Have you ever known someone, who turned out not to be the way you thought they were?

Well, there was my ex-husband. I know when we separated his behaviour left me wondering if I’d ever known him at all! I was stunned by some of the things he did. It really made me question my ability to evaluate people.

I have a friend like this.
We’ve been friends for years, went through the highschool together, always close.
I’ve always had a lot of respect for her, idolised her like a sister.

Gradually I noticed she’s far from what I thought. Controling, judgemental, arrogant…
I didn’t feel anything in particular. I just realised I was idolising her. It’s my flaw, I always end up idolising people I find respect for. I later accepted she has a dark, repulsive side as well as the good one.

Yes, both on this site and in real life, and it has become such a regular occurrence that I’m no longer surprised. Every time it happens, it becomes a reminder for me not to judge people quickly. Not all of them turn out to be bad people though.

It doesn’t hit me hard now. I learned my lesson not to judge too much. And also I can feel that my intuition power is getting stronger. I can “sense” people, and it helps me see through bullshit people pull out or recognizing the good in seemingly unlikeable people. I don’t say that people don’t surprise me anymore, but at least it doesn’t take me as long to figure out who is good or bad.

And there are occasions when people just change. Maybe they aren’t the same people I think they are, but they just turn from the great people I know into someone I just can’t stand. I hate it when people change for the worse. There have been at least two friendships ending that way, and they left me a bad taste in my mouth. I still miss them sometimes, but I know I’m just missing the old them.

Met a vagrant at a tavern, who claimed to be a mirror merchant. Thought nothing of it.
Weeks later I met him after I was arrested by Ofieri soldiers after I killed their crown prince who was transformed into a giant toad by a curse. He summoned a storm which helped me escape.
Turns out he was the devil.

My ex wife had two personalities. One was kind, gentle and thoughtful and the other completely lacked these qualities. I thought, or hoped, that the first was the real person but it turned out I was wrong.

People change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Pretty much everyone I knew when I was younger is different now than they were then. I could call a few of them but mostly I got everyone wrong. It just shows that we are all pretty bad at judging people over the long haul so we should just not do it.

Stevie in high school was a good student, not good as his older sister (she went to Vassar). He was fun to go to parties and dances in high school. This is the sixties, he was drafted into the Army.
I didn’t see him again until I moved back to town eight years later. He was walking along a rural road trying to catch imaginary butterflies with his imaginary net. I didn’t see him for month when I was gassing up my car he came walking by, he recognized me and came over to talk. I asked him where he was going, he said “a walk.” Then he asked to bum a cigarette from me, I gave him the rest of my pack. I asked him where he was going after the walk, he said back to his sister’s (I knew her husband vaguely so I knew where the house was it was three miles from the gas station).

Stevie was “basket case” from his time in Vietnam. Found out he was a ward of his sister. She made sure all of needs were taken care of, including money matters and his housing. His brother-in-law’s family had owned a small apartment complex with studios and one bedroom apartments next to the house his sister and brother-in-law lived in so one of the apartments was Stevie’s.

He wandered away about 8 years ago during the New England winter and later found in a hospital with pneumonia and exposure. He past away later that year.

Yes. The guy was very sociable, kind to all children, even claimed to be a devout vegetarian.

That damn Jeff Dahmer…..I’ll never forgive him…...

I knew a kid growing up who liked drugs a little too much. At 13, he took too many mushrooms and had the kind of bad trip it takes months to recover from. From that trauma, it seemed liked he was constantly self medicating. He really was a brilliant guy, friendly and generous, but he had very little ability to function sober. By his early twenties, LSD and ketamine were became his drugs of choice. One day, he fell down a K hole and never came back. He reemerged five or six years later on Facebook but doesn’t answer messages. He just posts the most insane profile pictures that seem like computer art on the themes of a hole in the head, and the occasional Wikipedia link to shoemaking or something equally bizarre.

