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My precautionary tale about my LDR: Be careful


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Romantic_Antics

About a year ago I met a woman in an online voice chat while playing a video game on PlayStation. She had a great personality and we hit it off immediately. I wasn't looking for love, but it happened. We fell for one another after several weeks of talking every single day. I thoroughly enjoyed her company.

 

The first red flag came when we were talking about our birthdays and she asked me, "How old did I tell you I was again?" I had a weird feeling in my gut. She'd told me she was 32 and I told her this. She apologized and said she was 35. Much later on, I found out she was actually 37.

 

The second red flag/lie came when she started lying about putting money into the MMO game we were playing. I think she felt stigmatized because our group jokingly referred to "pay to play" players as "Wallet Warriors". Ultimately it was nobody's business and nobody cared either way, but we didn't appreciate being lied to. I was not alone on this one. It was an unnecessary lie, but a lie is a lie.

 

Red flag #3 was that she drank on an almost nightly basis. Whether beer or wine, it was a staple in her evenings.

 

Red flag #4 came when she didn't even want to meet up. I almost ended it at this point and wish I would have, but I felt badly because she claimed she was feeling insecure about her physical appearance and was worried that I would find her unattractive and fall out of love. We'd exchanged many pictures, but for red flag #4.5, she looked different in every single one. It was a little strange.

 

What I'll call red flag #5 was her lie about going on a family vacation at the end of August, which is when I'd wanted to fly out and meet her for the first time. August came and went and there was no family vacation.

 

By now, my trust in her was gone. She continued to lie, mostly about little things, but obvious things, and she had a penchant for being inconsiderate, ie, logging out of the chat without saying good night or goodbye to anybody, leaving me hanging for an hour in our private chat after the door allegedly rang and she said she'd be right back, and going out with her coworkers when we were supposed to hang out without even giving me the courtesy of a quick text message to inform me of the change of plans. She even started being rude, snappy, and insulting during our game. Her true colors on display.

 

(I sadly lost the entire second half of this due to getting automatically logged out, but I'll try to reproduce it as best I can in a second post)

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Romantic_Antics

The final blow came when she lost custody of her son. It takes something pretty serious for a mother to lose custody of her child. It's typically abuse, neglect, substance abuse, or more than one of the aforementioned. Her 16 year old daughter was a teen mom with a live-in boyfriend and neither of them ever showed her an ounce of respect. Her daughter's boyfriend even told her once that, "You don't even take care of your own daughter!" I'm sure it was true.

 

By now, you're probably thinking that I'm an idiot for being in this "relationship" for 5 months, but I was duped, deceived, manipulated, and ultimately clung to a fantasy that was simply not real. It's easy to preserve an ideal image of a person over long distance and it's easy to remain in love with the idea of them.

 

We were supposed to meet in October, but with my trust gone coupled with her refusal to share any recent pictures of herself with me I had serious doubts she would even show up. I decided to end the relationship and she promptly ghosted after rudely getting me involved in that particular conversation at 1 o'clock in the morning. I had so many questions and things on my mind that went unanswered and ultimately lead to me hurting very badly and without real closure. That closure will have to come from within. Narcissists like my ex never truly care about you or respect you so once the gig is up for them, they discard you without a second thought.

 

So be careful and don't be the idiot that I was, being too tolerant of red flags and lies and even allowing her to very subtly shift the blame for her lying back onto me. It was no longer about her lies and shady behavior cultivating distrust, it was about me and my apparent trust issues and insecurity. This woman left destruction in her wake, as narcissts often do, and I have been left hurting tremendously with her ghosting being her final tactic to try to get me to blame myself for everything.

 

Thanks for reading and feel free to ask me any questions if you're having doubts about your own LDR. I'll be happy to help in any way that I can.

Edited by Romantic_Antics
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I saw red flags with my ldr too but I still love him and know I'd ultimately be miserable so I have to let him break up as he has even though it's really a control tactic. He doesn't get his way he breaks up. Non-compromising. Abusive sexually thought the sex was great until he went to far one day. It's hard when the kind man I met turns into a creep. He didn't ghost me like yours has, but I too was with him for 5 months.

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Romantic_Antics

I'm sorry that happened to you and I'm glad you got away from it.

 

I no longer have any feelings of love for my ex. Sadly the ghost treatment has made me very bitter more than anything else. I personally feel that genuinely good people are capable of having a conversation with somebody who loved them deeply at one point and is left hurting and with questions. I know I've done it for ex's, but I'm a different breed of guy who probably was born into the wrong generation, and I realize that many people feel that when a relationship ends they want nothing more to do with that person. I think everybody deserves at least some semblance of decency though.

 

Even enemies can show respect and aside from certain situations there is no justifiable reason to treat an ex like an enemy. The relationship failed, but they loved you once, which is more than the stranger passing you on the street has ever done, so don't treat an ex like less than a random stranger.

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  • 2 weeks later...
CommittedToThis

OP, I am proud of you for spotting the red flags and putting it all together, good job man. You can proceed with huge confidence in life knowing you will never be manipulated in this fashion again.

 

Once you learn the red flags it's laughable how transparent these disordered types really are. They are easy to spot and therefore avoid.

 

As an older man (55) who identifies as empathetic, this is my Bible, my Quran, my Bhagavad Gita:

 

I had a weird feeling in my gut.

 

These days the slightest *ping* in my emotional center ie. that weird feeling is all I need to completely sever ties with the person.

 

I have 100% trust in my instincts. No mercy, no questions, no looking back. If I'm wrong, oh well, too bad for me, move on to the next woman who hopefully doesn't engender weird feelings in me otherwise she's history, too.

 

I'm old, I don't care if I ever meet anyone again, but when I do I am not sacrificing a single thing, I am getting *exactly* what I want.

 

Otherwise, how sad, I have to keep living this happily single and utterly drama-free life.

 

Thanks for the great post and good luck out there.

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She's 37 but how old are you?

 

I can't believe with the TV show "Catfish" being out there that people still fall for this stuff.

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She's 37 but how old are you?

 

I can't believe with the TV show "Catfish" being out there that people still fall for this stuff.

 

Who do you want to be today? ;)

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