A Week in the Life of…

It has been a long week.  My Sister going through radiation/chemo treatments for brain cancer, having just finished it for colorectal cancer, and knowing she has one more surgery and rad/chemo round to go for the third type of cancer she has Merkle carcinoma (think that’s right) on her leg.  Mom is stressing over this and having some health problems, while I am still recuperating from my hip surgery in April.  There are good things happening:  I am getting my sugar count under control, I am working out 2-4 times a week, Sis is responding to the treatment.  So what didn’t go so well?  My love life. Looking back on it, I should not have even started it, but…we are all human I guess.  I would have advised someone else against it, but you decide…

Last Friday night I was looking through “my matches” on a popular dating site.  This site would allow me to see women from 44 on up.  The site has proclaimed that allowing more age difference than this can lead to problems of things…  I prefer to look at a bit younger, but that’s the policy, so I live with it there.  Anyway, I had selected a group of women to look at.  I was seeing if proximity was a problem, if they smoked too much, too many children, and so on.  Just trying to avoid most of the problems I normally run into.

I finally had it down to 3 or 4 that I would read in depth and decide if letters were going to be sent.  One, in particular, caught my interest.  She was in her early 50s, attractive (the photos were obviously from when she was younger, but fine, deal later- why do men get in so much trouble if WE do that very same thing, but it’s okay for women?).  She lived in nearby Indianapolis.  I answered her letter, stating we should “Talk” (that means talk through the website, normally). I send it and go to the next one.  Within 5 minutes she had responded.  Her response was to say, “You’re right, we should talk” followed by her cell number.  I don’t usually do that, but I was the one who used the word “talk”, my fault, I supposed.  I send her a text and got an answer very quickly.  This conversation started at about 12:30AM and ran into the wee hours, mostly because reception in my area is so poor.  I went to sleep for a short time, waking up to realize that she had already deleted her account and I hadn’t spoken to her at all.  I was tired and upset and tried to call her number…a few beeps, nothing more.  I texted her and got an almost immediate response.  She explained all that she had done, moving most of it away with the idea that she was in the military intelligence and all were “under surveillance”.  She also was not sure what had happened, but she was 32 and stationed in New Jersey.  For the next few days we texted.  I spent some time early on researching dating scams and seeing how she fit into them.  She didn’t, but one article stated that some went on for months or years gaining your trust to get the payout at the end.

She was looking to get serious fast (one of the earmarks of scams) and was furious when she found out I could not give her children.  She then asked about adoption.  I didn’t think this was sounding much like a scam, but I didn’t tell her anything I haven’t said here or on Facebook.  We continued through the weekend. I would like to say we shared information back and forth, and we did, but each time I asked a question she would take sometimes hours to answer.  She said she was at work and couldn’t talk all the time, but this happened off-hours, too.  The worst thing that I saw was she had a temper and moved too fast through everything.  She was talking about marriage and living together and we hadn’t even met. These things finally got to me.  I ended it on Tuesday in a text that she didn’t respond to for over 6 hours.  She texted back and told me that she didn’t know why I was so negative about things, but she didn’t need that in her life. bye.

There was more, of course.  I did Google her and her pics, checked out the NJ Military base, even sending an inquiry to personnel about her existence (word of advice – be careful with that one.  You may have to tell her and that is not fun at all!).

I don’t know if I was being Catfished or if she was legit and just young and angry. Doesn’t matter now; it’s done.  I am glad.  The entire thing wore me out mentally and even physically.  It wasn’t worth it, I don’t think so, anyway…

What do you think?

Namaste, my friends,

Scott