I am not sure I am entirely ready to write this story,  but usually, once I get started, the words just kind of write themselves.  I am glad of that, as I feel, the results are generally more genuine and from the heart.  This one is mostly about disillusionment and, maybe more than a dash of stupidity.  It’s about misguided trust, and a desire to be desired.  I am not going to be too detailed in dates and time frames, I am just going to rip open a wound, and hope that, when I bleed, the scar that reforms, will be fainter, for having gotten it out there, and maybe we will all learn from my mistake.

I am an attention seeker.  I readily, openly, and unapologetically, admit that. If I can be the centre of a crowd, or the one on stage, I will grab that opportunity, and run with it.  I am in my element when I have an audience.  I also have issues with my looks, my size, and my body image.  Leftovers from an abusive relationship, I am well aware of, and struggle with.  To say I get the attention I need and crave at home, would be hugely wrong of me.  I don’t.  I have worked, off and on for many years to change that, in all the right ways, with no success, so I have sometimes sought it from outside sources.  As I have said before, I am often brutally honest, and you can respect that, or you can judge, but I never judge anyone.  I can’t know what’s in their hearts and their relationships.  I am just willing to throw my mistakes out there, in hopes of someone seeing something they can relate to.

Stage is set for a very charismatic, very attractive, very exciting man, to enter in to the picture.   I believe he saw one of my pictures on a social networking site, and sent me a comment.  When I saw his face on my page, I was flattered.  When I read his profile, I was intrigued.  When we started to converse back and forth, I was hooked.  Keep in mind, I was in a bad place at the time, emotionally.

It’s a bit of a long story that happened relatively quickly.  He was a minor celebrity in his neighbourhood.  He had a ton of friends, who, when asked about him, always had nothing but good things to say.  Well, that was the case when things were ongoing, and they didn’t know he and I were working on developing a “relationship”.  Even his ex-wife, still considered him a best-friend.  Should a red light been going off, with sirens and whistles, that he still LIVED with his ex-wife, oh heck yes.  Did it, no.  He had an eloquent and feasible explanation for absolutely everything.  They still lived in the same house, for their kids, and because of finances.  In the economic situation we have been in the last few years, it made relative sense.  That he had to hide any kind of relationship with any other female, that was kind of odd, to say the least.

We spent a lot of time emailing back and forth.  We only ever talked on the phone a few times, but the words, in chat and in email, were everything I had wanted to hear, for so many years.  I am sure he knew that.  I felt everything he was saying to me was completely sincere.  He swept me up in his illusions.  The I love you’s flew, very quickly.  He was very free and quick to tell me that, and I went along with it, sadly to say.  We had tons in common, including having 2 boys.  Hmmm, part of me just thought, and I will share, how much of that was him , again, telling me what he found out I needed to hear.  As well, in retrospect, of course, we had some pretty big differences, country of origin not being the least of them.

He started talking about a future together, and his descriptions of how it could be, wooed me.  He started talking about meeting, to see if what we were feeling in cyberland, was real.  Sparks are one thing, chemistry can be entirely different.  That was probably the only sane thing my mind was grasping on at the time.  I knew I couldn’t decide on a future, in another country, without spending time, at least, in the same room, with this person. He drew a beautiful picture of a tropical vacation, during a time frame when it would be feasible for his ex-wife to look after the kids.  He wanted to meet, spend a week together, and if it were as amazing as he thought it would be, he wanted me to wait a few months, and move, to be with him and be a step-mom to his kids. Yes, he even talked about flying here, driving back in my car, with my little dog.  Plans were detailed, he sucked me in.  Shockingly, this was all in about a two month period!

I don’t know if I was just rolling along with his pipe dreams because I was not in a good place, at all, but reality was about to jump up and bite me in the ass, in a very big way.    I honestly, in hindsight, know that I was just floating on a high of the attention, and I never loved this man.  It was entirely a distraction from other things that were going on at the time, with other people in my life. It would have been a lot tougher to get over, and get on with things, if I were that invested.

The emails started dwindling.  It got harder and harder to reach him.  And, then I started to dig.  I started asking questions, differently, as a woman on a mission, rather than a woman with stars in her eyes.  Turns out, from talking with people who had known this man for 25 years, that this was a pattern.  He took some sort of perverse pleasure out of building these fantasy dreamworlds, many times over.  He had gotten himself into the habit, of finding a woman, about the same time every year, finding their weaknesses, and building this illusion of perfection.  I was vulnerable, but I wasn’t stupid.  That was his biggest mistake.  He had been able to run the other women out of his little world, with threats, and had never really had any backlash from it.  He had to run off with his miserable tail between his legs, after I exposed him for the cretin he is.

I didn’t lie down, cry and moan and drip about my plight.  I warned people.  I cautioned a couple of very young girls, who he had been grooming to be the next ones on his list.  One chose to believe me, one chose not to.  What became of the one who didn’t, I am not sure.  I do know, that on most of the social networks he was working, at the time, he stopped being active.  Who knows if he is back at it, or not, I don’t care, and I haven’t cared, for a very long time.  I am grateful that I found out everything I did, long before it got to the point where I was devastated, or devastated my family.  I was hurt, but I think, I was really, more angry that I had not been smart enough to see him for what he was, long before I did.  I got played, and I had always felt that that couldn’t happen to me.

I think it is, yet again, a valuable lesson for our young women who are online. I wasn’t young, and I fell for some very sweet words, from a very cool and smooth operator.  It could have ended very badly, on a lot of levels.  .  I was able to trust my instincts when things started looking just too fishy.  I was able to find the people I needed to speak to, and I was able to give my head a big enough shake, to jar myself back in to reality.  A much younger, more gullible woman could have ended up with far more than a damaged ego. This man, for all intents and purposes, was a predator, he just picked the wrong chick, when he chose to prey on me.  Ironically, he always told me my brains and intelligence was what he loved most, and what ended up bringing him down.  Sometimes, justice is sweet.