Why Lie? We Don't Go Together!

As usual, I have to begin every entry on life, love, and dating with the way I have made ginormous mistakes and, eventually, learned from them.  In that spirit, I need to begin this particular topic with a guy we'll call Adonis (names have been changed to prevent legitimate legal action LOL).  I met Adonis online a few years ago and we met at a diner in Brooklyn.  He's really kind of attractive and, when I was younger and fully and ridiculously stupid, those sorts of things clouded my judgment.....but not my ability to sniff out bullshit.  That skill will remain sharpened at all times no matter how fine a guy is LOL!

But I digress.  Adonis was hot and he seemed normal as we ate some breakfast at The Arch.  But then my (thank you Katt Williams for this term) N**** Spidey Sense started to go off as he spoke.  As a general note, guys (and gals, for that matter) will likely tell you EVERYthing you need to know within the first 14 days of meeting and talking to them.  It's a fact.  My friends and I have proven this time and time again.  Adonis was no different except it didn't take 14 days.

It took 35 minutes and employed the tried and true intentional, vague misdirection.

Adonis referred to his "ex" a few times and mentioned, sort of casually, that he and his ex still lived together.  He said that he was trying to be the nice guy since she didn't have a job, her family lived in Jersey, and she had nowhere to go.  Some women, younger and dumber than I was at the time, might think "Oh, he's so sweet to not put her out on the street."  The rest of us, however, immediately have the following thoughts.  He is either:

1) Living in a situation where she is actually NOT the ex and they are still together.
2) Living with his ex and still boinking.
3) An artful combination of both 1 and 2.

I chose to go with Option 2 because it relieved me of the moral quagmire of dealing with a technically involved man.  I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, and believe he was just being a nice guy, but my brain wouldn't let me.  It just wouldn't let me do it.  So I rationalized myself into the lesser of two evils and kept it moving.  I also noticed he did not clarify the category of ex.  Ex-girlfriend or ex-wife?  Eh well.  He was hot.  Whatever.

This all happened in the span of about 25 seconds.  We women make these decisions pretty quickly.

Anyway, Adonis, during dinner/breakfast, also gave me one of those, like, homemade, ratchet business cards saying he was trying to start a business.  If I remember correctly, he was working on a line of sneakers or lingerie for plus sized women.  Maybe sports gear for plus sized women?  I'm a little bit hazy on the details of the charade he had created, but the important thing to remember is that he gave me a card.  With this full name on it.  And phone number.  And email address.  Ladies, you know exactly where I'm going with this.

Investigation.  Straight #sherlockholmes status.

So after our rendezvous that night, I went home and did some research.  And I found the following item:

Yes, and there it is.  He was actually still married; there was no ex.  It was just his wife.  I then did some extra searching, found his address, when he bought and how much he paid for his house, and some other nifty details (he's a "devout" Mason).  I relished the moment when I casually dropped this bomb mentioned this information to him.  It was over sushi at my former favorite Japanese place and he'd had some sake.  I was waiting for just the right moment, because I wanted it to be perfect and I wanted to capture his reaction forever in my mind.  Everything went perfectly and he knew, or at least should have known, that the game had surely changed.  I no longer believed anything he said, even though he continued trying to lie.  Poor thing.

As a random follow up, I noticed (because he and I had become Facebook friends) that a picture with a familiar background popped up in my newsfeed one day.

Most of you may not know me or the places I've lived but that's my former bathroom LOL!  This dude took this selfie in my bathroom, with my bright yellow sink and facial cleansers on the counter LOL!  I found it quite hilarious and promptly posted it on my page for the ridicule it deserved.

Anyway, moving right along.


My reveling in his discomfort probably says more about me than him but so be it.  I enjoy catching people in their lies especially when they make it so very easy.  More importantly, though, I have to wonder why some guys will go out of their way to tell such horrific and easily traceable lies.  I mean, fundamentally, WE DON'T GO TOGETHER.  I have not asked you the questions that would even require such a lie which means you're lying just to be lying.  Just because it sounds good coming out of your mouth and, likely, because you think it's true I want to hear this nonsense.  Like, you think I will like you more if you tell me these stories despite the fact that your behavior and shadiness doesn't give you away.

Sir, you're not as smart as you are good looking you think.

