As anyone who’s ever been through it knows, rejection hurts. When we put all of our efforts and aspirations into winning over the boy or girl of our dreams, only to come up short, it can be very hard to control our emotions. Nevertheless, it turns out that most of us are angels when it comes to dealing with rejection—at least compared to some others out there.
Some people have so much difficulty dealing with being turned down for a date or broken up with that they act in ridiculous ways—which almost always only make their bad situation exponentially worse than it needed to be. But if it’s any consolation, at least these folks usually leave their would-be partners feeling pretty confident that they made the right decision!
Here are 42 of the wildest and craziest reactions to rejection that some of us have ever seen.
42. Nice to Who?
I’m a sailor. I was in New York one time during fleet week, in my uniform with my group, waiting to cross the street.
Drunk girl comes up to me, grabs me and says she's always wanted to be with a sailor. I gently stiff arm and let her know I'm happily married, but point out my young single shipmate in the group.
"But I waaant youuuuuu."
Her friends have arrived by this point. She told them I was being mean because I said no, and started crying. The friends confronted me:
"It's her birthday though."
"Your wife isn't even here, just be nice."
41. One Track Mind
This one girl couldn't take "no" for an answer. Every conversation progressed at some point to "do you want to go out?” or “why don't you want to date me?" It got old pretty quick. I tried being nice and letting her off easy, but she wouldn't stop. So I ended up just cutting her out of my life. The last thing she told me before I blocked her was "I'll wait for you." I'm not even that good looking…
40. Is There a Problem Here, Officer?
My sister got followed home by a dude she rejected. He went up to the house and started talking to her kids and telling them he was their new dad.
Luckily, their real dad came out—in his police attire. Put an end to that real quick...
39. Trouble Down Under
In high school, I turned a guy down. Naturally, he responded by going around spreading rumors that he tried to have sex with me, but couldn’t because I had a physical deformation down there. He spent the rest of the year talking about how nasty this non-existent aspect of my body was to all of his friends.
Sometime about five years ago, he tried to add me on Facebook and I blocked him. Screw that guy.
38. I Guess Your Perception of Him Was Accurate...
I turned down a guy who was known for being the “popular guy” because I thought he was full of himself. When he tried to kiss me, I turned my head the other way, said I wasn’t interested and walked off. He grabbed my hand, spat in my face, and said I missed the best opportunity in my life and that the only reason he tried to kiss me was because he pitied me.
37. Make Yourself at Home
I came home from work to find her naked on my bed. This was about a week after we broke up. She went into complete denial about the breakup and, for months, would tell people we were still dating and would show up at my house.
36. History Repeats Itself
I rejected three different girls in a two-month span. All three subsequent conversations went the exact same way:
Them: "What, are you gay?"
Me: "No."
Them: "So I’m ugly?"
Me: "I didn't say that..."
Word for word, this exchange happened in all three incidents.
35. Lying By Omission
I turned a guy down for a date and he then posted a long snap story about how much he loves his WIFE. He had never mentioned a wife before, which means he was either planning on tricking me into cheating with him or he was making it up to make me jealous.
34. A Tough One to Swallow
I know a guy who flipped out and bit a girl when she rejected him. They had only ever talked once on Facebook, and after that, he would just find her at football games and sit behind her without saying anything. Somehow or the other, things went real far south and he bit her.
33. Won’t Take No For an Option
I’d gone out with a guy once that I’d met through a dating site, and we just didn’t click. I told him exactly that, was very respectful of his feelings and wished him the best. He was NOT receptive. At all. He called me names and said he was going to find out where I lived so he could come by and push me into oncoming traffic. He wouldn’t stop texting me about how horrible I was and, at one point, he even said he hoped that someone assaulted me. I blocked his number, reported him on the dating app, and thankfully never heard from him again. It was legit one of the scariest things ever. Dude was unhinged.
32. This is a Special Kind of Crazy
There was a messed up story in the news about twelve years ago that has to be the ultimate horrible reaction to rejection story of all time. The guy was initially rejected by his crush when he was young. He took offense to this and decided to fix himself up and get his act together enough to win over the girl. Eventually, they got married and, a few years later, they had a kid.
