Dating : I’ve Now Seen Both Faces of the ‘Emotional Manipulator’

I was the victim of love bombing. Fresh out of a narcissistic abusive relationship, with the kind of narcissist everyone hates, the jerk, I didn’t even see it coming. A year out of a bad two decade-plus marriage, I thought I was ready for a new relationship.

I may have been very wrong.

This relationship started with two big lies. That isn’t quite right. Let me back up…like many relationships, it started online. (Let’s call my last guy, ‘Carl.’)

Carl sent a lovely introductory letter indicating how much he admired me, how much we had in common. This stood out in a field of ‘hi,’ and ‘hey,’ introductory messages. When I looked at his profile, our ‘match’ percentage on the dating app was in the mid-nineties. A few days later, it was near one hundred.

That was the first clue, but I didn’t think anything of it. I thought, maybe it was my faulty memory, after all, Carl wasn’t the only man pursuing me on the various dating apps. I knew nothing of the chameleons of codependency, the mask of love bombing.

Carl asked me out and I said yes. The first date was a delight. He was charming and funny and on time. (They were never on time, the dates). He told me he was nearly divorced, that his marriage had been over for years, that he was ready to date again. He said that he loved plays and live performances as much as I do.

So I picked up an extra ticket to my next play and he came to pick me up. Again he was chivalrous and nice. In nearly all my dates and my marriage, I’d never experienced niceness. It was intoxicating. After the third date, though, I got a text.

There were cracks in my relationship’s foundation…they never healed. Nearly every day I tripped over one or another.

There are two things I have to tell you, it read.

Every time any man had uttered that phrase, in my short dating life, a lie was behind the ‘thing.’ This was no exception. There was a lot of coaxing, but I finally got the ‘truth’ out.

The first, “I still smoke,” he said. He’d lied on his dating profile, Carl said because he didn’t want women to exclude him for the very reason that many would exclude him. Smokers in Southern California are like raindrops, few and far between and undesired by most.

The second lie was bigger. “I’m still married.” As in she’d moved out only weeks ago and neither had filed for divorce.

All that was quickly followed up with a myriad of justifications about how he’d been sleeping on the couch for at least a year and there was no more between them. Alongside that were declarations of true love, how we had something amazing and unique, how we were meant to be together forever.

All of that would prove to be the biggest deception ever.

I was floored by lies but charmed by love.

I know that when getting to know someone, there will be discoveries and revelations, but this was a lot to take in. Carl had a lot of explanations and excuses followed by declarations of love and intention. Those last two were the putty that filled in those first cracks.

But they were always there, the cracks.

No foundation can be healed perfectly. Later he layered on top of that the fact that he’d cheated not once, but three times during his marriage, and in between his affairs, strip clubs were his indiscretion of choice.

I’d made a pact with myself to stop being the ‘cool girl,’ but I guess I’m not all the way there. My reaction was a bit of a shrug. People make mistakes. People do things to ‘stay married and stay sane.’ I have no judgment about sex work and extended that lack of judgment to its consumers. It was all rolled out under the guise of radical honesty. I took the admissions at face value.

Alongside those admissions, however, were blow by blow descriptions of every action of his wife. She came by on the regular to drop off his favorite dessert or his favorite chicken dish or freshly baked bread. She came by to pick up this or drop off that. He had a drawer full of her underwear, not the daily kind, but the sexy kind which he showed me unprompted. For someone who’d moved out, she’d left a lot behind.

It was the beginning of triangulation, pitting me against her. That behavior was topped with confessions that I was somehow a secret. Carl had to hide all evidence of my existence in case she found out. She was crazy, he said. She had abandonment issues, he said. She would take him to the cleaners in their divorce if she found out, he said. Then he hung a curtain she’d made him — this carefully sewn accessory embroidered with a bright red heart — so he wouldn’t upset her.

Half of me wanted to tell him to stop. It was hurtful to be subject to a constant litany of her pluses, how great she was in bed, how fantastic marriage had been, and her minuses, horrible parenting, lack of empathy, bad with money, and unfaithful. The other half, the analytical half of my mind didn’t want to close the door to the red flags that kept flying from his mouth.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that the choice wasn’t between listening and plugging my ears. What I deserved was someone compassionate enough not to subject me to any of it at all. All of Carl’s sharing fostered disconnection in the place where intimacy would have grown. He kept saying that his love was big, but it felt miserly and small. Because that big love, that was reserved for someone else.

The cracks continued until the one that was as big as the San Andreas fault. He announced that he still kissed his wife — on the mouth. Those were his words, unprompted (again).

In all the months that he’d been professing his love for me, he’d been kissing her. More excuses and justifications followed, she’d stopped. He had to do it to appease her. They’d only been out as a couple a few times since we’d met.

None were enough. If he wanted to continue to be in a romantic relationship with her (a marriage with her), however dysfunctional, I was happy to leave him to it.

During the last conversations before I walked away, I asked him if he thought love should be this hard or this much work. I’d been trying to decide, again, between a duality.

Either love was easy or love was hard. I thought only one could be true. That maybe love would always be like this for me. In the end, I decided that maybe there was a third answer. That both could be equally true.

Love is different for different people. For some, like him, it’s lies and anxiety and chaos. But for me, someone with a history full of abuse and trauma. For me, love will have to be easy and peaceful. There’s no other way.