Past is the past. I try not to think about that anymore.

Infatuation. It wasn’t really love.

One thing that all of my exes had in common were phenomenal smiles. They also (mostly) shared the ability to accept things that are just human, without being weird or judgmental… and when I was younger that was a particularly refreshing quality. They were all bold, aggressive, ambitious in their own way.

As to the individual reasons that I fell in love with each person, it varied, of course. One was amazing in bed, but also had a remarkable talent for making me feel like the most important person in the world. It was a sham, of course, but it was well played… and I fell for it.

Another was energetic, athletic, always pushing me to be more and do more… but wanting to do it with me. Unfortunately, that energy was shared with lots of other people.

The other, well… I don’t know. Maybe it was her eyes. There was so much mystery, and I desperately wanted to be the trusted one. I just wanted to protect and comfort and something about it sucked me in over my head. This wasn’t ended by a conscious decision, there was a car accident.

I was very young and very stupid and thought I knew what love was at the time. I was horribly mistaken.

He was the 2nd ever 21yrs+ person who courted me with passion; I’m a sucker for charm and passion! For about 2 months, he’d ask every which way for me to have dinner with him or even a drink but. Every few days I’d have fresh flowers on my desk, he’d bring me little candies or some delicacy cooked from home. My ex is a very intelligent but also great humored man, he doesn’t appear that he’d be funny or easygoing since he’s also super intense but he is funnier than shite and it’s his humor and good intentions that kept us together for almost a decade. We are friends to this day and his family feels like an extension of my own.

My ex wife was a hard arsed bitch who could look after herself, the chemistry between us was explosive, in & out of the bedroom. I swear she could read my mind.. I found her softer more gentle side too, she mine…. Unfortunately someone else came along when my guards were down, game over! :-/

With my last ex, she was (and is) pretty much everything I look for in a SO and then some. We never really separated, we just redefined our relationship to better suit our diverging paths. We’re still quite in love with each other to this day and though we’ve each developed lives less entwined than we once envisioned our bonds happily remain.

It’s been my experience that as long as the love has been genuine and mutual the relationship has persisted in one form or another. And when it hasn’t one or both of us was looking for something that just wasn’t there to begin with even if that realization didn’t always come quickly or easily.

My soon-to-be-ex seemed so nonjudgmental, so accepting, so easygoing and never had his feathers ruffled. Coming from a previous relationship with an intense, competitive and demanding person, it was a pure relief. I wanted to be with someone that didn’t judge me or others, and he seemed to be that type of person. The only place he was intense was in bed, so of course that didn’t bother me!

What I learned, though, is that his “easy going attitude” had a flip side. He doesn’t feel strongly about anything, has no empathy, is an expert on discrediting and invalidating everything, never gives a direct answer (try grocery shopping like that), only has interest in his own feelings and thoughts, and does judge others quite coldly. He takes what he wants when he wants it and does what he want when he wants to, no matter what others might want, and in a very nonchalant way, too. People see him as a lovable teddy bear… I used to call him Pooh because he really does have a Pooh energy, but they don’t realize there’s a cruel man with dangerous sexual perversions inside the stuffing.

I met my ex while I was on vacation in India. Cultural differences were too extreme. But the biggest issue was that she couldn’t let go of the anger she had toward her family who abused her as a child. From what I’ve since discovered, this is (or was) a recurring theme with women who marry foreigners to leave India. I also gather that it’s also less of a problem since the standard of living in India has improved and the Indian government has recently allowed international commerce (was a time it was illegal to take or bank-transfer Indian currency into or out of India, and import tariffs were sometimes triple digit percentages!).

The chief reason my 20+ year relationship fell apart is that I didn’t really love my ex. He was a port in a storm as I was coming out of a pretty darn challenging chapter of my life. I was young, desperate to get out of my father’s house, and he was the complete antithesis of every man I had ever been familiar with. My life to that point was full of domineering alpha males who did everything they could to control my life. He was a non-confrontational, safe-seeming Elmer Milktoast who not unlike the person @linguaphile describes came across incredibly easy going and unintense. He was safe. He represented an escape. I ran to him as fast as I could.