He gave mother and child enough time to bond before he killed the kid as revenge against the woman for initially turning him down. This had been his plan ever since she first rejected him.
31. Temper Tantrum
Not me, but my best friend in school. She came onto him hard, in public. There were about a dozen people around. He was startled and turned her down. She then started screaming, stamping her feet, and crying. High school was weird.
30. Logical Fallacy
I rejected a guy, so he decided to call me promiscuous and said no one would ever want to sleep with someone as ugly as me. He didn't like when I asked how it was possible for both of those things to be true at the same time…
29. No Laughing Matter
I was the guilty party in this story. I have a nervous laugh that always seems to come out whenever I'm put into an awkward, sad, depressing, or serious situation. I just automatically react by laughing lightly and putting on an awkward smile.
So just imagine being in the girl’s shoes who rejected me. She's trying to hold back tears and telling me she is sorry but doesn’t think we can be together, while I’m just sitting there smiling and laughing lightly. She didn't like this. Her mood went from sympathetic to unruly, fast. She gave me the old, "So you think this is funny!" spiel, and I told her "No, I don't, I'm sorry."
28. I Know You Are But What Am I?
I’m a guy and when I was younger, this other guy asked me over to his house to study. When I got there, he started playing adult videos and making sexual passes at me. I rejected him and told my mom to come get me. He persisted the whole time. From then on at school, every time he saw me, he very loudly called me gay to everyone around him.
I am not into dudes and he was in the closet. Honestly, I just smiled and ignored him every time and he eventually gave up. I think he came out two years later and was one of the four gay dudes in school in revolving relationships with each other.
27. Two for One Loneliness
A guy who got rejected at a party climbed onto the roof of the apartment building and was threatening to jump in the middle of the party. People came and got me and I talked him down, but I'll forever be pissed cuz I was about to get with a sexy girl that I'd been working on for a long time.
That suicidal jerk!
26. Tragic Ending
He chased my car down the city’s major street as I drove away, running after me until he collapsed in the road. He then called me dozens of times, eventually blaming everyone from my little brother to my dentist for breaking us up, then flew to his hometown the next day and committed suicide.
I felt terribly guilty for years.
25. Her Nose is Growing Now
She cried and wailed about how this must be happening because she was ugly, and specifically because she had a big nose.
I told her that was not true, and that it was all me.
She later told people that I had been creepily attracted to her nose.
24. Pool Shark
A guy asked me out during an Uberpool ride. I told him I wasn't interested and he started moving closer and asking me why I wasn't interested and what was wrong with him. It was...uncomfortable, to say the least. My Uber driver, for some reason, just thought it was hilarious to see me pressed against the door to try and get away from this random guy invading my personal space.
23. Sweet Revenge
When I broke up with my ex of five years, she told me she was disgusted with me physically and that is why we did not have sex anymore (it was a nasty breakup). Well, me being the irrational person that I am, I decided to prove to her in a ridiculous manner that I was, in fact, not disgusting. I began a year and a half long campaign to hook up with all of her past and present friends. I mostly succeeded, being able to get with about 75% of them.
22. Return to Sender
I once had a guy send me hundreds of text messages calling me all kinds of names, cursing me out and threatening me because I didn't have sex with him after our entirely lackluster first and last date. I didn't even bother reading beyond the first 50. Just let him go on and on until I blocked and mass-deleted. It was nuts.
21. When Irish Eyes Aren’t Smiling
Me and this Irish chick hooked up and enjoyed spending a few great nights together. I soon realised, though, that our 20 year age difference is gonna lead us nowhere together in the long run. I break this to her, and she promptly walks over to the parking lot and burns my pickup truck to the ground. Not even the aluminum rims survived this. She was arrested for arson, but I laid no charges against her. I got a new truck thanks to the insurance. Stay away from psychos, folks.
