Woman says a man she had only just started talking to again demanded she cancel a five-week work trip — and by Valentine’s Day, she had blocked him
A Reddit user says reconnecting with an ex lasted about a week before it turned back into the exact same mess that had broken them up in the first place. In a post later shared on Best of Redditor Updates, the 30-year-old woman said she and her 29-year-old ex had recently started talking again after a breakup tied to his insecurity, distrust and controlling behavior. She wrote that she already had a five-week work trip to Texas and California locked in before they reconnected, including three days in Los Angeles with a close friend, and made clear the trip mattered for her career and had been planned for months.
According to her post, the problem started when he decided the trip was not really acceptable unless she reshaped it around his fears. She said he told her she had “no business” going to nightclubs with her friend in Los Angeles, pushed her to share her location for the full five weeks, and treated her hesitation like proof she was hiding something. She wrote that she had already lived through one round of this with him before, including fights that spiraled when he monitored her while she was away, and did not want to hand him the same lever again. He responded, she said, by claiming that if the roles were reversed, he would cancel everything for her, and by arguing that she had the power to cancel the trip but was choosing not to.
What made the story feel more lopsided was how much emotional labor she said she had already poured into the reconnecting phase. She wrote that during that short stretch she had cooked for him, helped care for him while he was sick, cleaned his place and tried to create a calm, supportive atmosphere, while he showed up with flowers, chocolates and a Valentine’s Day reservation, only to turn around and tell her the night before the holiday that his gut said she was “not the girl for him” if she would not fully accommodate what he needed to feel secure. Overwhelmed, she said she blocked him. In an edit, she added that she had even agreed to location sharing at one point, but he dismissed that too after deciding her earlier concerns meant it “didn’t count.”
Her next update made clear this was not some serious reunion that had already become solid again. She said they were not actually back together, despite his dramatic gestures, and that he had shown up on his knees promising to spend the rest of his life making up for past mistakes. She admitted she was known for being too forgiving and wanting to believe people could change, which is part of why she gave him another opening at all. But once the trip became a pressure point, she wrote, he quickly escalated into ultimatums, told her to cancel it or lose his number, belittled the value of the work opportunity, and even had his mother speak to her about his history of being cheated on and the therapy he supposedly needed.
That was the part readers really locked onto. The post was not about one boyfriend feeling uneasy while a woman traveled for work. It was about someone trying to turn his own instability into rules for someone else’s life. The woman said he could seem kind, thoughtful and affectionate right up until he felt hurt or challenged, and then the warmth disappeared. She said she finally saw that clearly and told him he was controlling, insecure and nasty. In the comments captured in the BORU thread, readers argued that the gifts and apologies meant very little when they were followed by guilt, pressure and an attempt to shrink her world back down around his fears.
By the final update in that thread, she said she was no longer in contact with him and was leaving for the trip anyway. She wrote that she had never actually intended to let him derail it, but had hoped for a more mature response than the one he gave her. Instead, the whole thing ended up confirming what the earlier breakup had already been trying to tell her: the problem was not the trip. It was the man who treated a woman’s career plans, friendships and freedom like things he should get a vote on after just one week of talking again.
What do you think — was blocking him the cleanest possible answer, or should she have seen the reconnecting phase as a mistake the second he started trying to manage her trip?
