#NerdsUnite: I met my husband on @PlentyOfFish (Online dating Vs. Meeting someone on the internet PT 2)
<editorsnote> Nerds, meet my buddy Jessica. She and I met through this loverly site, and by her reaching out to me asking if she could write for us. Really rad chickie, she provided a lot of insight into my childhood for me (something you don't get every day from someone!!) - andddddd she has quite the life story. Like did you know she moved cross country for love? ORRRR that she found out her ex cheated on her by reading it on Facebook? ANNNNDDDD she even married a guy she met off of Plenty of Fish! Yep, true story! This is life as told through her eyes, and through the keyword of the nerd. HIT IT JESSICA!!! </editorsnote>
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @ItsJessWeaver
Check out Part I of this story.
How to tell this story?
When I was 24 I met a man online. I wasn’t looking for dates. In fact, I didn’t even run into him online myself, at first. See, I was an odd 24 year old. I was very naïve, super religious, conservative, pretty smart, kind of a loner, a college graduate, and a virgin. Yep. A virgin at 24. I didn’t date people. I went to movies by myself. I desperately believed in the idea of a soul mate out there somewhere for me, and hoped very seriously that I’d run into him on the street one day. Or at church. Or at a restaurant where we both just happened to be dining alone, and then somehow we struck up a conversation, and it just made sense to move your place setting to my table, and the rest is history. I was a hopeless romantic. I didn’t just believe in love, I believed in fairy tale love. I believed I didn’t have to try to find love; it would come to me.
But, I’d also been the fat kid growing up, and had a strained relationship with my parents. I had struggled with depression and loneliness. I guess I looked the part, because this married couple at my church decided they wanted to try and play matchmaker for me.
Now, this couple was in their 40s, let’s say (because, frankly, I just thought of them as old, so I don’t really remember), and the husband was a magician by trade. Seriously, he ran a business putting on magic shows for little kid parties and stuff. Sleight of hand, a little mentalism, card tricks, the whole nine yards. He spent a lot of time online in magic forums like the Magic Café. One day he and his wife called me and told me about a young man they met there in the forums. They gave me the basics: a young soldier, deployed in Iraq, single, looking for someone to talk to. He likes to dabble in magic, especially cards. If you want, we’ll give him your email address…we think you’re perfect for each other!
So it began. The guy started emailing me a couple times a week. He sent pictures, he talked about his heroism in Iraq, his hobbies, how many languages he spoke, etc. He talked a little about his family. At first we talked about surface things, and then we started chatting more about serious stuff. We chatted all day on Yahoo Instant Messenger. I watched the news for stories about Baghdad, where he was stationed, afraid something might happen to him. Then he asked if he could call me. UM, YES! I was pretty stoked about it—but totally nervous. He explained how he had to run over to this bank of phones a couple miles away just to dial anyone in the US, and he was going to use that precious phone time on me. ME. WHAT THE HECK.
He called me, and I answered, and there was this weird delay. And then, he started speaking and I thought, OMG, this guy is a total goober! He’s acting like an excited five-year-old who just got promised a trip to Disneyland, and then, it hits me; he is being a total goober over me. Of course! But that freaked me out, and when we hung up, I didn’t know if I’d even talk to him again. Over the next few days, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. He’d told me how much he loved the paper letter I’d sent, how it smelled so great (yeah, so maybe I sprayed some perfume on it), and how beautiful he thought I was. He laid it on really thick and I ate it up. Whatever he was selling, I was buying it, big time.
I started falling for him, and as he got ready to leave Iraq for home, things got more serious. We started planning when to meet. He bought plane tickets to come to California. His mom lived a few hours from me, as it turned out, so he could see her and me in the same visit. We sent so many text messages we both had to upgrade our phone plans, and we called each other obsessively during the day. Three months of constant emails, IMs and texts, and then phone calls, and we still hadn’t met. I searched for him on the internet and nothing came up. I didn’t do a background check on him. All I knew about him was what he’d told me in his emails, and what my friend the magician had told me about what he was like on their magic forum. I fell in love. I fell for the sound of his voice—he had a sexy Spanish accent that drove me crazy. He would whisper sweet nothings in Spanish over the phone. I fell for his looks. He was a body builder and studied jujitsu. I fell for his quirky obsession with magic, his interest in travel, and his interest in, above all, me. He wanted me, and I loved it.
Finally, he came to meet me in California. I took my best friend with me to make sure he wasn’t a serial killer. She was like—hey dudes, have fun!! So we spent every waking moment of his trip together, and I bawled like a baby when he left. After that, we got way more intense in our internet and phone relationship, and looking back, there were SO MANY red flags. He was possessive, manipulative, isolated me from my friends…but I didn’t see any of that. I saw the man who entertained me with card tricks. He played little mentalist games with me, told me secrets about how magicians read people’s minds, and he was a really great kisser. He was strong and wrote stupid romantic poetry.
He came to see me in April, for Easter, and my parents HATED him--my dad, especially. Dad smelled something on him, something really icky and evil. Either that, or he just didn’t like how completely wrapped up I was in this guy I barely knew. I didn’t care at all. If anything, it made him even more attractive to me. I made plans to fly to Georgia in May, and the weekend I was there he asked me to marry him. I, like a twitterpated ninny, said yes. I quit my job, moved out of my apartment, sold my car, packed a bag and flew to get married to a dude I’d met on the internet less than a year before. I’d never met his family, and my family hated him.
