Reckon's Story

SSDD

I am an almost 56 year old woman. I have 3 grown children, 3 grandchildren, a grandchild on the way, and 2 step grandchildren. 2 of my children are married, the other one is in a long term, happy relationship. My children are college graduates. I must have done something right to have created these happy successful people, but my own life doesn’t reflect this at all. I was married for 20 years to a high functioning alcoholic. For most of those years, we were very happy. I spent 10 years without dating after my divorce, focusing on raising my children. I had no idea what a mistake I was making for myself doing that.
I’ve been back and forth, up and down, with my thoughts and my emotions for the past 15 months. I am still being pushed, pulled, sometimes even within 2 hours of one another.
I met this guy on a dating website 17 months ago. He IM’d me and said that I had said that I wanted to meet him. I said, “I don’t think so.” I told him that he wasn’t my type. I had seen his profile, but the picture of him bothered me right away. Something looked off, especially around the eyes.
I’m an accounting analyst by trade and I am very observant of things. I mentioned to him that he had given away his 2 website roses already and that he had told me that he had only been on the website a day. (red flag) He denied that he had, even though the roses were clearly gone. (red flag)
We continued to communicate with one another as friends for 2 months while he and I both went on meet and greets with other people that we met on the website. He always called me “sweetie”, which to me is a red flag. I know that everyone is “sweetie” to these men.
He was very country and used a lot of bad grammar and spelling errors in his communications. He wrote me poetry and sent me country songs from Youtube about women loving men, and how much the men loved that (I noticed that the songs never said that the man loved the woman).
All of his “dates” never worked out. There was always something wrong with the women. They didn’t dress right, they were married and hadn’t told him, they were drunks, they were fat , they were stupid, they were still in love with their exes. There was an episode where a woman’s husband had come after him with a shotgun. He said that this woman was still emailing him and telling him that she loved him. He laughed about her loving him.
Every man that I met from the website was still infuriated with their ex. Every one. Even if it had been 10 years since their divorce. Scarey.
We talked on the phone several times and we really hit it off. He had bad grammar, but he was charming. We laughed a lot together. I noticed later after I knew him better in person, that sometimes he would laugh at something after he noticed that I was laughing. (red flag)
My country N convinced me that we should meet up in person. The first time I met him at a restaurant. When I saw him, I was shocked. His picture on the website was an average build man. This guy had a 20 pound head and a 40 pound stomach. He had terrible crooked and chipped teeth. His fingernails were dirty. He had made no attempt to dress well that day. Just a dirty t-shirt and jeans. He didn’t seem to care at all. His face was slack and unexpressive, almost like an autistic child. His eyes were cold and black. I had never seen eyes like this before. He barely spoke at all through the meal. He wouldn’t make eye contact. There sure wasn’t any laughter. He had his phone on the table and kept checking it the entire time that we were there. It even went off with a text message and he explained it away that it was a text message from a friend. But how rude to have your phone out when meeting someone for the first time.
I was creeped out, but tried to make the most of it since we had been friends for 2 months now and had gotten along great in email and on the phone. He said “there’s a free concert in the park tonight”. Didn’t ask me out to the concert, just said it as a sentence. I thought that was so weird. I said, “well I hope that you enjoy it”. He said “I was hoping that you would go with me”. I said, “then ask me to go to the concert.” I was being playful, and trying to get him to open up. So he asked me. Like a fool, I said “yes”. The meal didn’t take more than 20 minutes and I couldn’t wait to escape. As soon as I got in my car I called him and cancelled the concert. I told him again that he wasn’t my type. I told him that he barely spoke and that it felt really awkward with him in person. He said that he barely spoke because he was intimidated by my good looks and “I liked what I seen”….lol what BS
He texted me long texts telling me how much he liked me and that he knew that he was going to like me in person and he wasn’t wrong. We did a couple more things as friends, bowling (which looking back on it, I think he showed up drunk), watching tv at my house. He never ever invited me to his house or introduced me to his friends or family in the 17 months that we have known each other. (red flag)
I found out that he had a very dirty job, which explained away the dirty fingernails. He said that he had tried everything to clean them, but that it was impossible.
I told my children about him and they shamed me in to giving him a chance. They said, “so if he got veneers on his teeth then he would be okay to date?” This was before they met him in person. After everything he put me through and me breaking up with him 50 times and then taking him back, my children will no longer speak to me. I tell them that it is over, but they don’t believe me. This increases my loneliness and loneliness trumps knowledge that you are dealing with a narcissistic sociopath.
After a couple of months of friendship, the N made his move. I was lonely and he sensed this and we made out on the couch at my house one day. It wasn’t that great, but better than nothing. Oh I forgot to mention. He brought his laptop inside my house every time that he came over, and was on it constantly. His phone was constantly receiving text messages. He always had the same dead look on his face and in his eyes even as he read his messages.
The first time that we “had sex” I wasn’t sure that it had even happened. I wondered if he was really a woman pretending to be a man. He feigned passion saying “oooohhh (insert name here)”. I was like…whaaaa??? It just seemed all so put on.
In the ensuing months, sometimes the sex was a little better, but it always seemed to me that he was trying to complete a job. There was never any passion. Sometimes he would say to me that I had said things regarding certain sex acts that I had never said. I know that he was getting me confused with others. He would tell me stories about him and other women and sex. He would try to get me to re-enact some of these exploits. This was such a turnoff. Why would I want to wear a blue thong like some other woman he had been with. I couldn’t believe that he was even stupid enough to tell me about him and other women.
