Okay, so we’ve all experienced this. At least, I think we’ve all experienced this. You are newly dating somebody you really like. They mention that their last relationship was kind of a rough one. You smile sympathetically, nod, and say “Oh, I know how that goes.” You take secret delight in the fact that this guy doesn’t seem to have a very high opinion of his ex, and you smugly say to yourself “I would never act like that.”

It’s all fun and games until you come out of your late night waitressing job, you’re 20 years old, broke, and the tires on your 1989 Honda Civic are slashed.

Psycho ex-girlfriends are everywhere, and they look like regular, everyday people, but they aren’t. When you least expect it, they come out of nowhere, hair raging wildly around their faces, foaming at the mouth, and leaving creepy notes on the windshield of your boyfriend’s car. Or worse, your car. You’d never know it to look at them. The sweet, mousy girl who sits in the cubicle next to you might actually be the angel of death to some unsuspecting new girl who is dating her ex.

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I have been in four long term relationships, and two of these guys had ex-girlfriends who I would classify as psycho. So, I feel qualified to discuss this with you, the reader, and give my non-professional, but I think reasonable advice about how to deal with it.

Specimen number 1: Debbie

My very first serious boyfriend Ryan had been broken up with his ex-girlfriend Debbie for almost a year when we started dating. I met him in a Chinese restaurant that we both worked at, and his ex-girlfriend worked there as well. It was a little awkward, but, to be fair, they had been broken up for over 6 months when I started my job there, so I didn’t steal him or anything. They had not broken up on bad terms, no cheating or anything like that, and they had remained friends. Word in the restaurant was that they had broken up because Debbie was extremely clingy and moody, and Ryan’s family did not get along with her very well. Ryan confirmed this when he and I started dating.

When Ryan and I began dating, Debbie, who had always been kind of aloof with me, took a sudden interest in being my friend. This made me slightly uncomfortable, but I was polite and pleasant when we spoke. I was cautious not to talk about Ryan when we did. As a naïve 17 year old, I didn’t think it was particularly odd that Debbie had such a sudden interest in me, I just thought she was finally warming up to me.

After Ryan and I had been dating for a few weeks, we decided we’d be boyfriend and girlfriend and that we wouldn’t see other people. This sent Debbie into a rage. She cornered me in the busser station at work and told me that she couldn’t believe I would date Ryan because we were friends. I calmly told Debbie that we weren’t good friends, and that she hadn’t spoken more than 3 words to me other than “Hey, table 3 needs boxes” until after Ryan and I had started dating. She acknowledged this, but said firmly “Well, we are friends now, and I would really prefer it if you would stop seeing Ryan.”

I looked at her in disbelief. To be 100% honest, for a fraction of a second, I thought that surely she must be joking. But after a quick assessment of the situation, I realized that she was definitely not. I found it slightly astonishing that this girl, who was almost 5 years older than me, was acting in such a childish way. It was pretty shocking, but I managed to pick my jaw up off the floor and tell her that I was very sorry she felt that way, but I wasn’t going to stop seeing Ryan. Debbie stopped speaking to me, which was fine by me.

Cut to two weeks later. Ryan and I were leaving work at the same time. As we were walking out to our cars, Debbie, who had not been at work that day, comes speeding up to us in the parking lot. She is wearing pajama bottoms and a flannel shirt and is looking very disheveled. She parks her car, rolls down the window, looks at Ryan and says “Get in, I need to talk to you. Ryan says “No, Shannon and I have plans. What do you need?” She gets out of the car and starts crying. At this point, I am feeling sorry for her. I decide to leave them alone, and go back into the restaurant.

From the hostess stand inside the restaurant, I watch Ryan and Debbie out the window. Debbie is yelling, but I can’t hear about what. She keeps tugging at the sleeve of his button down shirt. She’s crying, and clearly trying to get him into the car with her. He is obviously refusing to do so. Suddenly, she collapses onto the ground in the fetal position. Bette Davis couldn’t have done it with more dramatic flourish. Ryan looks at her, shakes his head, and walks back into the restaurant to get me, and we leave. I knew there was trouble ahead.

Debbie did lots of crazy/creepy things in the time Ryan and I were together. This went on for more than 2 years of our 4 year relationship. Once, she showed up at his new job, working the graveyard shift at QFC. It was 3:00 a.m., and she came into the store, with a Tupperware bowl full of macaroni and cheese, tried to get him to eat it, and sat on the floor crying while he stocked shelves until he finally got her to leave. Another time, I walked outside after work at 11:30 p.m. to find all 4 tires of my car slashed and my license tabs scraped off.

She would leave creepy notes on his car, with lyrics to songs that made her think of him. The one I remember in particular had the lyrics to Jewel’s song, Near You Always just printed out in her neat handwriting. “Please don’t say I love you, those words touch me much too deeply and they make my core tremble. Don’t think you realize the effect you have over me, and please don’t look at me like that. It just makes me want to make you near me always.”

Ummmmm…. disturbing, much?

We used to work out at Bally Total Fitness, and suddenly, Debbie worked out there too, and always at the same time. So we switched to 24 Hour Fitness, and Debbie showed up there too. Debbie got a new job working for an airline, and she suddenly knew every time Ryan and I would go on a trip. She would email him constantly, and a few times showed up at my work and asked me if we could go outside and talk, which I, of course, refused to do.

Ultimately, we had to threaten Debbie with a restraining order to get her to leave us alone. I found that the best way to deal with her was to be polite, and never condescending when I was dealing with her. I tried not to give her attention, because that was what she wanted. I always took the high road, and as a result, the whole thing had very little effect on my relationship with Ryan. As far as I know, right now, more than 10 years later, Debbie is still single. I find this sad, but not at all surprising.

