juddykun

(Warning: what you are about to read is based on actual people and events)

Chapter 1.

So I'll just begin by stating that this all took place over the course of only about two months so let's just jump right in at the very beginning...

It's near the end of September and I've been playing around, not very seriously mind you, with online dating after a coworker divulged the nature of how he met his amazing new girlfriend.

Now I've been single for over two years up to this point and have been secure and happy with myself whilst taking great steps toward achieving my entrepreneurial goals recently. The last thing on my mind was trying to fit in a new relationship.

But alas I am only human and curiosity blended with just the right amount of lonliness spurred me on to explore this new method of finding a potential mate; if only for the novelty of having some fun conversations along with the slight possibility of finding love.

So about two weeks into my new foray and I come across a very intriguing profile of a woman who seemed to be quite the enigma. Her profile described herself as brilliant and brash to sum it up. She was gorgeous and apparently did some modeling, was a sponsored Spartan athlete, a SG Hopeful, and a serious tomboy. Top it all off with being a nerdy introverted scientist and my heart nearly stopped dead just from having read about her.

Now, to be fair, it was also disclosed that she was into some very macabre stuff and considered herself to be quite crass. But the fact that she worked in a real laboratory then went bow hunting and played drums to blow off steam really seemed to overshadow those minor details.

So I took a chance and sent her a message with absolutely zero expectations that I'd hear back from such a "rad hotty."

But then it happened. I got a message back a few days later from her asking if I would like to meet up for a show which happened to be at the club a few doors down from my place of work. But I had already made plans to meet up with someone else that night so I politely declined and asked of we could do it another time. I didn't hear back right away so I figured I simply missed the train on that one. Darn!

And then came the next surprise. She hit me up the next evening and asked if I'd like to come over to her place for a drink. She mentioned that most people seem wary of such an invitation from someone they've never met. And, although I could grasp what she meant, I also was feeling quite adventurous and not intimidated in the slightest. So I made the fateful decision that night to venture forth into unknown territory...

Chapter 2.

After a quick after-work libation with my crew, I made my way over to her place. I knocked, and the door promptly opened to a very relaxed and darling little redhead wearing a black tank top and hospital scrubs. She had a drink in one hand and an alluring smile on her pretty yet strangly distant face. I just chalked it up to her maybe having a bit of a buzz going. Needless to say I was far from disappointed with the figure standing before me.

I stepped inside to what ended up being quite the romantic evening of nerdy banter, playing around with her electron microscope, having her run my blood type, and seemingly fully enjoying each other's company. The night did not end there.

The next morning I woke up beside her and realized I had pretty much fallen in love at first sight and that my heart now belonged to this woman for better or worse. We stayed together every day from then on. My place essentially became a glorified storage unit with a bed. I proceeded to cook for her and clean her place every day after returning home from work and generally just tried my best to be a great boyfriend.

(Now, for the sake of pacing, I will only relay pertinent information in much less detail.)

We went on a good number of fantastically romantic and fun dates, over the course of the relationship, which only helped to strengthen the bond that I felt with her. By the next couple weeks she even invited me to go look for a place together!

But it became apparent from early on that she was quite the alcoholic and was clearly stifling some kind of deeply rooted pain with this behavior. She was also just very negative in general about things such as society and people and revealed herself to be a racist and homophobe. Also she became extremely verbally abusive and judgmental and turned out to be an extreme narcissist and pathological liar as well. And to top things off I have been classified as "hyper-sensitive," which means that my empathic nature allows me to absorb the energy and feelings of those within close proximity to me. I was quickly being drawn into her spiral of negative emotions. But I was too far gone to make the right choice to bail at the first sign of trouble. I was so into the good side of her that I justified in my mind the fact that I was being horribly mistreated.

Inevitably the bad soon began outweighing the good and everything started declining between us very rapidly. I was very submissive the whole time to her bullshit too due to her genius at manipulation. I hardly noticed that I wasn't "allowed" to listen to my kind of music anymore or enjoy things like beers and karaoke. But holy fuck the sex we had was topping the charts! I now reflect and realize that this may have been her most powerful weapon to use against me.

Long story short we had a fight the week before Thanksgiving during which she requested some "space." I went home for a few days over which we emailed back and forth about the current status of our relationship. The conversation seemingly ended ok with plans to go see a show the next day.

Well I decided the next morning to stop by her place to grab my toll bridge pass. There was a car I didn't recognize in the driveway but I didn't think much of it. Only after I let myself in and discovered a pair of shoes on the floor that weren't mine did my stomach turn for the worse.

I opened the door to her bedroom and all my fears came true...

Chapter 3.

I pulled back the covers to find my girlfriend naked in bed with a naked dude that definitely wasn't me.

I tried to wake her up but she was in a drunken state of unconsciousness. I ended up waking up the guy beside her first and he helped rouse her the rest of the way. I then asked him to leave so that I could discuss, in private, some matters with my woman that had just come to light.

At that point she was awake enough to start in on me for "invading her privacy," and how dare I ask her "guest" to leave. He left. Turns out after a long talk with her that it was her ex-husband who cheated on her four years ago and with whom she claimed to have much reason to despise.

In the long run she refused to be held accountable for her actions by claiming that she had "mentally" broke up with me before this went down. Still that would have been no more than ten hours prior to my heart breaking discovery.

Anyway I still, for some reason, in the end decided that I would accept that "fact" so that we might continue the relationship from square one. My mistake. I learned that it is extraordinarily difficult to erase that kind of image from your mind in order to move on. Also that kind of put a damper on my trust in her in general for whatever reason.

So a strange week of avoiding the subject passed when things broke out into a fight again after her general negativity came back around, and again she requested "space." It was much harder to leave that time without feeling like someone may be about to come take my place.

The next day I get a crazy text from her that I need to go get an STD test because apparently I gave her something and she was furious to the point of threatening me with physical violence.

None of it made sense to me though as she was the first woman I had been with in over a year and I had been completely faithful to her. But nevertheless she drilled into me all the shame, guilt, and despair that comes with something like that by insisting that it had to be me.

My heart sank and panic ensued. I pulled myself together enough though to head to a clinic the next day and do the right thing. But my test results came up negative which only served to make me question which kind of lie she was now spinning. Was she cheating the whole time and caught something or did she make it all up to scare me?! Didn't really matter though because she insisted at that point that the test I took was inaccurate and she wouldn't believe it until I took another more painful one. So I did.

And somehow we were still "together" during all of this but now my feelings for her and my trust had begun to wither and die. We made it through Thanksgiving and then I just couldn't handle it any longer after one last "routine" squabble and got the hell out that weekend.

Since then my secondary results came back and proved that I was clean and confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt that she had violated me in the most disrespectful and malicious way that I've ever experienced in my life. Not to mention I had to pay out-of-pocket for these lab results which costed me over $1000!

The silver lining out of all this is that I dodged several bullets in that I didn't catch a disease from this person and in the end did not move in and try to maintain a severely toxic relationship.

The pain from this has been a whole new experience for me but I have the comfort in knowing that I did absolutely nothing to deserve being treated that way. I just clicked the wrong fucking button at the wrong fucking time. But the really sick thing is this: at the end of the day I still love her and just feel sorry for her that whatever is causing her to behave that way must be pain and suffering at an unimaginable level. We could have been such great friends too and the loss of that is something I will always mourn. I just hope that someday, before she drinks herself to death, that she might find a moment of clarity and start on a path to recovering from whatever is eating at her soul.

All I can say now is that I will never jump into something so fully with my eyes closed and my heart open in such a manner again.