Every awful ex-boyfriend you’ll inevitably have

The world is essentially just a smörgåsbord of boys; a cornucopia of boys. And though they may all seem different at first, they’re more similar than you think.

Essentially, despite how different you think they are and how torturous or individually romantic you thought your love was, every guy you have ever dated can be rounded down into a handful of types. It’s hard to imagine this, because you think they’re special. But they’re not, and to illustrate this, we’ve drawn them below.

So before you inevitably give up on love for good, here’s a look back at every boy you’ve dated – and why they’re all as bad as each other.

The childhood sweetheart

You got together when you were both really too young to know who you were, what you like or where you were going to end up (spoiler alert: not together). When you moved away your relationship went from hanging out constantly and seeing each other every day to fraught Skype conversations where you both cried a lot.

You both say you’ll “always be best friends” (even though you miss his dog more than him) and your friends still think it’s weird that you’re not together. He talks to your mum and his mum likes all your photos on Facebook, so really you’ll never truly leave each other. Crucially you thought – in all your 16-year-old wisdom – that your love would stand the test of time and distance. It didn’t.

The one who didn’t look after himself

Everyone, when they start dating someone, everyone pretends to be seriously chill. So when you started going out with this guy you didn’t mind that your dates – which you always had to plan, obviously – revolved around staying in bed all day. You didn’t mind that you gained weight when you were together because you constantly got a takeaway. You didn’t even mind that he didn’t text you back for hours (he was asleep). Slowly though, it starts to get to you.

After a while even the excellent weed connections you got through him can’t make you chill enough to put up with having the same conversation about “how can you ban a plant man? It’s natural. It’s from the Earth”. Your parents hate him, your friends hate him, and eventually it becomes apart that despite a shared love of The Big Lebowski and Superbad and a half-arsed plan to go “travelling someday” it’s not really going anywhere.

The one who probably cheated on you

The classic fuckboy in all respects, your text conversation with this guy – which always started after 2am – always began with “u up?”. He was always on his phone, he sent you the most basic sexts in the world (“and what would u do if i was there lol”) and you had a bimonthly conversation about “not wanting anything serious”.

Sometime before you “hooked up” – you never went on a real date – he read The Game and told everyone it changed his life, so there was a lot of negging, and speaking to every girl except you whenever you went on a night out with him. It went on, inevitably, for far too long, because you kept telling yourself “it’s just sex!” but even his friends felt sorry for you by the end. We’ve all been there.

The one your parents preferred to you

Ah, the nice guy. The lovely, perfect on paper, mum and dad’s dream son-in-law guy. He hung out with your dad without you and constantly said things like “I’m honestly not a dick” and “I’m sorry… that you feel that way”. He stood you up sometimes, but look, he always had a good excuse.

Because he seemed so nice your family and friends never believed you when you had an argument that was his fault, and obviously he talks about how he’s been fucked around in the past. He even got custody of your friends after the nasty break up. Maybe, and look, I’m just putting this out there, maybe he wasn’t actually that nice.

The posh boy

What attracted you to this one? Was it the connections? Was it his really great hair? Was it because he gave you the best coke you’ve ever had in your life? Whatever it was, he seemed exotic.

He was not exotic, he was just posh (despite the fact that he constantly said “Mate I’m not even that posh!”).

It’s always a nice fling, but you can never escape the stereotype that you’re his bit of rough. His parents fucking hate you, and he’s constantly leaving the country on a whim (probably off to South East Asia again). Plus he never understands your money worries, and he was full of angst about his family’s sad history from when they didn’t have money like, two hundred years ago.

Let me save you three to six months of depressing comedown following the fling: below the surface, there is n o t h i ng  t h e r e. 

The tortured artist

On paper: perfect. He works in media, he reads the same books as you, he does intricate charcoal drawings of other women on Instagram and you’re like “it’s fine, it’s art, I get it, it doesn’t matter that they’re not of me”.

He shows up for all your dates on a bike and takes you to arthouse cinemas and thrift stores (he shuns big brands, duh), and owns vinyl because “the sound is warmer” and really really inexplicably cares about what microbeads are doing to the environment and after a while you just feel a bit basic next to all that.

You didn’t really hate your gap year in India as much as he did and you don’t like coconut water that much and you’re not convinced the quotes he regurgitates from books are fully accurate and understood and really, it’s just all a bit too much like hard work to keep up.

The one who preferred his mates to you

He shushed you when the game was on – doesn’t matter which – and he didn’t have an inside voice because you don’t need one when you spend your life with 56 other blokes in a room. It’s quite sweet, obviously, to keep in touch with friends from your childhood, but really, every guy from every sports team he’s ever been on, as well as all his friends from school and university? There are like seven of them with the same name and you can never find any common ground to bond with them.

It was like going out with an entire squad rather than one person, and that’s exhausting. He wasn’t even that pissed off when you called it off. He’d rather be hanging out with the guys anyway.

The one who ruined your life

How is this person real? And how do they exist for everyone, slightly different, but always with the same life ruining qualities? Are they like, sent from Hades as a warning from the universe not to enjoy life too much, because it can always go to shit? Seems like it.

He was inexplicably tanned all year round, he showed all of his teeth when he laughed, he had 200 likes on his profile pic and an eco-friendly job in a start up that you didn’t understand. You thought you could change him, and put up with all the bad stuff because the good outweighed it: really nice bedsheets, best morning sex ever, that sort of thing. But eventually, of course, he left you for someone blonder, tanner and with more Instagram followers than you.

During the break up you were the worst version of yourself – spending hours every day stalking his ex and new girlfriend, refusing to wash your pillow because it smelt like him for months, and for long periods of time your friends literally had to confiscate your phone so you wouldn’t text him. We’ve all been there. It gets better. Probably???

Illustrations by Bobby Palmer. 

@rosielanners