Divorced People Reveal The Obvious Red Flags They Ignored Before Getting Married
When a couple goes through a divorce, each partner has a chance to reflect on where the marriage went wrong. Often times, a divorce has something to do with money, family issues, or a lack of a meaningful connection. But what about the people who willingly ignored the signs that their relationships would fall apart? While it may seem stupid to do such a thing, plenty of people have done it… and paid the price after the ceremony ended.
Considering that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, sudden splits are no longer all that surprising. These regretful divorcees shared the red flags that they brushed aside before getting hitched.
Don’t forget to check the comment section below the article for more interesting stories!
#35 It’s Not That She’s A Bad Mom…
Before we got married, his mom said, “If you ever get divorced, we will know it was because of him and not you.” This was a huge red flag, but all I thought was, “Wow, what a mean thing to say about your own son!”
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#34 That, My Friends, Is Why Ultimatums Are Garbage
I rushed into marrying my first wife. She wanted to get married and I didn’t want to break up.
On the day our wedding, my friends asked her how she was feeling, and they told me that her response was, “Well, I can always get divorced. “
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#33 Nothing Was Ever Enough
I worked tirelessly to make her happy, but nothing I did was ever enough. There was always “one more thing” that she needed to be happy. Eventually, after the $40,000 wedding, the European honeymoon, and the brand new house that we bought, I ran out of cards to play. All of a sudden, I didn’t have the qualities she looked for in a spouse.
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#32 Yeah, Okay, This One’s Hard To Ignore
My wife cheated on every single long-term partner she ever had. She cheated on her first boyfriend with his brother. Looking back now, she would talk about it almost like was proud of it; as if she thought they deserved it. Every guy she ever dated, according to her, was “abusive.”
Fast forward to when we got married and she cheated on me as well. When her family found out, she accused me of being abusive.
There were several red flags… I just decided to look past them because I thought she had grown up.
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#31 Man, This Sounds Super Lonely
I’d come home after work and I’d be alone. I’d wake up in the morning and I’d be alone. I’d have a few days off in a row and she was always out with her friends, the majority of whom were male. I’d think nothing of it because I thought I could trust my wife with other men. I didn’t want to be a controlling husband.
She’d always be angry with me about something. She’d yell at me all the time. She always spoke badly about her own family behind their backs, yet they were very nice to me. She’d always compare our relationship to her sister’s and her husband’s. The intimacy tapered off into non-existence.
#30 Nope, It’s Definitely Still Cheating
I was on bed-rest while pregnant with our son, due to preterm labor. I was told I could not get intimate with my husband as that could start the labor again. Even though we were engaged, living together and having a child together, he decided that since I was not putting out, he could go around sleeping with other girls guilt-free. We were married 15 years and he never would admit that he cheated. It was my fault for withholding.
#29 Guilty Conscious Much?
He called me up and confessed to cheating. He had kissed another girl. I thought it was cute and endearing because we were 18 and I didn’t consider us to be in a relationship. We’d gone on a few dates right after graduation, then we both went to out-of-state colleges. I’d gone out with other guys during that time.
Four years later, I married him. Things were good for a while until he started getting paranoid. He would hurl these cheating accusations at me…They started with periods of silence—he wouldn’t speak to me for days, then all of a sudden he’d ask where I had been during a particular date and time. It would be like, “Where were you at 1 p.m. last week on Friday,” and so on.
It would slowly escalate from moodiness to insinuations. About every five years, he’d completely lose it and have a major tantrum over some inkling he had about me.
#28 That’s No Casual Slip Up
He was shaking and was sweating buckets the entire time, right up until the “I do”. When the officiant had us say, “fidelity,” he said “infidelity” instead.
Turns out he was cheating the whole time.
#27 Doing It “In Your Head” Doesn’t Count
During a casual conversation, she commented on how a couple of years ago she slept with a guy that she really liked. The timing seemed off since I knew she was dating another guy around that same time. When I asked if she had broken up with the one guy before she slept with the other, her response was, “In my mind I had.”
History repeated itself.
#26 Never, Ever Brush Aside Bad Credit
Bad credit. I knew hers wasn’t good, but I didn’t realize just how bad it was until after we got married. When we showed up to our new place with all of our stuff in a moving truck, the apartment community manager wouldn’t give us our key because my wife had a vehicle repo on her credit that she never mentioned. I had to call my parents from their office and have them wire the money to the bank before we could move in.
#25 You’re Not Just Being “Anti-social”
I enjoyed my time away from him. I would get super depressed when I knew he was going to be home from work soon. I simply brushed it off as some anti-social tendency of mine.
But now I’m with someone who I’m still excited to see every single day after seven years and I’m still anti-social. He was definitely the problem.
