Whether you realize it or not, all of us have been “the villain” in someone else’s story at some point or another.

It could’ve been from a breakup, from a work-related incident, or maybe something random that happened between two complete strangers.

Whatever the case, everyone deserves to have their voice heard, even if they’re wrong and they know it.

AskReddit users opened up and shared their deeply personal stories.

1. Childhood friends.

“I was probably one of many villains in my childhood best friend’s story. If you ask her I ghosted her for a boy (I know she thinks this because I’m still in contact with her sister).

In reality she manipulated me and gaslit me for our entire childhood and teenage years. She attempted to isolate me and made me choose between my other friends and her constantly.

She would refuse to tell me what was wrong and then blamed me for not knowing why she was upset every time (it was always stupid things, like I was drawing a dragon, which she saw as childish and uncool). What finally made me walk away was when she got mad at me for wanting to spend a few days with my BF alone (we were dating long distance, I hadn’t seen him in over a year).

She picked a fight over it and I begged her to forgive me, which she refused and continued to yell at me over page-long tex messages. it caused my first ever major anxiety attack, which made her even more angry because I dared to not answer her for an hour while I was vomiting and trying to pull myself together(she had not answered my previous message for a week to “cool off” btw so it’s not like I left mid conversation).

I decided to not answer her for a while after another round of “I’m so sorry!” Messages, and when I looked back after a bit, I realised how toxic this shit was.

I regret not trying to explain it to her, why I had to walk away, ghosting her was not the right thing to do, but I knew that if I tried to open the conversation again I wouldn’t walk away, I’d end up right back where I started and I just couldn’t do that again.

Her sister did ask about it a few years later and I didn’t have the heart to tell her everything that happened. sShe was aware of the manipulation and some of the shitty behaviour though, she tried to warn me about it for years but she was my best friend and I trusted her, so I didn’t listen.”

2. Home wrecker!

“I was out drinking at a bar I went to regularly, met this couple who were playing darts. They were a nice, attractive couple. They were both kinda flirty with me that night but nothing happened. Went back to the bar another night, saw them there again.

The girl got very flirty, touching me lots. They’d had a couple drinks and said they were going to Uber home, I was sober and offered to drive them.

I said I was going to just drop them off, but the girl was adamant about me coming in to “meet the dogs.” So I go in, she starts getting a bit more physical, but her boyfriend was falling asleep on the couch, so she said maybe another night.

Next thing I hear, she’s crazy mad at me for “forcing myself” into their relationship, they broke up and she kicked him out, and she pretty much blamed me for the whole thing.”

3. Regrets, I’ve had a few…

“I once dated a girl who was too young for me (but still legal). She was persistent and I said no a few times. Finally I accepted and we dated for a few months. I wasn’t really into her and I had been contemplating breaking up with her for a few weeks and I had finally decided to break up with her that weekend.

On Friday, I met someone at a party and hooked up with her. When I met my girlfriend that Saturday to break up with her, she spontaneously told me that she loved me and wanted to be with me forever before I had the chance to tell her.

So I broke up with my girlfriend after cheating on her, right as she confessed her love to me. I still regret just about everything about that 4 month-period in my life.”

4. Still ashamed.

“One day when i’m not so ashamed of how things turn out I can publicly share this. but for my current sanity i would like to share it here

two years ago I got into a bad relationship. my now ex was very verbally abusive, snooped my phone constantly, i couldn’t go anywhere without him, he spent my money recklessly while also bullying me into buying him things and constant beer trips. he drank four tall cans probably every night at least, and i’m not sure if that makes him an alcoholic but he was drunk A LOT.

my family relationships were poor and he also used this to isolate me from them. I felt trapped but unable to leave a relationship that would make me homeless and completely broke.

desperate and starved for attention, I cheated on him with the first guy who gave me positive attention. I loved feeling important and like I mattered to someone else. Never before in my entire almost 30 years of living have I even entertained the idea of cheating on someone and here I am having full on affairs behind my boyfriends back. for MONTHS.

eventually he found out and told pretty much the entire world how much of a cheating slut I am and how I ruined our relationship. convinced my family that I am evil, I wrecked a perfectly great life, he thought I was The One. Even after all of that he still refused to break up with me- so i snapped, took the car(it was in my name) and ran away with the man i had been seeing behind his back.

To so many people I’m the bad guy, the villain, in this story, including my family and most of my old friends.

it’s been a long time and i’m still together with my current boyfriend but 2018-2020 feels like a depressed blur of life. I’m still trying to cope and feel like “Me” again.”