What happened when I settled into Georgia:
So many things. We didn’t get married like he said we would. Not that first week. Not the second week. Not after a month. He wouldn’t introduce me to anyone he worked with. Half his house was off-limits to me-doors locked. Some girl with his last name was getting mail there, but he claimed it was the person who lived there before him. One day, when we were moving to the city, I found a baby announcement in one of the closets, and suddenly this man who had claimed he was a virgin, or at least very sexually inexperienced, had a son, and a bi-polar ex-girlfriend stalker, who I was starting to suspect might be his wife. I blew up; I had a complete melt down. I walked out of the house and down the street, just crying, not really knowing where I was going. I wanted him to come after me, to tell me it was all a lie. How could he have hidden all this from me???!! Why couldn’t he have just told me about the son? Why couldn’t he have just been honest? I finally came back to the house and we had a huge fight over it. He kept getting angrier and angrier, and then he knelt down to where I was sitting on the floor, came right up to my face, and said:
“I don’t want to hear about this anymore. If you talk to me or anyone about this ever again, I will kill you. Understand? I will kill you. No one will know where to find your body. Enough. This conversation is over.”
(OH MY GOD, this is not happening to me….)
My fairy tale turned into a nightmare overnight. I had no money, no car, a shitty job, and a whole lot of pride that said I could not run back home to my family with my tail between my legs, admitting to them that they were right about this guy. Plus, I still wanted to believe that things would work out. As much as he scared me, I wanted to believe that it wasn’t his fault. He told me the girl who claimed her kid was his had climbed on top of him while he was drunk at a party and “raped” him. He told me he was trying to get away from her and start over. He told me she filed complaints with his command, telling all kinds of lies to get him in trouble, to get back at him for leaving her. As dumb as all that sounds, I was head over heels in love with this guy. I didn’t want to be angry. I wanted to believe him. And part of me just couldn’t really even process what we happening to me. Everything had changed so fast.
When he threatened to kill me, you’d think I would have just packed up and walked away, as far away as possible. But I did the opposite. I glimpsed something in him I was very afraid of, and then I tried to forget about it. It’s like this switch in my brain got flipped, and I didn’t care about me anymore. I only cared about him, and keeping him happy. I saw his flaws as the result of child abuse and post-traumatic-stress disorder, and I thought I could save him.
I’d like to say I left him not long after that. I’d like to forget about how long we stayed together, about the way he treated me, the way he spoke to me like I was nothing. I’d like to say I didn’t let him grind me up and use me. The truth is, he continued to hurt me, over and over, and I stayed and let him.
One day, I opened the internet browser on his laptop, which he’d conveniently left open. I saw a facebook profile in the url dropdown box, and clicked on it. There he was, with some girl on his lap, and their relationship all over her facebook page. He’d been openly cheating on me for 6 months! After that, it avalanched. I asked her to meet me at Starbucks and we compared notes; I went home that night and finally broke up with him. Something in me said, “I can’t do this anymore. I have to get away from this man.” I told all of my friends what he’d done, and found an apartment, which they helped me move into while he was at work one day. I got the courage to contact his ex on facebook and introduce myself to her, asking for help. That was so hard to do, since he’d built up this idea of her in my mind from the beginning, but I had to know the truth. Here is the truth:
She is a normal person. They were (and ARE STILL) married, and both her boys are his sons. They live in another state. They both look like him, no doubt about it; they are definitely his kids. The same day in 2005 he called me that first time from Iraq, he had also talked to her about his plans to come home, and the house they were renting. The times he couldn’t talk to me in his house because of bad reception? She was there, with their sons. The trip he took to meet me in California? He brought one of his sons with him and left him for three weeks with his grandmother while he wined and dined me 90 miles away. The Easter trip, when my parents first met him? That was the week he sent his wife and sons to Ohio for Spring Break and promised to drive up there to get them, and when he came back to Georgia, he just stopped talking to them—acted like they didn’t exist. He sent them to Ohio with a one-way ticket and a promise to see them soon for the drive back home, and never saw them again. As far as I know, he still hasn’t seen his sons, and it’s been over 5 years.
He lied from the moment he met my friend the magician on the magic café forums, and he kept lying as long as he could. I really don’t know if he was ever truly honest with me about even one thing he told me about himself. He was such a good liar. He was so thorough about creating himself new that I have only ever even seen two pictures of him and his wife together. I have never seen a picture of him with his sons. He used my weaknesses against me—I felt ugly, unloved, unwanted, stifled and scared to be alone, and he made me the center of his life long enough to get me hooked. He used the anonymity of the internet to escape from his marriage and convince me he was my prince charming, and then he used it to cheat on me the entire time we were together.
For a long time, I hated myself for being so stupid, for letting him cast a spell over me and bully me. I hated myself for allowing someone to change who I was. I hated myself for falling for every line, for not checking out his story, for not following every last gut instinct I had, and for not using the internet to find out the truth. I could have. The information was out there, waiting for me.
I really don’t know how to end this story. My ex? He changed his name and is still playing his little games. Every once in a while a new girl calls me to find out the truth, and when that happens, I tell her what I know. As for me, I got married to an awesome dude I met on PlentyofFish. We got married in his parents’ back yard earlier this year, and I’ve never been so happy in my life.
#thatisall
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