I have a friend who has a friend who was so stealth about her lie tracking abilities that she went to the odometer on her man.  You know how the mafia goes to the proverbial mattresses when things get sticky?  Yeah, she went to the odometer like that.  Apparently it is 20 miles between the home and work, where her man dropped her off.  Somehow, however, when he arrived to pick her up, there were only 18 miles recorded.  So, to recap....

Not only did he recognize that whatever he was doing was wrong, but he knew that he should at least try to rewind the odometer to cover his tracks.

Except his math wasn't that good....so close, yet so far....

Another friend was dealing with this guy we'll call Fuqua.  Fuqua was CONSTANTLY trying to insinuate himself into her social circle, catching an attitude if he wasn't invited to the latest cookout or party, and assuming that every stop in New York meant he would use her place as a hotel visit for the overnight.  Fuqua was friendly enough and made kind of the perfect "+1" if you needed a cool person to laugh at things with.  He certainly wasn't "man" material and there was never any expectation that things would progress beyond where they were.  Except, Fuqua kept behaving in ways that appeared to be contradictory to that entire agreement.

You see, Fuqua had children and one of the cardinal rules, that is clearly and explicitly understood among my group of friends, is that you don't meet kids and/or other family members unless things are really serious.  People obviously need to be vetted by friends, but family is a whole other issue.  So, for all these years, my friend never met dude's family or his kids.  He, however, kept talking like he wanted more but couldn't seem to make his behavior match up.  He would tell her he was into and interested in her and then disappear for months....until he needed a hotel to visit New York.







 But then when my friend would say, clearly you need some time and space to yourself - the time and space he would provide for himself by these self-imposed hiatuses - he would try to swing back into the picture, reinvent the "I'm feeling you and want to spend time together" speech, and the cycle would begin again.  We would all roll our eyes but Fuqua had a lot of jokes.  He was kind of like Kevin Hart if he had all the funny sucked out of him just, umm, maybe not that a little less funny.

Recently, he reached out to do the "Maintenance Hello".  You guys know that contact; where you touch base just in case, later, you want to ignite an old, extinguished flame that should have been thoroughly doused that may still have an ember or two still hot because you're kind of bored the regular contact keeps it smoldering.  Anyway, he reached out a couple of months ago.  My friend responded, and he never responded back. Typical.  But then a picture surfaced on his Facebook page.  This picture was with a woman - a woman who was not, surprise surprise, my homegirl.  The comments on the photo alluded to the fact that he had been in a relationship with this woman for a year; they were celebrating their anniversary.

Oh?






So, you can do this Ember Maintenance with someone you claim you're into all the while you're ACTUALLY in a relationship with someone else?  You'll introduce, apparently, a myriad of women to your children so that assures they'll have a really good understanding of how relationships between men and women work.  Good job, sir.  GTFOHWTBS This, right here, is the level of your fail as a father.



WHYYYY go through the drama?  Guys, at times, will say they don't want drama except for the fact that their lies create the very drama they claim they want to avoid.  We're in the 21st century so women are not always trying to tie somebody down, marry them, and populate the earth with tons of kids.  We're all just trying to find people and/or situations that make us happy and keep our lives in balance.  Lying just really messes all of that up.

Recently, a guy on POF reached out to re-establish contact after inboxing me about a year ago, expressing interest, and then disappearing.  We spoke Friday and were supposed to have brunch today, except - true to form and as predicted - there was no outreach and no brunch.  See, I've gotten to the point where I decide, pretty quickly, if you're full of BS and this dude was SURELY full of it.  The sad, sad part (as I slept through most of the morning until the early afternoon because I had a WICKED game of squash after a killer workout yesterday) is that he really, really thought I believed we were going out.  He got upset when I had that tone of incredulity in our communication around the brunch and he went to great lengths to assure me this time was different.


OF COURSE this time was not different and it only affirmed my notion that dudes lie just to be lying.  And that's a huge problem.  I mean, we've all told a lie before - we've all sinned and fallen short of the glory.  But dang, dudes, ya'll take it to a WHOLE new level.  Like, you are really doing the most.  Not only is it important to you to tell the lie and try to make it convincing, but you insist upon telling the lie until you feel we actually believe you.