We just clicked. I thought he was perfect. After living together, I realized when he got around his family, he would adopt their views – which were treating women w/ disrespect & doing whatever the hell you wanted. F that!!! Took about 11 months to finally break all ties w/him. Still miss him, but def not his family. Next! :)

I’ve never once spoken ill of my ex boyfriend. (ecxept that he drives like a fucking maniac wanting to kill everything under the Sun)

When we separated, we agreed it was for the best because that magic spark wasn’t there anymore, and the relationship would just stall and dwindle from where we were at. Time to move on. We had nearly four years going on, but the last one was undead.
But we didn’t break up through a huge fight or some nasty event. It was kinda cold at first. He comes up to me one Sunday afternoon and he’s like, so, I don’t love you anymore. I was like, okay. Imma go play video games now.

That’s not how it really happened. But it was over, we both knew it, and agreed to go our separate ways. Sometimes we go out for coffee and catch up on what each is doing with their life. It feels weird doing that with someone I was dating, but if that’s the worse that can happen lol. Actually though, I haven’t seen him forever. I also remmeber not liking his new girlfriend. Even today sometimes I still miss him lol. But yeah, I don’t account for the details in your question, so I don’t have to answer it properly! XD We had something for one another, something strong, but nothing lasts forever, I guess.

Temporary insanity and a tendency to be… kinda… Stupid sometimes.

If you can successfully put into words “why” you fell in love with someone… I would question whether or not you truly loved them.

@tedd The implication of your statement is that no one who answered this question truly loved their exes. Is that what you mean?

@wundayatta That would imply that I assumed they all successfully put their feelings into words.

I know I’ve loved a handful of my x’s. But if you asked me to explain why, I couldn’t. They had similarities, glaring differences, good points, bad points, etc, etc… I could tell you specific things I liked about a girl, but it would be hard to call most of those things unique…. So how do you know when you’re truly in love with someone? You just do. And no matter how hard you try to put your feelings into words, they will never come out right, because there are no words to truly describe what makes you love someone.

Ex#1 – I felt good when I talked to him. He seemed to understand me completely and I felt like we clicked quite well. We parted ways because of the distance. We may have also parted ways because our values weren’t completely the same. He ended it.

Ex#2 – I felt good when I talked to him. I felt like he understood me. He ended it because he barely ever got to see me, didn’t feel like we connected well, and felt that we had pretty much nothing in common. This came as a shock to me because I thought we did. It turns out he hid several of his actual interests from me and pretended to value what he thought I did. I fell in love with who I thought he was.

Ex#3 – I fell in love with him at a mutual friend’s birthday party. He shared his popcorn with me and carried me over puddles. He gave me so much attention and I couldn’t help but like him. We became a couple 3 days later. We had a lot of ups and downs in our relationship and ended up breaking up 3 times in the span of 2 years and 3 months. The first time, I tried to end it. The second time, he tried to end it. The third and last time, he suggested seeing other people and I didn’t like the idea… so he ended it. All 3 attempts at breaking up in this relationship were a result of us being way too different.

Ex#4 – I ended up falling in love with him because he seemed to respect me—he had even told me he did. He was there for me through so much when I was with Ex#3. He gave me so many ideas and tips on how to make it work (because he wanted to support me), even though Ex#3 had cheated on me with someone who had acted like she was my friend. I appreciated him not judging me for staying with a cheater when I did.

We ended up becoming a couple because of matchmakers. A girl I hung out with a lot at the time noticed how much I talked to him and she ended up falling for his brother. She would go on and on about how Ex#4 and I were the perfect match and how we should get together (marriage was even brought into this). To make things worse, his mother and brother also wanted him to date me.

While at first, we had plenty of good memories, things changed. I found out his mother accused my mother of some pretty nasty things and I was not happy about this at all. Neither was my friend. She was also growing very unhappy with his brother and eventually left (dramatically).

As time went on, Ex#4 and I started arguing more and more…. because of his mother and her accusations. I had his Mom on Facebook and she wanted me to delete this man I have on my Facebook because she was convinced the man was her sons father (when he does not even have any children and does not have the same last name as Ex#4 and his brother’s Dad). She also (according to what I was told, anyway) accused my mother of being part of a group who wanted to burn her house down and apparently did. Ex#4 could not take this fighting about our mothers and decided he wanted to end the relationship. He also told me he felt like he was lying when he said he loved me.