Yep, same as @Earthbound_Misfit My ex husband whom i divorced about 14 years ago now.
He was quite the wolf in sheeps clothing and concealed his true character well for years.
Total mind fuck at the time, the big bang of revelation when you say to yourself..” WHO the hell ARE you?” Sleeping with the enemy. LOL

Well the friends I grew up with pretty much all got married, got churchy and turned into huge pricks.

Yup, a good friend and co-worker turned out to be a total jerk, thought I should put him ahead of Mrs Squeeky because we work together,I wanted nothing to do with him after that.

Two examples come readily to mind, in opposite ways.

As a college freshman away from home for the first time, excited by the chance to make brand new friends, I was attracted to Sandy, a charming girl from New York. We quickly became close. We stayed up late together in the dorm lounge and gradually confided our life stories. Mine didn’t amount to much, but she listened attentively. Our backgrounds were extremely different.

Before long, and in strictest confidence, she told me some horrifying tales of childhood rape and abuse, which made me all the more eager to prove a loyal, protective friend. She explained that this was why she wouldn’t let her boyfriend sleep with her.

When the word came out that she was pregnant and was suddenly getting married, there was an impromptu meeting in the dorm lounge. Some people (like me) were shocked, and others not at all surprised. Sandy had, it seemed, been giving out a wide assortment of autobiographical tales to a number of people who all thought they were her best friend, and none of the stories matched. She was an expert at garnering sympathy but apparently couldn’t tell the truth to anybody. As near as we could tell, the simple truth was not especially dramatic, but I’d believed everything she said and defended her until the contradictions became overwhelming.

I’d never been lied to systematically before by anyone, and it really shook my faith in people. And I was hurt to find out that I’d been nothing to her but an audience and a source of flattering attention.

Then there was Terry, recruited by our new boss into a department where I’d worked for five years. The boss spoke so warmly about her beforehand that we all suspected it was one of those joined-at-the-hip relationships where new managers brought in their own team from their old workplace, collected a staff that owed them personal loyalty, and repeatedly scored referral bonuses.

Terry was very short, and that’s probably why she always walked around with her unusually sharp chin in the air. The gesture made her look as if she were constantly looking down on people, even though everyone else was taller. She also had a characteristic smirk and tended to echo the manager’s remarks in meetings with a supercilious little “M-hm.” I took an instant and instinctive dislike to her. Privately I labeled her “HLP,” which stood for “horrid little person.” I had to work with her on document production, but I avoided her otherwise and never stopped to chat. I never gave her the benefit of any doubts.

When we learned that she was a cancer patient and no longer in remission, her direct reports were in tears. That’s when I learned from them that she was actually a very warm and genuine person, that she treated them and everyone else fairly and kindly, and that her mannerisms gave a misleading impression. If I’d bothered to get to know her at all, I would have seen that for myself.

The last day she was in the office, she gave me her book of sayings of the Buddha. At her funeral, I felt very regretful that I’d never given myself the chance to be friends with her. This was 20 years ago, and I still have the book.

Both very interesting and telling stories, @Jeruba

Thank you.

@Jeruba,...very very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Well, my son’s wife’s true colors didn’t come out until after they were married. I’m still upset over that. It’s like, you faked it for 3 years, why can’t you just go on faking it?
However she’s been responding to us, and to my son, and has taken really great strides towards just being normal, and not freaking out over the smallest things.
When they first met she refused to go in the sun. Didn’t like going outside at all, or getting sweaty and dirty. Not sure why, other than her mother is weird like that.
Now, 3 years later, she can’t WAIT to go camping! And she’s at my son’s side when he does outside projects (which he does a lot.) That’s, a huge difference.

Also, she’s slowly developing a sense of humor. I think our humor used to utterly baffle her, but she’s starting to join in on it.

Yes, many times. A lot of times it has happened after a relationship ended. I have learned that having expectations of people, how they will or will not behave is pointless. People grow they change and they also are changed by life circumstances. It’s hard to digest at times but it’s a reality.
I believe we do keep our ‘core’ selves, so although we are changeable, unpredictable and so on, we will always retain that core, good or bad.