The truth is we never believe you.  We always know the truth and we will Sherlock Holmes you, when appropriate, to get to the bottom of things when they sound ridiculous and fishy.  Chances are it is in your ENTIRELY AND WHOLLY best interest to be honest from the door.  It saves everybody a lot of eye rolling and side eye in the future LOL!  Because, at this rate, I don't know how much side eye I have left in me.  My eyes might get stuck like that.

I'd Like My Eggs Over Medium, Please.....

One of my closest friends is odd.  Well, most of my friends are odd because I'm odd.  So let me begin again.

I have a really good friend I've known since I was a freshman in college.  Since I'm 36, as of the writing of this particular post, I have known her half of my life.  She knows a lot about me and my habits, of course, and I'm pretty confident I know a lot about her and her habits.  One of our mutual habits is the need for food at particular times of the day.  Breakfast, as it turns out, is one of the meals we like to have often.  I prefer mine daily.  Her?  Maybe less so!  When we're able to grab breakfast together, she knows what I'll be ordering and I know what she'll be ordering.  My order is boring.  There is a lot of swine.  My homegirl?

"I'd like two eggs, over medium."

OK.  I don't know how many of you enjoy this particular style of egg but, from what I can tell, it's hard to get right.  An egg cooked not long enough is over easy - no bueno.  An egg cooked too long is over hard - no bueno.  The over medium egg is more art than science, I've come to find out, and many chefs we've experienced are not artists.  The eggs rarely come out the way she wants them and I ask, "Yo, WHY do you keep ordering eggs over medium?  You know they never get it right!" and I have this, like, annoyed, exasperated, but still sort of amused chuckle that accompanies the question I've been asking her for almost twenty years.  And her response has been the same...

"Because one day, they'll get it right."

And such is the crux of the breakfast quagmire.  Do you order what you know is easy for people to make?  Or do you keep trying to get the thing you want because you know, when you get it, it'll be divine?

These are the same questions I find myself asking as I try to navigate this mystical world of dating in the 21st century.  I bet you didn't think I could make eggs and dating go together.  You were wrong.

It's ok.

So, yeah, that response, or rather the spirit behind it, is the crux of both the breakfast quagmire as well as the dating quagmire.  As I mentioned earlier, I'm 36.  When you round up, my age becomes 40.  So I'm almost 40, I'm (deliberately) single, I have a dog and a cat (because having more than 1 cat automatically equals Cat Lady status), own my own home, and drive a car that's leased under my name.  I work, I go to the gym, and I spend more time with spreadsheets that I ever thought was humanly possible.

I enjoy my single life to the extent that I am extraordinarily appreciative of the freedom I have.  I've been in relationships where I just wished I was out of them on any given day.  I also know people who stay in relationships simply because they are afraid to be alone.  I am thankful to every possible deity that this is not my reality.  Instead, I'm kind of just a serial dater but, even more than that and perhaps more accurately, I just have an active online dating presence.  I have profiles on POF and OK Cupid, and just wrapped up a profoundly disappointing year with eHarmony and Match.com.

What I have come to realize, while keeping these profiles on the free sites (mind you, paying for a site doesn't make the crop any more wonderful), is that I am likely going to remain single forever.  While I had some wild days in my 20s, those times are long past and I'm a bit older and more mature in my outlook on life.  I expect men to take the lead, particularly if they subscribe to the notion that the man is the "head of the household" and all that such suchery.  Yes, I do prefer expressions of traditional gender roles and I do so unapologetically.

However, having these expectations, and even being pretty clear about them in conversations, doesn't seem to mean much of anything.

"....one day, they'll get it right."

I like to think that my profiles are sufficiently informative.  My POF profile is pretty brief and concise, while my OK Cupid profile is a bit longer and has more information in it.  However, both profiles definitely paint the picture of someone who knows what she wants and who expects a certain level of respect when being approached.  So either the guys who respond to the profile don't read (which is highly likely) or they DO read and believe that I'm actually just kidding (equally as likely).  You wouldn't believe the kinds of notes I get.  Seriously.  You wouldn't.  So, in order for you to understand the depths of my struggle, here are some screenshots.  Think, like, Buzzfeed meets, ummm, meets......Just kind of maybe think of this as a sort of Buzzfeed situation.  To my Facebook friend, you can stop reading now because you've already seen these photos on my page LOL but feel free to direct your friends here so they
, too, can revel in the tomfoolery herein.