#24 If Only He Had Lived Alone Beforehand…
I never saw him live alone. He spent most of his early 20s living with my twin brother and a couple of their roommates. I moved in some time after.
The house was always clean enough. Every once in a while, I’d see him doing dishes or cleaning up, so I thought maybe he was the one responsible for the upkeep of the house.
But once we got married, I realized that he did no housework. Sometimes I’d ask him to clean up his mess and he’d occasionally do it, but he rarely picked up after himself.
When our baby was born, he was very little help. He would play with the kid and occasionally change a diaper, but all the extra dishes, laundry, shopping, and cleaning still ended up being my responsibility, along with the feedings.
Soon, to his detriment, I realized, “I could do this on my own and it would actually be less work.”
#23 Well Crap, That’s A Lot
My mom’s eight ex-husbands apparently ignored the red flag of how many times she’s been married.
Poor chap number nine ignored them too.
#22 Mother Always Knows Best
Around five minutes before the wedding started, my mother said “If we get in the car and leave now, I will never say another word. You are making the biggest mistake of your life.”
#21 One Lie Turns Into Another…
He was a pathological liar. The first thing he ever said to me was a lie. When we first met, he said he was 21 when he was actually 23. Eventually, his lying became a pattern.
He lied about everything. Big things, little things… Literally, everything.
By the time I realized it was a serious problem, we were married and already had babies. As time went on, I would catch his lies but also ignore them. There was no point in calling him out because he would just deny everything, swearing on his grave.
Finally, after wasting 27 years with him, he left me for another woman. All this time, he kept telling me he was just working late. It was all a lie.
#20 Too Many Red Flags To Count
I think there was more than one red flag.
She was a single mom with two kids, each with different men. One of her kid’s fathers was her brother-in-law, while the other kid’s father was in prison for grand theft auto.
She faked a pregnancy to get me to propose to her. Then, she would hurt herself every time she didn’t get her way. She constantly belittled me in front of her family. She didn’t have friends.
She opened a credit card in my name so she could eat pizza for lunch while I ate jalapeño-flavored pickles because that was all that was in the house. I was violently ill the day of my wedding.
#19 From One Bad Situation To The Next
He cared far more about his own happiness than mine.
I grew up with a mentally ill narcissistic mother and a dysfunctional family, so anything seemed better. But after living with him for so long, I realized just how unhealthy our relationship was.
#18 He’s Worse Than A Teenage Boy
I married a 35-year-old man who still lived with his parents. I thought, “Oh, what a family guy.” Nope. He was a lazy, co-dependent man-child who spent all his money on food, beer, and video games.
#17 That’s Not Quite How That Works
He told me, “You saved me from being gay.”
#16 Oh, So She’s Crazy Crazy
She was not kind to people she felt were beneath her — waitresses, housekeeping, mechanics, etc. But she was very, very beautiful so I didn’t think much about it as I should have.
I remember the exact moment I realized I didn’t love her anymore. I was sweaty from playing basketball and she said, “You are going to shower right? You played basketball with all those black guys.”
She also believed that Jesus only loves American white people and that dinosaurs and men were on the earth at the same time and got on a boat together.
How did I miss all those cues when we were dating?
#15 Ah, The Classic “In-Laws From Hell”
I ignored the fact that her mother and sister were super crazy! And that my wife was very much under their control. I forgot that when you marry someone, you marry the whole family.
#14 Sounds Like A Textbook Narcissist
So many things:
My parents and friends couldn’t stand her. We broke up once before we got married. Everyone was very relieved, then they got very disappointed when we got back together.
She was very jealous of anything I accomplished. It was me vs. her in her mind.
She blamed me for her shortcomings and never took responsibility for things happening in her life, regardless of her power to change them.
#13 You Should Have Listened To Your Gut
I felt like I was going to vomit every time I thought about the wedding. I didn’t care about planning it. I let my friends pick everything, including my dress. I sobbed at my bachelorette party. I tried to pull a Runaway Bride on the day of the wedding. I was 21 and felt trapped. I should have listened to my dad.
#12 I Won’t Be A Trophy Wife
I was concerned that he had a preoccupation with the fact that I was young. I didn’t ignore it. I told him straight up: “You know I’m going to get older, right? I won’t always be this young. I want to make sure that’s not why you want to marry me. I have no interest in being a trophy wife.”
I wanted to be sure that my youth wasn’t the reason he was so attracted to me. He assured me that it wasn’t, even though he’s seven years older. Maybe it wasn’t simply the fact that I was young, but I do think it made him feel like he had the upper hand in terms of life experience and earning power. He seemed to think he could make all the decisions.
He didn’t really want a grown woman. Seven years, two kids, and endless support and compromise from me later, he divorced me when I was 30. He’s now dating someone who is 20 years younger than he is now. Thank God I never gave up on securing my education and professional standing. His loss.