He told me that he loved me over and over many times a day, but again, I never felt the passion from him that goes with loving someone.
Right after he instigated the sex, he brought a lot of clothes and personal belongings into my home. I was really shocked by this. I don’t see anything wrong with having a date, and then the guy going home. But he basically moved in for the weekends. I thought, well I haven’t dated in 10 years, maybe this is how it is done now.
He asked me to be his girlfriend and that we would be in a committed relationship where we would not see anyone else. He said that we should both delete our dating profiles. I was still unsure, but wanted to be someone’s girlfriend.
In his dating website profile he said that he was a social drinker and a non-smoker. In the evenings I could never get hold of him. He would tell me that he was tired after work and just went home and went to bed. I had never had a boyfriend before who never called me at night to say goodnight or talk for an hour before saying goodnight. This felt so weird and not right to me. Also, I found out that he was a heavy drinker and smoker.
Whenever we went out, he barely spoke to me or acknowledged me, except to hold my hand. This didn’t keep him from staring at every woman that he passed, smiling at each one. I could see that the women were affected by this and would become animated after passing him, with big smiles. He sure knew women and how any amount of attention would affect them. I mentioned this to him, and he used this many times later to justify his behavior. “You keep accusing me of lusting after other women. I can’t buy you anything for Valentine’s Day because you do this. You don’t know how much that upsets me.” Ummm…that doesn’t even make any sense….lol Enter the stingy side of a narcissist. Which by the way, I was always hearing that he didn’t have any money that week, so could I pick up the tab when we went out.
Many times when we were laying in bed, he would tell me the most bizarre stories of his past. His mother ran off with a man abandoning their whole family (5 children) when he was 8 and they all moved in with his paternal grandmother, even though his father was still around. He was kidnapped shortly after this time as a child and held for ransom. He would have a lot of nightmares, and he usually said that the nightmares pertained to his kidnapping. He told me that he never married until he was in his forties. He said the marriage lasted 6 years, but I found evidence that it never even made it to 2 years. And this was 10 years ago, but he talked about his ex obsessively as if it was all recent. He said that he had a criminal record that was him taking the heat for her. He was totally innocent. He also told me that there was a woman that was “in and out of his life” for the past 20 years. Why would you tell your girlfriend that? Who wants to be around when you know that this woman will be showing up. And she did. She told me that one of her sons was the N’s child. But he denied this to me vehemently, and told me never to bring it up again. There are many many more stories that he told me about his growing up years and his adulthood. Maybe I will write a novel telling it all some day. I’m practically writing one now…lol
All of the red flags made me become a detective. I’ve heard since that if you feel a need to investigate, then you should run.
I found out that on the weekday evenings, and sometimes on the weekends when he made up some excuse for us not to be together, that he was in clubs and bars, drinking to excess, smoking up a storm, and meeting women. He had prostitutes on his facebook page. I found evidence that he had prostitutes at his house. Whenever I would leave town to spend time with my family, he would amp up his attempts to meet women. I found texts where he asked women out, messenger conversations, dating profiles, and private facebook messages. One message he sent to his 20 year woman, asking her to marry him, 30 minutes after leaving my bed.
He told me that one woman on his texts was a man who was mute and he would have the guy get in touch with me and tell me that. I texted this woman. She was a mute, but she thought that the 2 of them were embarking on a relationship (it was in the beginning stages). She didn’t know anything about me.
One night when he had lied to me about where he was and I found him in a bar, he put a cartoon on his facebook page that showed a guy lying to his girlfriend saying that he was tired so was just hanging out at home, but the guy was in a club. The girlfriend was right behind him. N put under the cartoon…BUSTED…LOL What a sick bastard.
One night at 1:30 am on a Saturday when he said that he was sick and couldn’t come over, his phone called my phone and left a 15 minute voicemail. He was clearly in a strip club getting a lap dance. I played this for many friends and they all agreed that’s what it was. I played it for him as well, and for the next 8 months received one different story after another of what it “really” was. And I was crazy and only “think” I heard what I heard.
Finally, I found 3 new women’s phone numbers in his phone. I called them all and exposed him for the cheater he is. I broke up with him, but didn’t tell him that I had contacted the women. When they told him that I had been in touch with them, he was enraged. He sent me an email telling me that he had never loved me and had only asked me out for spite because I had noticed that he was a womanizer from the get go on the dating website. He admitted asking all of the women out, because I was mentally ill, and he was hoping to meet someone else.
As I said, similar lies, manipulation, deceitfulness, and “crazy making” behavior continued throughout the past 15 months. I am currently broken up with him, but continue to receive emails. Just yesterday he emailed that something was missing from his life and it is “you”.
He supposedly moved farther away from me in the past week, so I don’t really know what the point of this is. I feel that we live too far apart to continue trying to have a relationship. I miss the friendship and having someone to do things with, even if the “relationship” part of it was all a lie. My gut is telling me that he moved because he is in a relationship with someone. The emailing is an attempt to make me the “other woman”.
I know that I should go NO CONTACT. I like the attention as well as he does…lol Don’t we all? My eyes are open. I don’t even wholey believe him about the details of his move because, as usual, it makes no sense.