For the purposes of continuity, I will rate these fools like my homegirl rates her eggs: over easy, over medium, and over hard.  An over easy man is somebody so sloppy and lazy that they either think you're easy or they actually ARE easy.  Over hard men are those extra freaky, nasty message sending guys with names like freaknasty69 (an ode to a friend of mine who always seems to get notes from guys with some variation of 69 in their usernames).  Over easy and over hard can be difficult to distinguish, even for someone who has made the term up, so I'm open to disagreements about who is what.  BUT over medium is that perfect guy; the one with everything you need.  He won't be on this post because I can't laugh at him because there's nothing funny or inappropriate about who he is or what he has said or done.

I will ALSO use, perhaps all the time, my new obsession with Tinder lingo.  For those of you that don't know, Tinder is an app that allows you to anonymously judge someone, and whether you want to meet or get to know them, solely by their looks.  It links to Facebook so you can choose the photos you want to post (as you usually can with these sorts of things).  If you do NOT want to meet someone, you swipe the photo to the left and it's all "Nope" for them!  If you DO want to meet someone, you swipe their photo to the right and it's all "Liked" for them!  So, I may say, for some, #leftswipe or #rightswipe and, now, you'll know what I mean.

So, let us begin!

OVER EASY, for sure.  First of all, why are you taking a picture from underneath all of your chins?  I'm not a skinny woman, by any stretch of the imagination.  I workout, but my results ain't hardly what I want them to be just yet so I cannot say I'm only looking for Shaun T looking dudes.  But MY GOD TODAY, sir, please learn about how to showcase your best assets and they are not currently on display herein.

#LEFTSWIPEALLDAMNDAY

Number 2.

Over easy AND I'm not sure he's really looking for the things that I, as a woman with lady parts, really have to offer.  I understand that it's important to demonstrate that you workout in your home (or your grandmother's home), but the longing eyes and the "Leroy from Fame" braids WITH the accessories on the ends, say to me that maybe I should introduce you to some other friends of mine..........

#LEFTSWIPE

Number 3.

OK, so here we have a fairly attractive dude who sent the first note over on the left.  We had never spoken and I had no idea who he was when I got his note.  I checked his profile, mainly out of curiosity, and then replied, as you can see on the left.  I mean, what the hell else was I supposed to say?  So, apparently, he was shocked by the ambivalence of my reply, as you can see on the right.  And, I guess everybody thinks every city/town in CT is near every other city/town in CT.  I'm here to tell you, it ain't.  And even if it ain't, sir, I could not care less where you were going to be on the weekend in question.   Over hard and a QUICK #leftswipe for you.

Number 4.

Over.  Damn.  Easy.  and LEFT THE HELL SWIPE!!!!!!!  How......why......so.....what??????  OK, so this dude, according to his profile, is a truck driver and his initial note to me mentioned he was going to be in New Hampshire.  So now, in this correspondence, he is thinking I would have wanted an invitation to "ride" in his truck and that I would actually jump in the truck and be like let's go!  NO SIR!!!

But the other piece of this that is disturbing is that guys tend to always want to offer their number before they even know my name.  I hate that and find it presumptuous and obnoxious.  What has this world come to where men, who will often say they want to be the head of the household and run things, always want women to call or pursue them?  I am not about that life at all, in any way.  In fact, I wrote another blog entry about this phenomenon and how destructive it is.  Just sad.  SAD!

I mean, basically, dating in the 21st century is already a really tricky situation.  Online dating sites and dynamic shifts in gender roles and relationships expectations have created atmospheres wherein finding the right person is damn near impossible.  It's like finding a needle in a haystack or, in the words of my friend, trying to chase that ever evasive over medium egg.

#exhale #lesigh #mylifeat36

Sometimes it's really tempting to just kind of go with what's easiest; date the person who just appears and demonstrates a base level of interest and doesn't cause problems.  But that's a lot like just grabbing the low hanging fruit - that which is most convenient, not that which is the juiciest and most wonderful.  While it is sometimes painful, we need to make sure that loneliness does not drive us into the arms or lives of the wrong person, a #leftswipe.

It's a challenge and an annoyance to keep trying different things before the over medium eggs finally appear on your plate.  But, hell.  I'll wait.

Because one day, it'll be right.  He'll be right.  The situation will be right.