#11 You Aren’t A Single Man Anymore, Sweetie
He acted completely single even though he was in a committed relationship. We had a great relationship so I trusted him completely. After we had kids and he wasn’t the center of the world, he went off the deep end with serial cheating.
#10 Please, Listen To Your Friends And Family
My friends and family warned me that my ex wasn’t good for me. I ignored them for six years while I was on and off with her until we finally got married. It took me four months of being married to realize they had been right all along. It wasn’t one specific event that made me realize, I just slowly came to understand that I wasn’t happy with her. It was one of the craziest things I’ve experienced. Six years of thinking she was the girl I’d spend my life with and it only took four months of marriage for me to wake up and realize how unhappy she made me.
The real kicker was that looking back, I don’t think I was ever actually in love with her. According to my family and friends, I always try to “fix the broken ones” without regard for my own feelings and they thought that’s what I was doing with her.
As a guy, I carried the stigma that I couldn’t be on the receiving end of abuse. But if there was ever proof that a guy can truly be emotionally abused, it was my relationship with her.
#9 So, She Can’t Handle Life
She became overwhelmed by even the tiniest setbacks. Someone said something marginally rude to her at work and she had to take the rest of the shift off because she was fuming so much, for example. Turns out, she was that way with everything.
#8 Sometimes, Introverts And Extroverts Don’t Mesh
She wanted to go out every weekend. It seemed like something easy to compromise on, but it was indicative of two very different lifestyles. To her, having a big group of friends to hang out with was important. She wanted to cultivate that, be a part of stories, be extroverted, you know, just social. That was never a want or need for me. I didn’t mind it occasionally, but the fact that we didn’t want the same things led to never-ending fights. It was all downhill from the start, we were just too blind to see.
#7 You Can’t Build Marriage Around A Kid
I knew I shouldn’t have done it. I grew up sheltered and VERY Catholic. I was pregnant. Even though I was 24, didn’t live at home, and I had no issue providing for myself and my child, I thought getting married was the right thing to do, for the child.
Every fiber of my being was resisting as I walked towards him on our wedding day. We didn’t last. We were both miserable. He cheated and I didn’t care. We had no relationship.
#6 She Needs A Lesson In Respect
I could never do enough to make her happy. I did all the housework and yard work. Nothing was enough. I wasn’t allowed to be tired because she thought all I did at work was sit at a desk for nine hours a day staring at a computer screen.
We both had childhoods without fathers in the picture. We talked about kids and she asked if I could be a stay-at-home dad since she made more than double what I did. I told her yes and she told me she couldn’t respect me.
She was still attached by the cord to her mom. The money we received as wedding presents went to her mom so she could keep her house and not move in with us.
#5 Yep, That Was No Accident
He kept the front door open all night and the cat I had for over 10 years got out and ran away.
It was no mistake. He was a horrible person. My cat was a rescue and he was very skittish. I got him for my seventh birthday. His name was Oliver and I loved him so much. I should have left my husband right then and there for doing what he did.
We also had over $10,000 saved up to put down on a house, and he ended up gambling ALL of it away in one night while stationed in Korea.
#4 No, Man-Babies Never Hit Maturity
Here’s what I learned from being married to a man-child:
A 25-year-old who sits on his butt eating pizza and playing video games with no hobbies, ambition, life skills, or charisma is just going to turn into a 40-year-old who sits on his butt eating pizza and playing video games with no hobbies, ambition, life skills, or charisma. No amount of wishing, intervening, pushing, or encouraging will get him to be an adult.
#3 Okay, His Codependence Is Insane
He was a mama’s boy, but beyond what was reasonable. If he wanted some new toy, like a computer or some art stuff, he would literally go to her in tears and ask for it. He was in community college and failing out of his classes, and would claim it was because the professors all hated him. His mom kept paying for him to go and retake classes.
I was attending the university nearby, and if I tried to help him he would get angry with me and cry to his mom that I was “making him feel stupid.” He absolutely refused to get a tutor. He spent six years failing out of his first semester of community college.
#2 Dude, Even The Pastor Thinks It’s A Bad Idea
I attended a wedding rehearsal. The bride yelled at her nephew as he came down the aisle, saying: “CAN’T YOU SPEED UP? YOU’RE GOING TO RUIN EVERYTHING!” The kid had CP and was in a wheelchair.
The pastor took the groom aside on the day of the wedding and calmly explained that this didn’t have to be his choice. No one would think less of him, he said.
They went through with it and divorced one month later. Moron.
#1 So, You Don’t Know Each Other At All, Then?
When we were filling out the marriage certificate in the courthouse I remember thinking, “Huh, so that’s your middle name.”
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