He Was Ready To Move Mountains In Order to Be With Me

Alas, the best-laid plans!

There are some guys out there who fancy themselves to be a Joey Tribbiani of Friends fame. They even have the “How you doin” line pat-down. But there end the similarities. I would know because I had a brief yet disastrous encounter with a Joey wannabe during the Covid lockdown.

I expected the worst when I first signed up for a popular dating app after a long-term relationship fraught with toxicity ended.

The worst was because I believed my ex’s parting shot that he pitied me for he was convinced nobody else would have me and that I’d be alone for the rest of my life. The worst because I felt like I was just going to prove that he was right.

I mean I was seriously messed up in my head at that point and it probably wasn’t a good idea to jump into the dating pool. Perhaps I wasn’t even thinking of dating in a romantic sense but more about making a connection with a kindred soul.

To my shock, within a few hours, I had hundreds of likes and was being bombarded by messages.

I deleted my account.

It took me another few months to try again. This time I was more prepared in the sense that I knew what to expect and how to use filters to narrow down the search.

More or less the same thing happened which led me to believe that many guys randomly right-swipe on everybody in order to maximize their potential matches. I mean it would certainly not be on account of my bio because I have never applied my writing skills to creating the ultimate dating profile.

In fact, I love to read what others write on their dating profiles — entire past, present, and future — and go Wow! In those instances, I can sense my writerly instincts practically pleading for an opportunity to revamp these chaotic and disorganized bios.

But I digress.

Within a couple of hours on the dating app, I matched with someone whom I thought interesting and we started exchanging messages. He was polite and asked all the right questions without sounding pushy.

Brownie points.

We progressed to a phone conversation and decided to meet for coffee.

Looking back, maybe I wasn’t ready for what unfolded. I mean, I really hadn’t thought beyond a coffee and conversation — maybe some light flirting — something to break up the monotony of life.

But after the second date, he said something that scared the crap out of me: “I adore you.”

Huh?

“Dang, dude! It’s only the second date and you’re thinking of an exclusive relationship already?”

He was getting ahead of himself making plans to buy a house in my town to be closer to me.

In hindsight, I get why.

He was separated from his wife. She did not willingly agree to the divorce and often manipulated the situation, leveraging their two young children for her own benefit. Due to the pandemic, their divorce proceedings were repeatedly postponed, leaving him in a state of limbo.

We found each other during a time of upheaval in both our lives — seeking respite from the unrelenting present and the inescapable grip of the past.

In other words, it was a rebound for both of us.

He yearned for the stability that came from domestic bliss. I was like a cat who had devoured a bowl of cream. I mean, after I had been through my nightmarish marriage, here I was with a handsome guy who was younger than me and adored the ground I trod on.

However, like in every fairy tale, the cracks began to appear before long.

It didn’t help that he was a manual junkie.

By that I mean he was that guy who had been burned badly in marriage once and was now determined to do everything right. He spent so many hours reading up on how the perfect relationship worked that he lost all sense of spontaneity and room for organic growth.

Conversations with him began to sound like a job interview (as his potential partner) and annoyingly, every roadblock in our budding situationship was navigated by him looking it up in the frigging relationship manual written by best-selling author, Ms. Know it All.

Forget the fact that none of Miss Know-it-All’s relationships have lasted more than a couple of years to date.

However, the biggest red flag for me is that he kept things for me.

In any relationship, I take pride in my ability to be candid about my past, even though at times, this honesty may come at a personal cost. In compassionate moments, I felt like he was trying not to scare me away by revealing the vastness of his responsibilities. But those moments never lasted long because by doing that, he not only put me in a difficult position but his entire family as well.

Sometimes spouses continue to have strong feelings for their exes, even when their marriage has ended. The downside is that they may find it challenging to accept the news that their ex-partner has moved on with someone else. I am still not sure if this might have been what triggered the mental health breakdown in his former spouse. I had no prior knowledge that she had been living with a serious mental health condition for an extended period and had ceased taking her medications until I received a call from the hospital where she had been admitted.

He was calling for a break till he navigated the crisis.

What do I say to that?

My best friend told me he was just making up excuses to exit. Otherwise, he would have been upfront about such things from the beginning. I prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt.

However, I could never see him again in the same light.

Because I just could not wrap my head around the fact that he was attempting to forge the ideal relationship while ignoring the turmoil festering in his personal life.

Talk about being a third wheel while being completely unaware of my status as a third wheel who had been invited to a casual backyard barbecue, and what was meant to be a relaxed and enjoyable gathering took an unexpected turn. In the sense that the grill suddenly exploded creating a firestorm in the process.

Nobody said I didn’t have a knack for getting into incredibly awkward situations.