We all know that love on the brain can make us do stupid things, but Liz Pardue-Schultz from YourTango shares just how far some people have gone.
“I went to this beers-and-bible-study thing with her dad. Every week. For a year. I’m an atheist.”
Love makes fools of us all, and what better way to drive that point home than to share the worst examples of dumb things people have done for love and how our infatuations have turned us into simpering idiots? If love is the great unifier, then our malleability in the face of it is our one true common trait.
We asked people to share the most ridiculous, humiliating, or flat-out cringeworthy things they’ve done for love and oh man, did they deliver.
1. I tried to serenade her with a cliché from a movie.
“Did you see Say Anything? Remember how girls swooned over that one scene with the boombox? Turns out, dudes who live at home with their parents and have siblings don’t love it that much, especially when it’s with Whitney Houston’s song from The Bodyguard.
2. I sent him a strange painting.
“Once, I was in a long-distance, on-off thing and I coated my body in green paint and did a full-body print on a giant piece of white craft paper. I rolled it up and sent it to him in a tube.”
3. I waited around while she went out with another guy.
“So this is dumb and also shows how naive I was in high school but I rode my bike to my girlfriend’s house to see her . . . only to find out she was going out somewhere with another guy. She asked me to wait behind the house until after they had left and like the dumb kid I was, I did it.
4. I tried to impress her with Jackass stunts.
“This one girl who I was really into in college was a skater chick and loved the CKY videos. So I decided that me and some of the guys I knew needed to put together one of those videos just to impress her. We stole two wheelchairs from the hospital and then proceeded to do dumb sh*t with them, like race them down hills into oncoming traffic, ramp them off of the roof of the dorm onto some of our mattresses. (That hurt just a bit.) Other ridiculous shenanigans included holding onto the back of my buddy’s truck . . . while in a wheelchair, going 85+ MPH, and later, diving into all the fountains on campus.”
5. I drove hundreds of miles to see her.
“I once drove five hours to be with this girl I was seeing only to have to drive back in a few short hours, then fly across the country. Ten hours of driving in like 15 hours or so. I’d do it again I think, for the right person. I believe in going the extra mile, literally.”
6. I rear-ended someone while staring at my crush.
“There was the time I was going to meet my friends at the beach and as we passed by a gas station, by a light, I saw the girl I liked standing, pumping gas in a tiny silver bikini. I hit the guy that was stopped at the light and she saw what happened. Luckily there was no real big damage to either car; however, my ego was hurt badly when I had to explain to the cop and the gentleman that I hit why his bumper was dented. They both laughed so hard and apparently understood what I was going on that the guy I hit didn’t even want my info. He said he ‘remembered those days’ and the dent was a great story he could tell others.”
7. I kept taking him back.
“I caught him in lies all the time and he cheated on me a bunch and he straight-up left me at least a dozen times, but I just kept forgiving him because I was an idiot and I hated myself. But I also really loved him and thought that he just needed one constant, loyal person in his life to become the person he had the potential to be. Instead, it just turned me into a horrible person full of resentment and self-loathing. After that relationship, if a significant other even spoke to me in the wrong tone, we were done. It took a while to figure out a healthy balance.”
8. I left a love note on his doorstep.
“In high school, I left a matchbook on my crush’s doorstep and wrote ‘light me and I’ll burn for you,’ which are INXS lyrics. Also, same era, my friend and I found a rusted old grocery cart somewhere and we left that on her crush’s doorstep with a note that said ‘I’m a basket case for you.’ (Also, we both knew he’d had the same cheerleader girlfriend for like, three years.) Those are true stories.”
9. I tried to bond with her dad.
“I went to this beers-and-bible-study thing with her dad. Every week. For a year. I’m an atheist.”
10. I did a huge belly flop and embarrassed myself.
“In middle school, I was infatuated with this girl who was a gymnast. She went to the local pool with everyone else in the neighborhood, and one day we were all letting her give us a tutorial on doing backflips off the diving board. My friends had been doing flips and stuff long before that day so everyone was jumping in and making asses of themselves for about an hour before I finally got up the courage to give it a shot, having never even attempted anything close to that on dry land. Not only did I belly flop horribly, but I messed up my back so badly I couldn’t do anything the rest of the summer. I got to sit around, immobile, and watch her splash and flirt with some other dude who became her boyfriend by the time school started again.”
11. I followed her to college.
“On the list of dumb things people have done for love, this takes the cake. We’d had a fling and it didn’t work out, but I was so optimistic I could win her back that I even signed up to be in the same dorm as she was. Never happened, but I met my wife there, so all wasn’t lost.”
12. I went semi-stalker on her.
“I was sort of a stalker in high school and didn’t realize it, which is super-embarrassing in retrospect. This girl I thought I was in love with was very clear about not being interested, but I really thought if I could show her why I was better than the dude she was dating, she’d leave him, so I just kept showing up at the places I knew she’d be and trying to rope her into hanging out by foisting conversation on her. I even got my friends to join me, so I’d look cool and not like I’d planned the whole thing. This would happen multiple times each week in more and more out-of-the-way encounters until one of her friends figured out what was going on and told me to knock it off or they’d take legal action.”
13. I moved in with her.
“We’d only ever been long-distance and were growing apart, so in order to ‘save us,’ I moved my entire life a few states away and — worst mistake ever — into an apartment with her. We broke up within two months.”
14. I let her spend all my money.
“It didn’t start off like that. At first, I just bought her dinners and gifts, but then it was ‘Hey, can I borrow $50 for gas and this doctor’s visit’ and then ‘I can’t cover my electric bill this month.’ And before long, I was spending as much on her life as I was on my own for no real reason other than because she asked for it. The worst part was that I didn’t even realize how bad it had gotten until my friend gave me a funny look when I mentioned that I’d floated her some money so she could take a trip with her girlfriends.”
15. I got married.
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Written By: YourTango
This article was originally published on popsugar.