I Found Out He Was A Nerd. So I Dumped Him.

And I lied to him about the break-up, too.

I should be furious at my ex, Stephen. At least, that’s what people who knew our relationship say to me.

I figured they would quit being on my side once they knew how I broke up with him. Bold-face lying as a breakup excuse doesn’t score brownie points with your nearest and dearest, even if they’re meant to take your side.

I would’ve thought my admission of lying and lack of sincere apology would also be a blight on my name. I guess his lying first trumped my lying last.

You see, my ex, Stephen, lied to me from the beginning. Our relationship never stood a chance, considering how everything changed when he came clean.

His revelation, the secret he kept, altered every part of our dynamic. We were good, fine, and progressing well until he dropped this lie on my lap.

Stephen lied about being a nerd, and I could never forgive him for it.

In the summer of 2009, I spent my days grinding at a shoe store and my nights celebrating milestone twenty-first birthdays. With a European vacation looming six months later, I funnelled every cent from my paycheque into my holiday fund.

By the weekend of Rachel’s end-of-summer birthday party, I was lamenting the repetition of my life. Luckily, her’s was one of the last. As I discovered entering the party, it was a reunion of sorts. Her parent’s backyard was filled with familiar faces, mostly of boys who had once dated one of my girlfriends.

I knew most of them by name, almost all by face. Yet one or two were unfamiliar to me, one of them being Stephen.

During a moment when I found myself alone, Stephen introduced himself. By the night's end, he was charming me with stories of the birthday girl and growing up just around the corner from my family home.

Stephen seemed like a nice guy, and we kissed and swapped numbers; he promised to call me the next day.

I almost couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw his name appear on my phone only sixteen hours later. He made a promise to me, and he kept it.

At twenty-one, you don’t expect guys to call you or to keep a promise like this.

During the infamous phone call, he asked me out on a date, suggesting we hang out at his place one night during the week. I was taken aback by how forward it seemed, but I had yet to encounter this rare side of dating—almost grown-up dating.

I immediately said yes.

Standing outside the shoe shop, I spied Stephen, as promised, to pick me up for our date. Kissing him on the cheek, he noted, “You look beautiful.”

“Thank you.” We stood for a moment as the deafening silence overtook us. I was desperate for it to cease. “So, should we get going to your house?”

“Yes, it’s this way.” Stephen began to walk, pointing up the hill past the shops and towards a set of houses. “I live just up there.”

“Did you walk here?” He nodded. Without him saying anything, I followed his lead, concluding that we would be walking to his house.

I didn’t mind walking to his house, by the way. I was a gym junkie, using an excuse to move more. But when he said he would pick me up from work, I assumed he meant he was driving. He did have his driver's license. He told me about that at the party.

Yet, in the daylight, I wondered whether I had made that conversation up. Or whether his promise to pick up was a misconstrued lie by him or a misinterpretation from me. Somewhere, we had our wires crossed.

I don’t remember much about the date. He cooked me dinner, watched a movie, and took me for a tour of his home. He showed me his bedroom, a gesture not done in a sleazy, suggestive way.

I could tell Stephen was genuinely showing me around his life.

“You keep your room so clean,” I noted, his desk almost blank except for a few books with a laptop perched on top. In the corner of the room, containers were stacked uniformly.

“This is how I always keep it,” Stephen proudly declared.

Date number two, and we were welcoming Groundhog Day. Dinner, pool and hanging out at his house.

Date number three, and aside from an introduction to his friends, were doing Groundhog Day again. Adam and Paul were like sidekicks, only absent for the last week to give us time to get to know each other. I wasn’t sure whether this admission was their invitation for me to thank them for the space.

I had to admit meeting his friends and his sister that night was a highlight. They were all such wonderful people, and I could see why they were like family to each other. They brought me in like I was one of their own almost immediately.

I’ve never found their energy or inclusiveness within any other people since.

A couple of weeks passed, and we continued to date. I began staying at his house. His parents were always working overseas, so it made more sense than to be at my house with the chaos of my family.

As days became nights and then into days again, Stephen and I discovered each other’s routines. He studied part-time at a local TAFE and didn’t have a job.

To maintain a social life, he was lavished with money from his parents, the pair agreeing to keep paying him until he finished his education.

In my not-so-wise youthful wisdom, I convinced myself our opposing attitude to money was a quirk of our relationship. He kept his hand out whilst I slaved for every cent. I worked since my fifteenth birthday; he had yet to experience the necessity of employment.

Our misaligning values could be forgiven, considering Stephen didn’t have outlandish expenses.

His meek closet wasn’t filled with designer threads, nor did he harbour aspirations to become a fashion snob. He confined his social life to the walls of private school homes.

No one in their conceivable mind could label Stephen a “big spender”.

Yet, he was broke most of the time. All of his money went to models. Forget Victoria's Secret, think more fantastical.

Those perfectly positioned crates tucked in the corner of his room were filled with model aeroplanes and fantasy world action figures. He and his friends, who so lovingly accepted me into their circle, would spend entire weekends building models.

Stephen had entered his models into several competitions and won many titles. He wasn’t just good at it.

