Woman Says She Would Have Preferred To Be Cheated On After Learning Why Ex Called Her By The Wrong Name
Infidelity isn't the only deal-breaker.
TikTok In a video that’s been liked 1 million times, TikTok user Carly Burke (@carlybburke) responded to a question posed to viewers: Have you ever suspected your partner of cheating, only to discover the truth is way worse?
According to Burke, her ex-boyfriend, who she calls ‘Bob,’ kept calling her by the wrong name. His behavior made Burke think he was cheating.
His reasons for calling her the wrong name were more sinister than cheating.
“He kept calling me Jessica, despite my name being Carly,” she said.
Carly met his family, who would also slip up, saying ‘Jessica’ from time to time. His grandparents even asked if they could just call her Jessica “because it would be easier at this point” to do so.
“They were not joking,” Burke noted.
She “awkwardly” told them she wouldn’t respond to Jessica, because it wasn’t her given name. Later, she “freaked out” and accused Bob of infidelity.
Bob denied her accusations, a response that Carly felt was genuine.
At this point in her story, Carly added that Bob always wore a necklace strung with a locket. He refused to show her the inside of the locket. One day, she grew weary enough of the mistaken name-calling to open the locket herself, convinced she’d find some kind of clue.
Inside, she found a photo of another young woman.
“There’s another girl in the locket, but this other girl looks like me. That other girl, I find out, through his brother, is named Jessica. And that other girl is dead. He had a dead ex-girlfriend named Jessica who looked just like me.”
Burke’s story got stranger from there, as she began to put the pieces together.
“Every now and then, I would get text messages saying, ‘Hey babe, I just bought you flowers,’ but he’d never give me flowers,” Burke said. She said she decided not to press him on the issue, because “it wasn’t that deep.”
Through Bob’s brother, she found out that Bob brought flowers to Jessica's grave, then texted Carly about it “to communicate with Jessica."
Not long after, Burke broke up with Bob.
She ended her post with the revelation that Bob stabbed himself during their breakup.
Burke answered follow-up questions in a second post, explaining that she broke up with Bob over FaceTime. She watched on her computer screen as he got a knife from his dresser drawer and stabbed himself without warning.
“There was no lead-up to it, I had no time to process that this might happen,” Burke said, “I was shocked to see it happen.”
When she asked if he needed to go to the hospital, Bob reacted “like I’m the biggest idiot on the planet and he goes, ‘I was in Cub Scouts.”
Burke watched as Bob grabbed “a needle that was already threaded with clear fishing wire and started trying to sew his arm back together.”
After the breakup, Bob pretended to join the military in an attempt to win Burke back. He called from “the army base… I looked up the number, it was his grandmother’s landline.”
Unfortunately, Bob’s delusions didn’t end there.
“For the next several months, he’d randomly call me, and be like, ‘Hey babe,’ and act like we never broke up.”
Burke ends with the shocking news that Jessica died in a car crash while with Bob, which makes it apparent that his behavior was the result of deep-seated, unmanaged trauma.
Burke noted that she’s spoken with a therapist to unpack her experience. Hopefully, Bob has done the same.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers celebrity gossip, pop culture analysis and all things to do with the entertainment industry.