20. The Guilt Trip
A girl who had gotten rejected by my friend told all her friends that she would commit suicide. They tried to guilt my friend with that into changing his mind, but he managed to shrug it off. The whole thing blew over in three days.
19. Tipping Point
My alcoholic ex-wife had become very unfaithful and abusive towards me. One night, she crossed the line and went completely off the rails in front of our small children and I just knew that I could no longer live like that. I had just returned home from a week-long business trip and hadn’t unpacked my bags yet. So I grabbed those, took one last look at my nice home and my family and left. As I walked out I knew full well that all of the things I didn’t grab were probably gone for good. But I needed to be as well, or I would either end up in jail or dead.
She blew my phone up for the next couple of weeks. At least 60 text messages a day, all hate-filled and incredibly vile. I tried to call her a couple of times when off of work to talk about how we could best separate our finances and try to move on amicably, but she would just scream and accuse me of cheating (something cheaters often do).
The last time we talked before the divorce, she threatened to file a false police report accusing me of harming her four-year-old son. She didn’t specify whether the allegation would be physical or sexual in nature. That didn’t really matter though—neither had ever happened, and either accusation would instantly end my career and my freedom. I cut off all contact.
18. Sounds Like a Disaster Waiting to Happen
He called me “roofie bait” and then followed me around campus for a couple months.
17. Head to Toe
A girl at work started playing some "aggressive footsie" with me at work. When I pushed her foot away and gave her a look, she went on to tell me I'm not as attractive as I think I am and that I should start dating girls "in my own league."
16. Double Rejection
My ex-wife's reaction to my reaction to getting divorce papers takes the cake.
She just happened to be home when the divorce papers were served to me. I politely thanked the guy who served them and he left. She then flipped out, saying that me not flipping out when I got them was proof to her that I didn't love her and justified her filing for divorce from me in the first place.
15. Plan B
When I was a nanny, I was walking around with a baby and we visited a bookshop. A man in there started talking to me, and then asked me out. Keeping my father's advice in mind about being kind when I have to reject men, I very kindly said that it was a very nice offer, but my boyfriend might not be too keen on it.
His response to that was to lean in and try to kiss me on the spot. I told him to get the hell off me. He then exploded with rage and started screaming in my face. I was saved by the bookstore employee, and the man stormed out of the shop. I spent the next few hours shaking like a leaf.
What a champion.
14. Working His Way Back Into the Family
After I broke up with my high school boyfriend of 3.5 years, he asked my parents to seriously consider adopting him. We were 17.
13. Bringing Down the House
I tried to get my ex-wife served with divorce papers, only to learn she had vandalized and abandoned our former home in response to my leaving.
I went over to find almost all of my clothes had been bleached, along with our new living room set. The new dining room table and chairs had been gouged. Weeks worth of trash and raw food had been left out. The refrigerator had been turned off, leaving hundreds of dollars worth of food to rot. The whole place smelled like death.
She had also taken all of the electronics (probably to hawk), my passport with stamps in it from around the world, and the painting I had inherited from my beloved grandfather who had passed away (she knew this would hurt me the most).
All said and done, there was $7,000 in property damage and another $1,500 in stolen property. I filed a police report but sadly, not much was done about it.
12. Finding His Way Home
He was 15 at the time, and although the rejection happened over the phone, he was so irate that he illegally drove a car to the nearest place he could to the neighborhood he knew I lived in. He waited there demanding I give him more accurate directions to my house.
In retrospect, I probably should have been more terrified than I was.
11. Hunger Strike
I dated this one guy who was extremely emotional and super attached. We only dated maybe a month and I couldn't take it anymore so I had to end it. At the time, I worked in a large shopping mall, and he would meet me after work in the parking lot.
We were sitting in his car and I told him I couldn't be with him anymore. Being the super emotional person he was, he began to cry hysterically and started banging his head on the headrest in the car. He yelled about how I was such a horrible person and wanted to know how I could "break his heart like this."
He abruptly stopped crying, looked me square in the eyes, picked up the McDonald’s food he had just bought, rolled down the window and said "If you don't want my love, you don't get to eat!"—and promptly threw the bag out the window. He continuously stared at me with glaring eyes the whole time this was going down. I am almost never at a loss for words, but this time I was truly speechless.
