(Picture: Erin Aniker/Metro.co.uk)

Here’s a bit of life advice, from me to you.

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I can pretty much promise that if you follow it, you’ll save yourself vast amounts of aggro and unhappiness.

If someone you are dating refers to more than one of their ex-partners as crazy, put down your drink, pick up your coat and walk away.

As a general rule, a person does not tend to have more than one genuinely ‘crazy’ ex. The same goes for people who say that every boss they’ve ever worked for has been evil, or every landlord they’ve ever had is unreasonable.




It’s not impossible that everyone this person has ever dated was insane. But it’s unlikely.

And if they were insane? That’s probably for a good reason. From personal experience, every relationship that I’ve been in where I’ve acted even the tiniest bit ‘crazy’ hasn’t been because I’m actually unhinged. It’s been because being treated badly makes people ‘crazy.’

Women having crazy lady feelings (Picture: Getty)

Crazy, wasn’t my ex’s favourite choice of word for me.

Needy. Emotional. Overwrought. Hysterical, they were the preferred terms. And you know what? Sometimes, yes I was emotional, or needy, or overwrought. And while I would never call anyone hysterical (because it implies a woman is crazy because of her silly lady hormones) there were times where I sobbed so hard I was almost sick, which was arguably hysterical.

I wasn’t that way because I’m unhinged. I was that way because I’m a normal person with a normal spectrum of emotions.

When I started dating my long-term ex, I was none of those things. I was cool, breezy and independent. But five years of only being allowed to speak on the phone for 15 minutes each Wednesday (I could apply for a 10-minute extension if I had something major to discuss) left me incredibly needy.

Only being allowed to see him for one weekend a month and one weeknight a week also made me clingy and precious about our time together. If the dates got cancelled or changed I would be in floods of tears. Not because I was a crazy obsessive, but because I knew it would mean less time together.

The word ‘crazy’ (along with hysterical and needy) is used to undermine a person’s feelings. And the less you listen to a person when they are talking about their feelings and their needs, the worse you make it.

Probably also ‘crazy’ (Picture: Getty)

‘My boyfriend called me crazy because he caught me trying to look at his phone, after I’d been quizzing him about some suspect messages I’d seen come up on the screen. Two days later, when he was in the shower, I managed to look, and lo and behold there were half naked pictures of girls. When I confronted him he called me a psycho for going through his phone’ Rachel, 31 told me.

There’s no limit to the number of things that will cause a person to accuse their partner of being unbalanced. Maya’s ex boyfriend even liked to diagnose her with specific mental health issues.



‘Whenever we had an argument, my ex would call me mental. I was ‘mental’ for being upset that he stood me up. I was ‘bipolar’ for being annoyed that he didn’t want me to meet his friends or family. I was ‘crazy’ for struggling with a pretty intense family situation going on.’

Another friend shared the story of how she called her long-term boyfriend once a day during Freshers Week, because she was ill and lonely. At the end of the week he told her she was ‘crazy’.

Even if you’re not a person who is prone towards getting upset easily – even if you’re thick skinned, do you really want to date someone who spent their previous relationships accusing other people of having mental health problems rather than taking responsibility for their actions?

So, if you’re newly seeing someone who calls their exes crazy, get out while you still can. And if you’re in a longer term relationship, take the time to understand what it was that made your partner see their ex as crazy. Did they have One Direction bedclothes (in which case, fair enough) or was it just as simple as occasionally having a strong emotional reaction?

Even if it’s not malicious, it is condemning a person’s feelings as ‘crazy’ rather than engaging with them. It’s just lazy. I don’t think my ex was trying to gaslight me, or manipulate me when he said I was needy. I just don’t think he could be bothered to engage in a discussion with me, or examine his own actions. It was quicker and easier to call me crazy.


The whole thing becomes a vicious circle. The more someone tells you that you’re crazy, the more you start to believe it. And if you believe that you’re unhinged, what’s to stop you from calling your partner fifteen times in a row until they pick up?

I did call my ex at 2AM, crying. Sometimes I’d do reckless, dangerous things to try and get him to pay attention to me. Occasionally I’d flirt with other men to try and make him remember that he fancied me.

So yes, sometimes, just sometimes I was a little bit ‘crazy’.

But you know what? It’s very hard not to be just a little unbalanced when someone is treating you like shit.

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