Tales from the front: How I knew it was over …

Love might announce itself with roses, violins and heavenly choirs of angels. But when it’s over, the announcement may come in the form of a sexually transmitted disease, an elusive ATM machine, or even a Crock-Pot …

HALEY: My on-again/off-again boyfriend called to tell me he had tested positive for gonorrhea and chlamydia and that I must have given them to him since he hadn’t slept with anyone else since we started dating three years earlier. He swore to this on his mother’s life.

We had broken up, at one point, for six months, but he insisted he hadn’t slept with anyone during that time. I, on the other hand, couldn’t claim such devotion. I called the only other guy that I had slept with during that time and told him the bad news. He was furious, but he admitted he’d slept with other women, so I thought that the case was solved.

We both went and got tested. A week later, we got the results. We had both tested negative for all sexually transmitted diseases. I went over to Mr. I-Swear-on-My-Mother’s-Life’s house and rang the doorbell. When he answered, I shoved the two sheets of paper at him and asked if he now remembered sleeping with someone else. That jarred his memory and that was the end of him.

NANCY: Twice, I took back a man who had cheated on me with a woman who had been a friend to both of us. The last straw came when he spent most of a New Year’s Eve talking about his feelings for her and how confused he was. I told him to do whatever would make him happy. He married her, and now tells me it was the worst mistake of his life. I also got married, and it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Imagine that.

MANDY: I should have known it was over when my boyfriend gave me his mother’s used Crock-Pot for Christmas. (I got him a leather jacket.) She had won the Crock-Pot as a door prize, but didn’t want it because it was too big. So she persuaded her son to buy her a new, smaller Crock-Pot. She put hers in the original box and told me it had been used “just once.”

ELISHA: My boyfriend of six months and I wasted half of a Saturday morning looking for a branch of his bank so he could save $1.50 on ATM fees. We were on an outing to a small town about 50 miles away but instead of taking the scenic back roads and enjoying a gorgeous spring day, we dashed down the highway from one exit to the next searching for that elusive bank branch, burning up gasoline in the process, of course.

MARISA: He asked me if I’d mind staying with his daughter when he went to the Kentucky Derby with his friends. I barely knew the girl and wasn’t about to drive her to and from school, soccer practice and sleep-overs while he partied with his buddies.

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