10. A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
A guy I rejected photoshopped nude pictures of another girl, cropped her face out, and showed them to everybody saying it was me.
9. Bad Table Manners
She stabbed me with a fork about 15 seconds after I told her I didn't want to be with her.
8. Breaking and Entering
He broke into my house and chased me into my bedroom, then spent ten minutes shouting through my locked bedroom door that I should come out and have a reasonable conversation with him, adult to adult.
7. Cruel and Unusual Punishment
When I broke up with this one girl, she began falsely claiming that she had become pregnant and intended to keep the kid. We had always practiced safe sex, but condoms have a non-zero failure rate, and there's no good way to tell someone who says they're pregnant that they're wrong, so I took her at her word. After three weeks of her stalling on showing me any kind of proof beyond her word, she just told me "it wasn't going to be a problem."
I was beside myself with stress until then. Meanwhile, I'm figuring out if I need to lawyer up—I take responsibility for myself, so being a deadbeat dad wasn't an option, but child support was going to throw a huge wrench into my financial plans. I was in the middle of moving to a new city as well. All in all, it sucked. I didn’t find out till months later that she had just made up the whole thing. Near as I can tell, her goal was simply to inflict stress and pain. She succeeded.
6. Watch for Slow Traffic
He stopped his car in the middle of an intersection and just kept slamming his fists on the steering wheel repeatedly.
5. Driving Her Crazy—Literally
My friend lived about 40 minutes away from this crazy woman he had been dating. One night, after four years, he decided it was time; he was gonna break it off. He goes over after class at like eight or so and says his business. He tells her why he is no longer interested and everything, and she’s all sad and crying and begging him not to leave. It takes him two hours to get her calm enough to let him leave.
So he’s driving down the interstate at like 10-10:30 and these lights come flying up next to him. It’s her—she’s hanging out the window and screaming when, all the sudden, her car swerves across the median and she flips her car three times. This is the point where he calls me losing his mind, thinking it’s his fault that she died.
It turns out she just ended up with a broken thumb and a new therapist.
4. Business Before Pleasure
I dated a girl from work. After a few dates, I didn't see it going much further, so I ended it.
The girl then decided to spread rumors around saying that we had sex in the office. We didn't. I ended up having to change jobs about 12 months later after every application for promotion from that point on was given to someone else despite myself having way more experience. She single-handedly destroyed my entire career path with that company.
Lesson: Don’t date someone in your office!
3. Calculated Disaster
A guy pretended he was killing himself on the spot after I rejected him.
He said goodbye, and then very convincingly and emotionally and turned his phone off/stopped picking up or answering any texts.
I quickly phoned his dad, whom I knew from the past, and sent the screenshots of the messages to him. Everyone was absolutely hysterical and worrying that he was in a gutter somewhere. HOWEVER, it was very quickly discovered, by his LIVID father, that he was actually over at a mate's smoking weed, and that this whole thing had been a plot to try and get a "pity shag."
What a complete and utter twat.
2. I’m a Bar-B Girl
This girl I dated in high school for over a year was all kinds of manipulative and crazy. I finally broke up with her after she cheated on me, in her room at her house (so I could leave rather than try to get her to). When I said it, without even thinking about it, she grabbed her jewelry box and chucked it at her window. The glass shattered, and she started grabbing chunks of broken glass and throwing them at me. Two hit me: one in the shoulder, one in the face. I ran from that house and made a point to avoid her at all costs at school. Thought I was finally done with the situation.
Nope! A few days later, she came to my house in the middle of the night with a friend and threw a freaking barbecue through my bedroom window! That resulted in police action, which I now find hilarious in hindsight.
1. An Eye for Fashion
We went on one date and I declined a second. A couple of days after that, he called me and told me what I had been wearing that day. This went on for a couple of months. I'd literally never see him but at least three times a week he'd know exactly what I wore and call to inform me. Weird…
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