That red flag you ignored.

[TheThingOnTheIce]

Anyone else ignored early red flags. You saw them but hoped you were wrong and try to see the best in people ?

My most recent disaster , his female ‘best friend’ who was an issue from the start and my gut told me she’d be the end of us and I was right. I should trust my intuition more .

When I found messages from his friend telling him to leave me home and go to the party alone as the girl who fancied him/he fancied was there and wanted to "make a move" and I confronted him and he left me at home crying to go to the party alone.
That was 18 months in, we were together 16 years.

Lots of lies about silly unimportant things and constantly trying to make me jealous and insecure.

Jesus......!

When he said he was sent to boarding school at 7. Or when he used to get super on-edge (while completely denying it) every time he’d go to visit his (dysfunctional, emotionally unavailable) parents. Or the way he would react (swearing, name calling, silent treatment) in response to any perceived slight. Or the fact he said he wouldn’t spend the money his mum had gifted him, in case he said something that upset her and she asked for it back. Or when he voted Brexit because his controlling boomer dad told him to. Oh, there are so many. Emotionally stunted manchild. Yes, you experienced childhood trauma. Do the healing work and decide to do better.

My ex never admitted to being wrong.

whatever happened to
him was always someone else’s fault.

he never laughed at my jokes but would laugh at other peoples

never paid me a compliment but would mock me and make fun of my voice

he kept his dogs locked up in crates 23.5 hours a day

he never came over to my house to hang out, I always had to go to his

and the one before him was happy to see me only Saturday evenings until Sunday noon. He wanted to “socialize “ with other people on Fridays and Sundays.

i mainly had to go to his and he would literally come to my house once a month (Saturday afternoon until Sunday noon of course)

we never spent any time doing “nothing “ together, always had to be out and doing something. He had no interest just hanging out watching a movie and making a meal at home. It was always a night out and sex.

oddly now that I’m older I wouldn’t mind that kind of relationship. But at the time I was late 30s and wanted something permanent.

With hindsight so many…. He gave me a key to his house on our first date. He had not gotten the key back from the 17 year old he was dating for a few weeks before me (he was 33). He was dating a 17 year old previously. His ex, who I knew through work, tried to warn me he wasn’t a nice guy. He would brag & laugh how his next door neighbour would let herself in to borrow videos (???) and would do his washing up because he’d just leave it massively stacked up. His next door neighbour helped herself to my brand new dvds, still in their cellophane, when I left a couple there for us to watch at the weekend. He didn’t really like me going out with my friends. He drove like a twat with me in the car.

over the years, the flags would build up. I do wish I wasn’t so young, inexperienced and naïve when we met.

So many
ex husband when we first got together he’d tell me what I had to say to his friends. Pressured me from the start to go out with him, to say I loved him - I didn’t, tried to dump him a few months later and threatened to kill himself, I stayed for 18 years and 3 kids then he leaves me. I wish I was stronger at the beginning and ended it.

Another relationship, always trying to get me jealous, mentioning that some crazy woman keeps messaging him but he can’t block, because she’ll always find a way rubbish , talking to other women in front of me, how it’s just him being friendly, I still keep convincing myself he loved me.

When he told me his sister would always be his favourite woman in the whole world!

I am ignoring a couple of red flags with current DP because he’s great in so many ways. 1) He sometimes drinks too much socially (I think because he feels shy around some of my friends) and 2) He told a couple of white lies at the very start of our relationship, again due to feeling shy/insecure.

Breaking up with someone for the smallest transgression is very Mumsnet. Real life is a little more complicated than that.

It’s obviously not that ‘mumsnet’, as there wouldn’t be so many women in bad relationships on here. A lot of women seem willing to put up with a lot to be in a relationship.

The sensible women here that try to ask questions to get the full story and give advice, they don’t just say LTB without good reason, that’s a bit of a myth used to justify putting up with bad behaviour. Most of us recognise that relationships have bumps along the way, but that certain behaviour should never be minimised. A lot of vulnerable women post here and it’s good if other women help them see what is so often a bad relationship for what it is.

I wasn't young but insecure and newly divorced. The way he spoke to his lodger, love bombing (asked to marry me on an early date), his 'crazy exes', his female 'friends' on Facebook that he didn't actually even know and so much more. Took me a year to get away.

When he ( mid 50s) told me that he had never managed to stay faithful in any relationship he had ever been in, as he 'gets bored easily' then going on to tell me that to keep him from straying I needed to make sure his sexual needs were always met.
WTAF?
I was such an idiot

The very first time I saw him, in a business meeting, the quiet voice from the back of my mind said "That man will destroy you if you let him". I didn't know then what I know now, so I thought "Intriguing ..." and engineered an informal meeting.

First proper date with him, I was late and he went into a proper rage, ranting at me on a crowded pavement. I should've called quits there and then. Instead, I waited until he stopped, asked "Have you finished?" and carried on with the date.

The flags kept stringing up like bunting at a Socialist Workers picnic: I can't quite believe I actually married the weird fucker! The sex was good, but I was paying a hell of a price for it. The only good thing he did for me was telling me there was something wrong with me and I should see a therapist. I did, thank god, and she helped me see I was sacrificing myself on a daily basis.

Mumsnet's a fantastic resource, in my opinion, and I hope these threads have helped many women see what my therapist showed me.

Sigh. I've been there. And worse is it was a relationship after the end of a long marriage.

We were invited to a function where we had to take our own drinks and a plate of snacks. We arranged that I would sort out the food and he would arrange the drinks to take. He knew that I am unable to drink a particular wine which he liked, and we get to the function and he only packed 4 bottles of the wine he likes. And drank all 4 to himself. I ended up scrounging cold drink from someone else to have something. He is a functional alcoholic but even this didn't convince me right away.