5. Very insecure

“My friend and I (both girls) had been single forever and it was something we bonded over. We were in different cities and she decided to visit. She brought her boyfriend over, presumably to show off.

I had gotten a makeover and therapy since the last time we’d met (I was the definition of sad girl prior to that), and she immediately became convinced I was trying to steal her boyfriend. I had no such intention.

But it started becoming a self fulfilling prophecy for her. Her bf and I had a lot in common which I kept trying to downplay, but she kept playing up. Like we spoke the same language, had several common friends, had the same food aversions, and we would be in the same city at the same time for work in a few months. She just kept growing more and more insecure. I heard her crying in the night.

She was staying over with me, and he with some family. She went out in the morning to get coffee, and I was taking a shower. The door was unlocked, I didn’t know that. I came out in my underwear and was applying moisturizer, when her boyfriend walks in, and then she walked in a minute later.

She ran out crying, he ran out after her, and I was mortally embarrassed.

Apparently that caused enough pain in the relationship that they broke up. So I’m very clearly the villain to her, but all of it was avoidable if she was less insecure.”

6. Obsession.

“Dad was dead. Mom was crazy. We were poor. I didn’t go to normal high school and had basically been a shut-in for years. I was really poorly socialized when I moved into the dorms. I didn’t notice when the overwhelming feeling of affection I felt for her [edit: a girl in the dorms] crossed into obsession.

I convinced myself that if I didn’t literally stalk her or call or text her phone, that made it ok to send her a million pleading messages elsewhere. I was sure sure that we’d be perfect together that, when she tried to be my friend afterward–more than once–I ruined it by constantly pushing for a closer relationship.

Years later, when the pandemic started, I fell into old bad habits and messaged her until she politely told me to fuck off, which I really deserved.”

7. Sounds like you’re doing just fine.

“”Stole” his girl, married her. Had a child with her.

Let’s ignore the fact he drank his face off nightly and cheated.”

8. Quite a story.

“Former coworker convinced the company owner and his son that I was at her house and I got so drunk that I crashed through one of her apartment walls and I refused to pay for it…

The truth was that years before this happened a bunch of us were hanging out, having a young 20-somethings house party.

She tried to take me to the bedroom and I turned her down because she was completely insane, in love with her baby daddy, and she’d fucked so many of our co-workers that there’s no way she doesn’t have the Herp or something.

The owner refused to sell me the location I ran for 5 years. Not just ran, but when I took over it was nearly bankrupt. 5 years later I tripled revenue.

I only found a couple years ago when I asked the owner to grab lunch with me so we could chat, make amends, and that’s when he told me he may have made a mistake when he listened to the gossip.

Because of all this bullshit I started my own thing and became a real competitor over the last couple years…We’ll, I was. We’ll see how much more the Rona will choose to fuck me.”

9. Called it off.

“I realized that I was about to become a passenger in my own life, so I called off the wedding. I never should have proposed, and I still feel bad about it, when I think about it.

But there’s no doubt, I was the villain.”

10. Doing your job.

“I’m a property manager for a mortgage company, I handle most of the evictions work. My first year I did 33, and it’s been steady for the last 10 years.

I usually see people on the worst day of their lives, and it’s never easy for them.”

11. NOT a happy ending.

“So, I was in a long distance relationship, we lived about 8 hours apart from each other. It was a horrible relationship, because we were just horribly incompatible. So we had our one year anniversary, and he came to visit me.

We had a huge fight over the phone right before he left to visit me because he accused me of lying ( we chatted the evening before, and I told him I was going to sleep and good night, but he saw me online an hour later… ).

He had to turn off his phone for the drive because of low battery. I was just done with all his accusations of me being a horrible person, so I called my best friend in tears about what I should do. We had all these fights because he’s rather a controlling type in a relationship, and I really need freedom and trust.

So after speaking to my best friend, I realised, that I need to break up with him, because the relationship wasn’t healthy anymore for neither of us. So he arrived at my place, we sat down to talk, I told him while bawling my eyes out that I couldn’t do it anymore and I want to break up. So we did and he drove back home.

Only later I realised that he now hated me very much because from his point of view it looked like I made him drive 8 hours to my house, only to break up with him at our one year anniversary. Oops.”

12. Picking on the quiet kid.

“I was really mean to the quiet kid in my class. He was definitively odd, carrying around those little Minecraft action figures. He would say weird things and someone asked him a not-so-nice question.