Adam, Stephen’s friend, explained that competitions were the tip of the iceberg. The obsession began in high school, where Stephen, Adam and Paul bonded over their nerdy habit.

Their words, not mine.

Once Reddit was born, the boys migrated to online communities whilst still socialising at the occasional swap meets.

This was a whole new world for me. I didn’t know anyone who was into making models. But what happened next caught me off guard.

After this confession, I discovered Stephen had lied to me.

The day before our first date, the three friends rallied in Stephen’s bedroom, their objective to transform his sleeping quarters into an acceptable scene.

They stripped his bedroom of any models or related paraphernalia a lamens would associate with making models. Deciding to hide the models in plain sight, they ventured to the local Kmart, stocking up on the grey crates I spotted in his room. They attempted to hide everything inside the opaque boxes before returning to the store to buy more.

Adam applauded me for my reaction when I learned about the models, a recognition I didn’t believe I deserved. I hadn’t said anything, good or bad. All I had done was listen as my boyfriend told me the story of his lying.

Stephen’s friend explained that when most people find out their partner is a nerd, they run for the hills.

It was at that moment that I put the two and two together. Making models was a nerdy hobby. This was behaviour straight out of The Big Bang Theory playbook. In this situation, I was Penny, except without the apartment exploding with science, gaming and comic book paraphernalia.

The night I found out, I went home, wondering how I felt about the situation. Should it matter he was a nerd? Should I care?

A day after the revelation, I returned to Stephen’s house after spending a night alone to marinate the news. Arriving at his home, I was determined not to let the situation turn weird.

Yet, when I put my bag in his bedroom, the once pristine desk was now covered in models. The crates were no longer in use; instead, they were open, the floor covered in everything once hidden.

I couldn’t find anywhere for my bag to go. As Stephen claimed I could keep my things in the hallway, he shoved a piece of paper into my hand.

“Don’t lose it,” he pressured me. “It’s your ticket for the swap meet on Sunday.”

Seizing the paper, my hands trembled. What had happened? Yesterday, we were dating in black; today, it was white. And worse, it wasn’t like he had a criminal record or had cheated on an ex. He wasn’t an axe murderer.

I found out that he was a nerd. It wasn’t exactly something you could dump someone over.

Yet, as my fingers danced over the edges of the paper, I couldn’t help but feel mad. He had sold a version of himself that wasn’t correct. He didn’t mention anything about this huge and important side of his life.

“Why didn’t you tell me about your hobby?” I blurted out.

“I was afraid if I told you about it, you wouldn’t want to go on another date with me.”

I know I should have been sympathetic. Any ordinary, compassionate, kind-hearted woman would think this romantic. Not me. Instead, I could only focus on how he deliberately hid this part of his life—a large part of his life, passion, and how he spent his time.

I didn’t have the heart to point out the problem in this scenario. What would’ve happened if I found out later and didn’t like what I saw? And what was going to happen now that exact scenario had played out?

I didn’t care about him being a nerd. It wasn’t like I was going to dump him because it turned out he was a closet nerd, and I didn’t like nerds. Nothing of the sort.

The real problem?

I didn’t enjoy how he had lied to me and deliberately deceived me, trapping me into a relationship with him. And when the cat was out of the bag, he became completely different. As time passed, the nerd life overtook everything else, and our relationship was unrecognisable from when we began dating.

Only a few weeks later, I broke up with Stephen and blamed it on the fact that I was heading to Europe and didn’t know when I would return.

Riddled with guilt, I felt like a disappointment to women, to me, to the dating code. I lied to him about why I was breaking up with him.

Yet, I knew I couldn’t tell him that it was because he had lied to me in the first place. The optics wouldn’t be in my favour. It would make me look shallow.

Even if I had explained how starting our relationship with a lie infuriated me, I would’ve come across as the bad guy.

But you don’t have to be a dating expert to know starting a relationship on a lie will never end well. Even if the lie seems harmless, the other person will always feel deceived. They will always feel like you can’t be trusted. They’ll always wonder what else you’re hiding from them about your life.

And if you value honesty and integrity, which most people do, this is a lie that people can’t return from. A lie is a lie, plain and simple.

When people talk about dating women and how complicated it is or how the entire dating process is complex, I think of Stephen.

There isn’t anything complicated about being honest. There isn’t anything complicated about building a relationship on honesty. Even if you think what you’ve done is horrible, and no one is going like you for it, it will never get better as a relationship deepens. It’s always going to get worse.

I felt firsthand how the pain worsened.

What I hate the most about my experience is how cliche it is. I hate that. A person hides their true self to impress the other person. How predictable.

I also have to be the woman who was lied to by a man in the beginning. I also hate that.

I’m a woman who couldn’t overcome the lie, work through it, and forget it ever happened. I hate how I’m the unforgiving woman.

I also hate that the lie happened to be that he was a nerd, and then it makes me look shallow because it looks like I can’t get over his nerdy persona.

What I don’t hate is what I ended up doing. I don’t regret breaking up with him.

I dodged a bullet.

In my mind, I dodged a liar who was more worried about impressing me with a fake version of himself rather than being authentic.

I’ll take an honest nerd any day.

I’m here to use my wins and losses in life, business and relationships as your cautionary tale | http://www.ellenjellymcrae.com/