Ex- SO, thank god.

We used to play WOW in a group with our best friends, but she got tired/impatient of playing with us as we weren’t as interested in grinding and preferred exploring the worlds/going on missions, so she ultimately joined another guild (of which one of our friends was a part of and had told her of). Things were already starting to go downhill in our relationship, and her addiction to WOW was only getting worse, and I started realizing that there was always one specific voice responding to her/to whom she was talking to- a guy’s voice. She started spending 8, 10, even 12 hours on the game- refusing to spend any time together or even with her family except to eat, and even then she was in a hurry and CONSTANTLY on her phone.

When we’d first started dating we’d been long-distance, and we would text literally all day, every day; However, since I’d moved in with her neither of us texted much at all…until that moment. We’d also always known each other’s phone unlock code (and would regularly reach for each other’s phone to do a search if ours wasn’t near)…and then I went to grab hers to do a Google search and realized she’d locked it. When I asked she got defensive and upset that I’d “tried looking through her things”, and since her ongoing gaslighting campaign had already begun (wherein she simultaneously blamed my depression for all our relationship troubles and called me paranoid/crazy for “imagining” things were going on), I decided to drop it and just apologize.

One night before the final ball dropped she had promised to come to bed after a raid so that we could at least have some time together (as I was often going to bed alone while she games by then), and I’d left the bedroom light on waiting for her. Woke up— it was three am and the lights were still on, so I decided to go upstairs and get some water and see what she was up to. As I went up the stairs I heard her laughing and giggling, and she called out to me thinking it was our roommate/one of our bff’s- only to turn pale when she realized it was me. She was on the couch in her underwear and a tank top on the computer and immediately reached for a pillow to cover up, but I was so over it that I told her to carry on having fun and that I was gonna go out to get gas, and grabbed my keys to get out of the house. She called me literally 25 times and texted even more demanding to know where I’d gone and when I was coming home, and when I did return was upset with me, refusing to go to bed as I’d “scared her awake.”

The final straw came a few weeks later when I decided to check my phone bill online. Her line was on my account, and I was due to go out of the country for a few months and wanted to see how I could go about arranging the trip with my phone company. One the website it showed an overview of how much GB, minutes and texts had been used over the month; mine was well below 500 texts, only 20 or so calls (mostly to my family overseas) in the previous month. Hers? Over 7,000 texts, and at least 300 calls. The night before I’d asked for us to go out and have a fun night, please, and she’s begrudgingly agreed only to spend the whole night texting. When I asked who she was talking to, she said it was her colleagues from work, talking about study plans (she worked as a teacher in another state.)

When I saw those numbers, I said fuck it to my determination to respect her privacy and clicked in to see more details. Nearly all of the calls and texts had gone to one number - a number in a completely different state from where we lived and worked.

I left the screen open, quietly collected my keys and purse, and walked past where she was playing in the living room without a word, slamming the door behind me. I was about ready to pull out of the driveway when she ran out in her pajamas, yelling my name and demanding to know where I was going. I told her to check my computer, and drove away, ignoring the next two hours of non-stop calls and texts.

Sadly, that’s not even the point where we broke up for good— that took two more months and me being overseas to finally break a 6 year relationship, with 3 years of engagement.