They asked, ” Dean, would you shoot up a school.” He replied jokingly, sick of our shit, that he would just target specific people. Looking back it was just dry sarcasm, but he hated me, so I got really scared. I told others what he said, and before long the Vice Principal had to come into our room to take him out, he came back.

He has been teased about it for a long time afterward. I’m starting to realize over this quarantine period that I was being the villain that was bullying him. Dean, if your reading this, I’m sorry.”

13. Haha. A funny one.

“I dropped my sister-in-law off and she crossed the road as I swung the car round. I was now driving alongside her, round a corner, so I rolled the window down and gave her a really lascivious wolf whistle… just as an old couple came round the corner.

They glared at me as I (in their eyes) sexually harassed a stranger.”

14. Talking trash about the boss.

“I got fired because I was talking shit about the boss behind his back.

He thought we were really good friends, almost best friends. We weren’t.

He was early-season Michael Scott, if MS was a 30 year old jock. He fired many of my friends for dumb reasons, or tortured them until they quit. For some reason he always took good care of me, but I just couldn’t take it any more.

Another guy, who already quit but was on 2 week notice, wrote to me on Slack to complain about the boss, and I replied with some pretty mean stuff. I should have known that the boss was reading all of our slack conversations, but whatever.

Getting fired was one of the best things that ever happened to me. To the boss, he had to fire his best friend in the office, and his best employee, because I was saying horrible things about him behind his back.

I regret that that’s how our relationship ended, but it had to end for my own sanity.”

15. Life lessons.

“Came to this realization with the help of a friend named Lucy:

Several years back, I ended up hooking up with a best friend of mine and we clicked like a perfect match. Dana and I spent a week together exploring each other’s bodies and just being super content. It was surreal. Nearing the end of the week, “the conversation” happened. “So what are we?”

We mutually agreed to keep things casual because we were in transitory periods of our lives.

Anyway, that fateful week culminated with my birthday on a Saturday.

Dana volunteered to throw me a party at her place and all of our friends were going to come – fantastic. My other friends invited me to their house to begin partying in the late afternoon. Dana gave me the okay to take off and she would set up on her own.

About 4 hours later, after pre-gaming with friends and attending a local mini-film fest viewing, I stumble into my party just as it is taking off around 9pm.

Since it is around Christmas time, we had agreed to do a pollyanna gift exchange. I start it off by handing a poorly made wooden boat to a buddy of mine and immediately proceed to the kitchen to take a shot of tequila. At that moment, I blacked out until about 1am.

The night is a blur. I remember dancing. A lot. Yacked a couple times but always bounced back. And then I fucked up.

There is another girl, Karla. Karla and I had a brief stint fooling around and that was that – nothing more of it, just friends afterwards. Anyway, Karla hadn’t gotten me a gift and so she thought a little makeout sesh would suffice.

So it is nearing 1am and I am still dancing like a fool when Karla appears on front of me. I don’t know what it was, but she gave me those eyes and I knew exactly what she was thinking so we make out for a few minutes. I turn around to a crowd is staring at us from the kitchen. Me being of my rocker, shrug and keep dancing. Dana was not happy.

Shortly after, another friend of mine who I had been involved with in the past shows up and mentions grabbing a pizza. Next thing I know, a small group of us left the party, grabbed a pizza, and went back to my house where I passed the fuck out.

So I was a stupid, selfish, heartless idiot that totally betrayed a best friend I had recently gotten romantically involved with by:

leaving her to set up for my party by herself

showing up wasted to the party and immediately blacking out

making out with someone else in front of her, in her house, at the party she was throwing me

leaving to get pizza

not returning until morning

I was in denial of my guilt initially, but upon some enhanced reflection a week later, I realized how selfish and self-centered I had acted.

After a month apart from each other, Dana even tried to forgive me and we started a serious relationship together. But I had broken the trust already and there was no going back.

As years have passed, it becomes clearer and clearer how knuckleheaded my behavior was over the course of those 3-4 months. I truly was the villain from every angle. I know Dana never wants to hear from or see me again, but I wish I could tell her that I understand I did her wrong and I understand why she was so frustrated and upset with me.

Early 20s are the stuff of life lessons.”

Some of those stories are pretty painful, but it’s important to read them to get their perspective.

Have you ever been “the villain” in someone else’s story?

If so, what happened?

Please share your story with us in the comments.