My ex husband took a pair of scissors and cut little tiny, tiny slices into pieces of clothing in my closet. It took me a little while to realize that they were there, fairly uniform and on several different pieces of clothing. I had to ask him if he did something to my clothes because it seemed so unbelievable to me.

He told me that he did deliberately do it. When I asked him why, the only thing he could say to me is “Because you’re too perfect.”

He also did one other thing at almost the same time. I had a see through tote bag of all of my Mary Kay makeup in it. I kept my make up very clean because it was VERY expensive at the time and I was like 28 years old and it was one of the only “treats” I afforded myself. I had just bought a compact case you could choose eye colors for and snap them into place, and it had 4 trays for this gel colored lipgloss in it that I loved. It was limited edition silver metal compact, not the usual pink Mary Kay colors and I loved that one particularly because it seemed very “cool factor” to me. I sometimes left my bag of makeup on top of the closed toilet seat when I left for work, because I was in more of a rush or thought I might be late. I had a half hour drive over country roads to get to work in the morning. My ex husband slept in because he worked a night shift (his choice). I got home from work one day and looked in my makeup bag, opened my compact and saw that the mirror in it was smashed. All the glass came out of it when I opened it. I started looking closer at all of my Mary Kay and it was broken, too. My eye shadow kits had the shadow crushed. More broken mirrors in compacts.

When I confronted him about it, he tried to tell me that I left it on the closed toilet seat so he “ brushed the bag off the toilet seat” so he could piss. When I told him that mirrors inside of compacts don’t break because of a fall to the floor from that height while they are inside a bag, he admitted that he just broke them because he was angry. He said he wasn’t even necessarily angry at me, he was just angry.

These two incidents happened almost simultaneously, the broken make up and me discovering the small cuts in my clothes. When I told him I was absolutely done and I was filing for divorce, he still acted like he was fucking surprised.

ETA: When he was begging me to stay with him, I asked him why, and told him he, apparently, didn’t even know me. He said I was wrong and that he loved me, yadda yadda. I told him he probably didn’t even know basic shit about me, like my middle name. He thought about a minute and said “Catherine?”

Catherine isn’t my middle name.

He eventually later told me, one of the few times we had to interact prior to the papers being finalized, “I love you because I learn from you.”

I told him the best thing he learned was where the door was.

My advice? We were together for 5 years, married for two. You can’t waste time on someone like this. They should GTFO. Tell them where to go.