This went on until at least the next March, when Caroline and Michael broke up. Of course, she ran right back to me. And I, being the idiot that I was, was thrilled because of aforementioned inability to get over her and was totally okay with it (you know, at the time. Pretty bitter about it now). We dated for about nine more months until we broke up at the end of Christmas break over my juinor year. She just kind of blurted it out her last night there while we were in the car. I was broken up for about five minutes before I realized I was ecstatic. The relationship had completely run its course, and I was pretty much over her within 10 minutes at that point. Then again, she had decided she was a lesbian at that point (which she also never told me, but Facebook statuses later made abundantly clear). She had changed a lot for the worse going to college; she basically started doing a bunch of shit just because her parents wouldn't approve of it. It was obnoxious to see her become a shell of herself.

Glad I could take way too long to tell that story. It was fun. It completely messed me up my entire third semester, and I'm now exceedingly bitter about it and am totally upset I wasted so much of my time. But it wasn't nearly as bad as people who seem like they had good chunks of their lives ruined by it. I feel awful for you guys .