Since we’re on a bit of a Red flag Roll, here’s another blog post I read this morning that is FULL of them. Single Dating Diva has been gracious enough to let me deconstruct it. She’s not going to curl up in the fetal position and cry in the corner and run to twitter and tell everyone about her omigod “haters” and lock up her tweets. She’s got guts, so let’s keep that in mind when we’re commenting.

Okay. Read the story here first.

Ready? Okay.

So my “friend” and I have been friends for a while.  We met as colleagues but he was in the land of far far away and I was here in Canada.

Now, I’m going to take this to mean that they never actually met. SDD has confirmed this. By the time this all went down, they had known each other via work for a little over a year. The “romantic” development began the spring of this year.

We have been through various ups and downs together, as friends.  We’ve been there for each other through some of our hardest challenges.  This brought us closer together and created a very trusting and loving relationship….  It was great, since we had the solid friendship base it was an easy transition into romance.  There was love there already.

As we discussed yesterday, many women have a tendency to idealize relationships and dynamics. Their FWBs are “good friends” who “respect and care for them.” Reality? They’re just guy who don’t treat them poorly.  There’s no tangible or hard evidence proving this alleged loyalty and respect. It’s all in the woman’s mind. That’s especially easy to do when you have no first hand, in person experience dealing with someone. So, while SDD believes that they have been through ups and downs, she doesn’t know him well enough to have a baseline of his behavior. Establishing that takes time. It also takes face to face interaction. A lot of it. This bond that she and this friend of hers developed likely didn’t actually exist to the depths she believes it did.

We also decided not to mention it to any of our other colleagues so as to not create a weird situation in case it didn’t work out.  Actually, I didn’t really mind telling people, but he was adamant we didn’t.

Bam. There’s the first real red flag. Why was he “adamant” that she not tell anyone?

All was great and, he being the type to “shout it from the rooftops” that he was in love, he did.  But he didn’t mention any names.  He wrote publicly that he had met someone very special and only had eyes for her.  No one really asked who it was…I was asked by one of our colleagues and was forced by him to lie (sorry!).

And there’s the next red flag. So, he’s adamant that she not tell anyone, but he runs to Facebook and announces it? Inconsistency. Plus, the announcement was vague. No names. That’s convenient.  When men make public declarations like this, usually if not exclusively it is for the benefit of the woman he’s dating. Guys don’t typically get all mushy in public. In private? Sure. But not in public. If he does it in public it’s because he’s trying to prove something to the woman he’s dating or someone else.  Finally, nobody asked him who the lucky lass was. Know why? They probably already knew. Or they didn’t care, as this guy has a habit of falling in and out of love.

The reasons why a man will ask a woman to hide something are that he’s either very private, embarrassed by something about the relationship OR he’s being dishonest in some way. Since he ran to Facebook and announced this, the “very private” excuse doesn’t cut it.

He would call me his “missus”, he sent me love songs, talked about the future, even talked about buying furniture together for one of his homes.  So he booked his flight here to visit and when the day came for him to come he was so excited, sent me several text messages and then he had problems getting on the flight.  So he supposedly spent the entire weekend looking for a way to get here “because I was worth all the hardship and trouble” he said.  He wasn’t successful.

See, this sort of behavior feels really childish. Especially the effusive compliments. I’ll take Spring to mean May or June. So then they’ve basically been flirting for 3 months. Maybe 2. Somebody talking about buying furniture with you after dating 3 months, let alone”dating,” should raise that red flag. We don’t know exactly what was said. He could have made a joking reference to needing her help shopping for a couch. Who knows? In any case, 3 months of non-in person interaction is not nearly enough time to have such conversations. I don’t care what anybody says. When I hear these stories of people meeting over the internet and never meeting for a year but falling in love, I roll my eyes. Something is off about that. It might work, of course. But only because the two people are of the same emotional/social maturity level.

So he cancels this trip that he was super excited to take. Hmmm…red flag.  Then he evades her for the next few days. That, my friends, is when her internal warning system went off.

But instead of just dropping him and letting him show her if he was being genuine, SDD decided to “trap” him in his lies. Which, for future reference  ,is a giant waste of energy and time. This is something women do because it makes it seem like they are taking control of the situation. Except they’re not. They’re hoping against hope that they haven’t been duped.

The next day he sent me a message that someone very close to him was very ill and in the hospital.  So he couldn’t talk.   Each day that went by, I was more and more patient.  But he started speaking to me less and less.   Even responses to my emails were becoming a rare treat.    He said it was because he was spending all his time at the hospital with this person who was ill who the doctor’s gave a negative prognosis.  I tried to be loving and supportive and told him I would fly there to be with him even if that meant I was sitting in a hospital all day.  I didn’t care.  That’s what you do for your friends and those you love without thinking twice.

No. That’s what you do for someone you actually know because you’ve met them in person. This is how women get scammed online. They believe the unbelievable. We’ve all been there. I’ve been there.  When all the pieces fall together, it’s  a punch to the gut.

A few days after that, I was online and saw pictures of one of our other colleagues (who was even further away from him geographically than I was).  So I looked through the pictures and saw him in one of the pictures with her. Hmm, I thought, that’s strange, he was spending day and night at the hospital with this ill person.  So I sent him a message asking him if she was in the land of far far away and that I saw him with her.  His prompt reply was that she was there for “business” and promised he would take her for lunch and that I should “not panic”.

This is why I say that trying to “catch” someone in a lie is a waste of time. They’re just going to lie, and you’re going to believe them because you want to. If you were ready to not believe what they say, you’d have ditched them by now. That’s why you don’t ask leading questions. When you find yourself at that point, you just leave. She had photographic evidence that he was out and about at a time when he said he was stressed out by a sick loved one. Case closed.

The reveal? He was dating someone else who lived out of town. Shocker.

But a couple of days later, I woke up in the middle of the night and I felt the urge to go check the other woman’s account.  So I did.  Lo and behold pictures of them together doing various activities looking quite happy together.

Annnnd….scene.

Funny thing is that if he had been honest from the start with me we could have at the very least salvaged the friendship.

If SDD took anything from this situation, it should be that there was never a friendship to begin with.