Specimen number 2: Jan

Jan and my fiancé dated and lived together for two years. They broke up about a year before he and I started dating. Jan was a volatile person, and their relationship was rocky from the start. She was 4 years younger than he was, and pretty immature. Anyway, long story short, Jan did a lot of appalling things during their relationship, and theirs did not end well. She didn’t take being dumped graciously. At all. It wasn’t exactly friendly or amicable. In fact, our front screen door is still broken as a result of one of her drunken rages. But I’m getting off topic.

Anyway, I knew that Jan still called my fiancé from time to time after we started dating. Once, about a year and a half into our relationship (So, mind you, this was two and a half years after the end of their relationship) she called him up at our house and said:

“I just realized I have your senior yearbook. Do you want it back?”

“Yes, can you stick it in the mail please?” he asked, irritated, because he knew that Jan didn’t take his senior yearbook by mistake.

“No, if you want it, you can meet me in person to get it.”

“Why do we need to do that?” he asked. “What’s the reason? Just mail it to me, or drop it off at your parent’s house and I’ll come pick it up. I don’t see why we need to have some sort of meeting for me to get my yearbook back.”

“Look,” she replied with a dramatic sigh… “I’m a grown up now. You should be a grown up too. Have coffee with me, and I will give you back your yearbook.”

“Jan, go ahead and keep my yearbook, I don’t want to have coffee with you.”

“FINE!” she screamed, and hung up.

This kind of thing was pretty much par for the course.

There were other things too. On the first Christmas that he and I lived together, there was an incident. First, a few days before Christmas, one of our friends ran into Jan at a bar. Jan is always at a bar. She walked up to our friend and said hi, and asked our friend if she had seen my fiancé lately. The friend replied that yes, she had, and Jan said “I’m going to see him soon. I can feel it.” The friend raised her eyebrows. “I’m going to see him soon, and I’m going to be ready.” Jan repeated.

Now, as the friend told this story to my fiancé, she lowered her voice into a course, demonic sounding voice for the “I’m going to be ready” part, which made it much creepier. Anyway, my dear fiancé did not share this info with me, because at this point, he was still trying not to let on to me what kind of person we were dealing with.

So, fast forward a couple of days to Christmas morning. It’s 4:00 a.m. and we’re up to go to my parent’s house. My family is crazy and gets so excited about Christmas that we start at the crack of dawn. Anyway, we’re sleepy, and walking out to get into the car. I am freezing. It’s about 19 degrees outside and I can’t wait to get into the car and turn the heater on. All of a sudden, My fiancé’s eyes go towards the edge of our driveway and he starts getting angry and swearing. Very un-Christmaslike behavior, in my book.

Lined up neatly along the edge of our driveway were nine Amstel light beer bottles (Jan’s beer of choice) and several Marlboro Light cigarette butts (her preferred brand of poison sticks.) At this point, I did not know these details, nor did I know about the conversation Jan had had with our friend in the bar, so I just figured some neighbor kids had been drinking out in the street the night before and left their garbage in our yard. I couldn’t figure out why he was so angry about that.

He told me why he was so upset later. The best we can deduce is that Jan parked her car outside the front of our house, and spent a few hours silently watching through our windows while we slept, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes before she gave up and left. Seriously, this story gives me the willies.

To this day, we get 2-3 hang up calls per week from a blocked number, and mysteriously, after 2 years of nothing, we started getting all kinds of mail in her name sent to our house. In large volumes. All junk mail. It was like she was deliberately sending herself junk mail to our address. We wondered if the post office had been holding her mail for two years and had stopped, but when we looked at the post marks, it was all recent mail, so it was definitely weird. Leaving a note for our mailman solved that problem, but it was a nuisance.

The biggest problem with psycho ex-girlfriends is that they mess with your head. You start to wonder if maybe you are the crazy one. I mean, some of these things sound pretty far-fetched, do they not? Yes, I wondered if we were being paranoid to think that it was Jan who left those beer bottles and cigarettes in our yard. Was that, paired with the “I’m going to see him and I’m going to be ready” talk just an eerie coincidence? Did Debbie really slash my tires and leave those notes on Ryan’s car? Or did I have some other mystery stalker? Were we imagining things?

You can’t let them mess with your head. The best thing to do is to ignore them. I’m sorry if I sound like your mother, but this is really true. This is hard, especially when you are spending the $300 you had earmarked to buy your college text books on new tires. But attention is what they want. If you ignore them, they do eventually go away. Sometimes it takes the threat of a restraining order, sometimes not.

I will tell you this: Psycho ex-girlfriends are outstanding at doing things that you won’t be able to prove that they did. Short of fingerprint analysis, you aren’t going to be able to prove it was them, and the FBI hardly makes a practice of sending Marlboro Lights to the crime lab for DNA evidence, or creepy love notes in for fingerprint analysis.

When the first crazy thing happens, you won’t suspect that the psycho ex-girlfriend did it. Most of the time, you don’t even know her, so she is the last person who pops into your head when you start getting a bunch of hang up calls. Time, and lots of inescapable coincidences will finally show you the light. But don’t call them and scream at them. Don’t call them out. It won’t do any good. You can’t prove it, and you don’t want to waste your valuable relationship time dwelling on such things. Don’t let them bother you, or your relationship. Just ignore them.

Oh, and ladies? I know as well as anybody does that getting dumped sucks. It’s painful and awful, and nobody enjoys it. That said, don’t act like a crazy person. Do you really want that to be your legacy? Do you want to go down in history with your ex-boyfriend’s family, friends, and future girlfriends as the “Crazy” or “Psycho” ex-girlfriend? Don’t act like Jan or Debbie. The best thing you can possibly do when you’re dumped is to act like you couldn’t care less. It’s healthier for you, and it will drive the guy who dumped you crazy. In a good way. Trust me on that one.

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