Something was rotten here. I met him the night of his return from the funeral and the afternoon was misty and overcast. It had been his birthday while he was attending the funeral and I had felt so badly for him that I welcomed him with a cupcake and candle. He seemed so lost. There was always a cheerful veneer, but I always sensed a deep hurt that kept him from really feeling true emotions. As I pieced everything together I realized that he’d very likely been lying to me about his dating and I began to wonder if he had ever separated from his wife. There were so many clues! Then, I researched his wife online and verified that she had been ill, but also discovered that she was from a prominent political family and a similar well-publicized scandal had occurred with one of her siblings. The spouse of the cheater was devout and had taken the cheat back. There was a pattern here and I strongly suspected that Dick’s wife had, at one point, learned to look the other way… but I was not going to be trapped into this mess so, I finally broke it off, telling him I needed to be with someone who was free to be my partner.
I was devastated, but he agreed that it was time to stop. He seemed annoyed by my feelings of guilt. Imagine, I had more feelings of remorse than he did! The next day I went to the dating site and saw that he had been online again. How had I fallen for such a narcissist? I was angry. I texted him, “How could you do this?” He replied that he couldn’t see how it was any different than me being online and I replied that the difference was he was married… I got angry; I accused him of having an online “zipper problem.” With all of the things I had said to him and accused him of, this is what he took offense to!! I had been played so badly, but I had hit the nail on the head.
Two weeks after our final contact I was back on the dating site and found an interesting potential date who had viewed my profile. I had seen this profile when I had first gone online and had saved it but discarded it when there hadn’t been a response. So, I ‘winked’ at him. Later that evening I went online to look at his profile more closely and felt a rising alarm. It was Dick using another profile!
