An Online Dating Parable

I did not hear another word from him again until he was driving to work Thursday morning after dropping his sisters at the airport. It was as if nothing had happened! He just said that he missed me and wanted to get together after work. He was sorry that he couldn’t talk to me or text me, but there was limited cell service, which I knew was bull. I was getting the awful gut-churning but unmistakable impression that I was a booty call! I started to piece together that he had constantly been dropping off of IMs over the time we were talking … was he speaking to other women? In one of our rendezvous during week two he had admitted to one brief affair with a woman named Elizabeth that he had met online five years earlier. He had seemed contrite, but there was also a trace of in your face defiance when he told me. Here I was seeing this married man, so who was I to stand in judgment of him now? He also admitted that he was still friendly with his former paramour. As I thought about it, how could he still be friends with this woman? If he had any remorse at all, I would think he’d be really reluctant to have any contact at all, let alone be friends. I also checked the dating site and he was still going online. I asked him if he was seeing other women and he laughed it off. With all of the pretences of his saying he was falling in love with me, my crap detector was running full tilt, but I was choosing to ignore the signals. Then there were the mysterious busy signals; he would text me in the morning on his way into work and say he would call me from the car. On a few occasions I had missed the text and called him reaching his voicemail, as he was on another call. Who was he speaking to before 7:15 a.m. in the morning? When I would ask any of these questions, they were always evaded.