Woman says her boyfriend let her stalker ex into the apartment to leave a “birthday surprise” — and the update made the whole situation even worse

A woman on Reddit said she thought the gifts her ex kept leaving at her door were creepy enough on their own, but things got much worse when she came home on her birthday and found her apartment decorated with balloons, flowers, and chocolates. At first she thought the surprise came from her current boyfriend, Cole. Then he told her her ex had buzzed the apartment, been let inside, and decorated the place before leaving. She wrote that her ex had been trying to win her back for months with gifts and letters after a breakup, and said she already felt unsafe even before learning her boyfriend had helped him get into their home.

In her original post, she said the part she could not understand was Cole’s attitude. According to her account, he kept saying he felt bad for the ex and did not want her to “waste” the gifts, so he ate the chocolates and read the letters even though she told him the whole thing made her uncomfortable. She also said she and Cole were living together largely because of rent costs in an expensive city, which made the situation harder to untangle quickly. Still, by the end of that post, she was already wondering whether the relationship was unsalvageable and said she planned to confront him.

The update is where the story turned from unsettling to genuinely bizarre. She said she brought her brother over for safety before confronting Cole, expecting maybe to hear that he had secretly been in contact with the ex. Instead, she wrote, Cole admitted he had made multiple fake social media accounts to follow her ex online and had been encouraging him to keep pursuing her. According to her post, Cole said he got satisfaction from watching the ex keep spending money, sending gifts, and failing to win her back, and treated the whole thing like a game. She wrote that he had essentially been “stalking her stalker” and feeding his delusions for entertainment.

She said that revelation completely changed how she saw both the relationship and the months of unwanted contact from her ex. In her telling, the fear and discomfort she had been living with were being amplified behind the scenes by the person she lived with and trusted. She wrote that she moved out to stay with her brother and his girlfriend, told Cole to move out within the week, and blocked him. She also said she planned to go back to therapy, asked her landlord about breaking the lease, and called the non-emergency police line to create a record while she figured out how to safely collect evidence from the apartment.

The reaction in the comments was exactly what you would expect from a story like this: disbelief, a lot of alarm about her safety, and a lot of people saying the boyfriend’s behavior was more disturbing than the original setup had suggested. What started as a story about a stalker ex and a clueless boyfriend ended up reading more like a story about someone discovering that the person beside her had been quietly helping keep the whole nightmare alive.

Original Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/1nz94mo/my_28f_boyfriend_29m_let_my_stalker_ex_28m_into/