I’m gonna say right off the bat that this relationship sounded like it was TOTALLY TOXIC.

There’s no doubt about that!

And the woman who wrote this story on Reddit illustrated just how bad this fella was…

Check out how she ended up getting petty revenge on him.

I found something my ex-husband accused me of destroying, and I returned it.

“My marriage – we were both in our 30’s, this is important – had problems right away, One of the manifestations was him berating me for “not going to an elite university.”

Sounds like a snob to me.

I went to a very good undergrad and an even better grad school (had not finished at that point) but he went to one of the best schools in the country (known for graduates with a chip on their shoulder.)

That was really all he had on me, and I would just laugh.

Even his parents told him he was being a jerk and sounded like an idiot because I had an impressive education. (Something I had never felt the need to discuss before.)

So anyway, he became really competitive about his college and especially his friends from college (very few he was still in touch with, this was before Facebook) and he had this photobox full of memorabilia. (Cardboard, no lock or anything. I had a dozen or so myself.)

A normal thing would be to go through his and mine together and share memories and stories and bond. I didn’t really care about what was in the box, and college stories are boring when you weren’t there, but I would have listened.

This guy was a real jerk.

But the box became a symbol of everything wrong, with him constantly saying I’m not good enough for his college friends. At some point he forbid me to look in the box. Of course I didn’t take this well. Telling me I wasn’t good enough to see what’s in the box was like kerosene.

It got brought up in every fight. Like a ***** spiral of “you’re jealous of my friends”/”your friends suck and I wouldn’t like them anyway.” (I didn’t say I was the hero in this story.)

Fast forward through years of abuse. We moved on to more spectacular fights and the box fell pretty far down the list. Then for some reason one day he went up to the attic and couldn’t find his box.

He said I threw it away because I was jealous and petty. I didn’t, but after a few years of this he managed to convince me maybe I did.

That’s how abuse works.

He wouldn’t give it a rest.

“AND YOU THREW AWAY MY BOX” went back into heavy rotation.

I begged his forgiveness. And fell into deeper into depression over the depths to which my life had sunk.

It was time to move on.

Finally got a divorce. Cops, ROs, the whole nine. I healed, moved on.

Years later I sold my house (it was mine before) and when I was packing up I found the box.

I had such an emotional reaction my legs buckled. I sat on the floor and wept. My boyfriend was really sweet about it. He didn’t know about the box.

It’s so ridiculous and I was so ashamed but mostly I had put it all behind me by then. Until it all came rushing back.

I called a mutual friend and asked him to come get the box so they could get it to him.

People suggested I should throw it away out of spite, but I had something to prove.

One last parting gift.

Before I turned it over, I put copies of two unpublished essays I wrote about what he did to me, along with a handwritten note: “I knew you didn’t have the balls to **** me. And I sold your D&D books.”

Who’s he going to tell? I mean, he probably will. But then he has to admit what’s in the essays, and he’s the 52 year old man complaining 10 years post-divorce that his ex-wife sold his D&D books.”

Here’s what people had to say on Reddit.

This person has been there…

Another reader said she did the right thing.

This individual shared their own story.

This person also had to deal with a whacko.

And this person thinks they know where this guy went to school…

Good riddance!

If you thought that was an interesting story, check out what happened when a family gave their in-laws a free place to stay in exchange for babysitting, but things changed when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.