My (36f) boyfriend (41m) of 4.5 years, ran into his ex-gf (34f) and her husband (30s?m), she looked scared when she saw him and yelled random accusatory things at him, this experience has left me uneasy

My boyfriend uses reddit a lot, so I hope he doesn't see this post or figure out it's me.

This past weekend my boyfriend and I were running various errands, at one point in the day he noticed an ex-girlfriend of his with her husband and their baby. He told me it had been over 10 years since he had seen her, and would be nice to say hi and catch up. I didn’t see anything wrong with this, they were sitting down in a public space having a snack. My boyfriend and I also have a child together (almost 2 years old) and I thought it would be nice to chat with another mom about our kids. (My mom was babysitting our son while we were out, FWIW).

They didn’t see us approach right away, when his ex looked up and noticed him her face went white and she had wide eyes, she almost looked scared. As we approached I heard her say to her husband, “don’t say any personal information about us.” Which I thought was really weird, the husband looked up and just looked confused and looked back at his wife.

My boyfriend starts to nicely and happily say “Hey “Kate”! It’s been a long time, how have you been?” She seems really cold and standoffish, and just responds with “what do you want?” Then he says “Oh come on, it’s been a long time! Long enough to get over our breakup. You have a cute baby, what’s their name? We have almost 2-year-old named “Thomas”!”

She then says “There is no way in hell I’m giving you my baby’s name. And I can’t believe you’re responsible for another humans life.” She starts to get really upset and angry and starts to go off on him as she and her husband gather their things together to leave. They had a bunch of their stuff and babu’s stuff on a table, so it took a few min for them to get everything packed up and their baby secured before rushing off. While they were in the process of packing up all of their things, she was shouting out various things at him, these are the ones that I remembered and stood out to me:

• Are you getting shit faced and doing drugs around your kid?

• Are screaming at your kid at the top of your lungs whenever he does something you don’t like?

• Are you calling your child profanities when you’re unhappy with them?

• Are you throwing empty beer bottles around your kid when you get angry?

• Are you still a psycho who hits himself in the face and chest when you get angry?

• Are you making her pay all of your bills? the rent? your cigarettes? your gas?

• Are you making her do all the cleaning and cooking?

• Are you still unemployed and just smoking pot and playing video games all day while someone else takes care of your ass?

• Did you force her to have sex with you to make that child of yours?

As they were walking away, the last thing she said to him was “you’re a fucking monster,” and then warned me by saying “you and your child aren’t safe with him, get out while you still can.”

I got angry when she implied that my boyfriend had forced me to conceive our child. That’s when I yelled back something along the lines of, “wtf are you saying? he’s not a rapist! jesus… he would never do something like that” And she responded with “yeah.. I beg to differ.”

As she was saying those things to my boyfriend and they were packing up, my boyfriend was getting flustered. I could tell he was angry, every time she threw an accusation at him he would say something like “that never happened,” “quit being so dramatic”, “you only bought me gas once”, “i’ve had a job for awhile now, thanks..”, “i don’t smoke pot anymore”, etc… just deflecting whatever she had just said. At this point my boyfriend and I just wanted to go home. On the car drive back, he was explaining that when he and Kate were still together she had a tendency to be overly dramatic and would exaggerate to the extreme. He had hoped she would have grown out of this in the past 10 years. When we first got together he told me he use to have a drinking problem, but got help and was better. But he was never as bad as the way Kate had described him. He told me that he was more of a depressed/sleep all day alcoholic, but he was never violent or drove while intoxicated. He said that he was with this ex during some of those alcoholic years and that’s why they broke up.

However, some of the things she said made me remember a few specific moments in our relationship that made me worry. I’ve only seen him get really angry a couple of times, and it hasn’t at me. One example I can think of was: he was angry with a support person he was on the phone with, he had been trying to get something resolved for a long time but the support person kept trying and failing to help him. While he was on the phone with them, he did punch himself in the chest/shoulder area a few times. I thought this was really strange behavior, especially how hard he did - he gave himself a bruise. Later he apologized and explained that he was so tired and frustrated trying to get something to work, but kept failing. Another time I came home to see broken shards of glass in the trashcan, I asked him what happened and he told me he was flustered and didn’t realize how hard he threw a glass into the sink. I remember being skeptical of this claim, b/c I saw a new mark on the wall in the kitchen and a shard of glass near the scuffed up wall. He said he must have dropped some of the glass when cleaning up.

He has also had money problems during our relationship that I thought were odd. He usually pays his fair share of the rent/bills, but there have been several months in the past where he told me he wouldn’t be able to pay the rent that month or pay the bills that month. His reasons have been things like - he took his car in for maintenance and the dealership found something wrong with the car and it will cost $800 to fix. Or that his mom can’t cover her bills that month, so he is going to give her a few hundred to help. Or that he needs to buy a new laptop to help with job. And he ends up not paying his 50%. We also argue about chores a lot, I do almost all of the cooking and cleaning. I don’t mind too much, I do have a work from home job and my schedule is pretty flexible and I can do a few chores throughout the day while I’m waiting for something to happen at my job. But, he does as little as possible, and tends to only do a chore when I ask him directly. He usually won’t clean on his own free will. There was one other incident where he had a bad day at work and ended up accidentally breaking a picture frame in the living room. He was telling me about his day and was being somewhat angry about it. He was using his arms a lot while talking, and ended up swinging his arms hard enough to where he knocked off a frame from a bookshelf and it shattered on the floor.

I really don’t know what to think about what happened. It’s been all I can think about over the past few days. My boyfriend doesn’t really want to talk about it, and said I should forget about what she said. He said, that she’s just a crazy drama queen who wants attention. He also said it was his fault for dating someone much younger than him - apparently she was 19 when they met, and he was 26 and apparently they were together for about 5 years. In the 4 years we’ve been together it’s been great for the most part. Sometimes he can be a little lazy or emotional at times, but I don’t think it’s a dealbreaker.

tl;dr : My boyfriend tried talking to his ex-gf he saw in public, mentioned we have a kid together. Ex gf and her husband freak out when they see him. Start packing their shit up and the ex gf starts to yell random things about my boyfriend and how horrible he is. (Probably best to scroll up to the bulleted list of things she says to him). What should I do or think about what happened?

Submitted January 29, 2019 at 07:21AM by throwaway4melalala http://bit.ly/2MG33LA