When drunk during the night, he on more that one occasion tried to rape me in the night. His excuse was he couldn't help it and suffered him sexsomnia.

I endured this for over a year! No I can't tell you why either, but I think it was because the end of my marriage was so awful it was just a different type of awful.

Reading this back now I feel like such a fool as it was so obvious. But I am out of it thank goodness but will never put myself in that position again. Ever.

He said, “Oh we shout a lot in our family. We are just passionate people.”

Aftet having screamed abuse in my face three times, at me down the phone a few times, I really wish I had got up and ended that date 17 years earlier. I was petrified.

I get that @abyssiniam8 My end of marriage was awful too and then I went into a different sort of awful.

I ignored that DH never seemed like much of a provider. A bit too chilled out, and a bon vivant, always up for the fun stuff, but not the serious stuff. 20 years of feeling put upon as the higher earner and eventually threatening to leave him, and he finally retrained into something that pays well, but I will harbour some resentments for life.

Also, drinking. He quit smoking at my insistence, 15 years ago. He decided he'd never touch hard drugs again after a hideous night in his 20s. But he likes a drink. He's a lovely drunk - never nasty or violent or anything - but I'm always encouraging him to call it a night, leave it there as he's already had 3 pints, have one less glass of red wine with dinner, take Sunday-Thursday off etc. The impetus is never coming from him. I'm very health conscious and worry about his future health (and my future caring responsibilities).

The red flags you write there I could have written about my exH when I first met him.

The drinking because of his "social anxiety" became a huge issue as did various other behaviours related to his "shyness".
He wasn't too shy to end up in someone else's bed though - the internet helped him do that.

God too many to mention: my exh was messaging other women in an adult site. Proper explicit stuff. 3 months into our relationship when we’d done the exclusivity/I love you stuff. I stayed with him. I married him and he carried on doing it 5 years into our marriage. He did nothing to celebrate my first birthday with him. We were visiting friends in Paris, over my birthday, and he just gave me a card, even though in his birthday not long after we met, I bought him a gift and helped him celebrate. He told me it was my fault because I hadn’t told him what I wanted, and now I’d ruined it because actually he was planning to propose. I still married him but to this day, I think he said that in a panic because he couldn’t think of what else to say! After I ditched him, I became involved with what I now know to be a narcissist. Absolutely typical love bombing from day one, swept me off my feet type and I was so emotionally starved after my exh I lapped it up (didn’t know about love bombing etc at the time). Emotional manipulation, pathological lying the works.

finally got rid of him after 7 years but it nearly broke me! I had very poor role models grown up so it’s taken me a long time to develop healthier boundaries.

more red flags than a communitist parade, unfortunately- and I had to learn the hard way!

Telling me that if I upset him in anyway he no longer felt close to me , so wouldn’t come near me , no kisses, cuddles or sex until I started doing as he wanted me to, why I put up with this I have no idea 🤷‍♀️ never again.

Like others, after an awful marriage (where the red flags were there from the beginning but we were together 32 years) I missed different red flags with the next man.
He was pathologically late for everything and on the one occasion I was late he took enormous umbrage and sulked all evening.
He asked incessant questions about my ex husband but revealed nothing about his own wife/said he didn’t want to talk about her.
I got badly bitten by a stranger’s dog in a oub and he mopped up the blood but was not supportive of my subsequent fear of being around dogs of leads / he then without telling me bought a dog of the same breed that bit me. (That was the final straw! ) He was jealous of every man I spoke to.
He’s had a very difficult upbringing and was very insecure about sex and the size of his penis.
So many flags!
But he was fun to be with and so different from my exh that I overlooked all these till he got s new job that he said he needed to concentrate on and ghosted me anyway after 2 years…
Then I met a lovely man who is showing me what a real relationship should be - early days but no red flags. In fact lots of green ones /eg he has a dog but - without me prompting- he has kept her away from me (his son often looks after her) because before we dated a mutual friend told him I am nervous around dogs…

My DH told me his dad is a alcoholic so he didn't drink until he was 21 but that he has a very high tolerance to alcohol. Then n the early days of us living together, he took a sick day from work when he was hungover and I told him this was unacceptable and he told me that he took a calculated risk by drinking so much that he couldn't get up for work because it was only a training day.

I remember being so cross amd disappointed in him and I now wish I had used that incident as the trigger to break up with him.

Now he is a fully blown alcoholic who wants to be able to "drink sensibly" but absolutely refuses to see the extent of his problem. He isn't violent or abusive when drinking, just neglectful, sleeps a lot, and blames it on various illnesses. We now have a house and a child and while I regret neither, I want to separate from him and this makes it more complicated.

Yep, genuinely can't believe I stood for it.
Clearly I look back now and think differently, but at the time I put it down to being young and naive. He was my first boyfriend and I was late to the dating game compared to everyone I knew so made excuses to not be alone.
Although he wasn't unfaithful at that point (just completely disrespected my feelings), he did go on to be.
I can't regret it though as I have some awesome kids, but hopefully I'll stand for less next time.

Second time I ever saw him we were talking about something mundane that we did differently. He came right up to my face said “You’ll do things MY way, or else!”

First time I met his Mum her first words to me were “Have you seen his temper yet?”

Still wasted the first 14 fucking years of my adult life on him!

Problem drinking or drinking too much in certain situations is a red flag which should never be ignored.
We were young and, as someone up thread also says, everyone was drinking at that time so it seemed less odd. But looking back, my exH's drinking always made me (and others around us) uncomfortable. He was off his face at our wedding reception fgs!

Never ignore it, always discuss it and if they won't lessen their drinking for you then consider ending it.