Woman says one female coworker became the excuse for her boyfriend to start a fight he already knew would hurt her — and the update ended with her finally walking away
A Reddit user says the trouble started long before the breakup, with a female coworker she had already asked her boyfriend to set clearer boundaries around. In the original story, the 32-year-old woman wrote that her 35-year-old boyfriend had been texting, calling and FaceTiming a coworker outside of work so much that it became a repeated source of conflict. She said the woman was his subordinate, that they worked closely together, and that after one earlier fight they had supposedly agreed to keep things professional.
What made this version hit harder was his explanation once she found out the outside contact had continued. According to the post, she calmly asked why he had spent the last couple of weeks talking to the coworker on the phone for long stretches after promising to stop. His answer, she said, was that the two of them had been fighting and he did it on purpose to hurt her. In her telling, that turned the whole thing from a boundary problem into something uglier: he was not claiming it was innocent or accidental. He was openly saying he used another woman to get under her skin.
The bigger picture around the relationship already looked rough. In comments preserved in the BORU repost, she said they lived together, had been together about two years, and shared a baby. She also admitted one reason she had stayed through earlier problems was fear: they were locked into a lease, the cost of starting over felt overwhelming, and leaving would likely mean going back to family in another state while figuring out how to rebuild life with a child. Even then, she said she still carried a small hope that things might improve.
They did not. In the update two days later, she said she sat him down for a serious conversation and told him the disrespect, the dismissiveness and the refusal to actually work through issues had become dealbreakers. Instead of hearing that, she wrote, he flipped the whole thing around. He accused her of “looking for things to be unhappy about,” said she was the one constantly criticizing him, and even started accusing her of cheating with men whose numbers were still in her phone. She also said he dragged his friends into it, and that they all echoed the same claim: that her discomfort with the coworker must mean she had a guilty conscience of her own.
By then, she wrote, the pattern finally looked impossible to deny. In her words, there was no accountability, no real concern for her feelings, and no sign that he viewed her as an equal partner. Instead, she said the conversation became one more round of him antagonizing her and repeating that she had been “caught,” while acting as if he deserved credit for “overlooking” things because he supposedly loved her. Her reaction by the end was blunt enough to sum up the whole collapse: she ended the relationship and said she was going to focus on being a mother.
One of the details that seems to have stuck with readers most was what she admitted afterward: this was not even the first time he had won her back after behavior she already knew she should not have accepted. She said she once tried to leave and return to family out of state, and he threatened her with parental kidnapping. That made the ending feel less like one woman snapping over a coworker and more like someone finally recognizing that the coworker was only the latest tool in a much older pattern of control, blame and emotional punishment.
The BORU thread is here.
