Married Sociopath

I’m feeling a little shell-shocked right now – by my own stupidity and naïveté, and by the sheer mind-blowing badness of other human beings. I’m thousands of miles away from home, visiting a friend, and I’m trying not to let what happened ruin the trip.

I told my friend about the client, and she was not terribly happy given that she knows I met him through sex work. She’s right of course: hardly the best way to meet a decent man. I showed her a YouTube video of the dude I had managed to unearth during one of my googling frenzies, and she pointed out that he was wearing a wedding ring. I looked a little closer, and she was right!

The YouTube video had been posted a few years ago, so she said “Well, maybe he was married back then, but isn’t now.” Well, true, but this guy had never mentioned being married as recently as 2008. He said he was married once before, but got divorced in his early thirties – a long time ago given that he’s now forty-seven. No other wife was ever mentioned.

A few more quick google searches unearthed the Facebook profile of somebody who is very probably his wife. Also, some things he said just didn’t add up at all. Yup, the dude is married. No doubt about it.

I almost feel like he was fucking “grooming” me for an affair. For example, he made a point of talking about the long, long hours he works. Of course he did! That way when we finally ended up shagging, he would have the perfect excuse for not being available all the time. I made myself vulnerable by telling him a lot of stuff about my personal life, and I think he pegged me as an easy victim. His strategy was to pretend that he, too, had had a crappy childhood and felt lonely, and disconnected from people. He seemed so kind, understanding and empathic. That stuff I wrote about us having a “trauma bond“….man, there wasn’t any fucking trauma bond between us. But he sussed that I wanted there to be, so he sucked me in by creating one. I’ve got to hand it to him, the dude is good.

I’m flabbergasted. I just don’t understand some people. Why would you deliberately lie to your wife, and then lie to some obviously very vulnerable other woman to get into her knickers?  It’s fucking sick. I can’t imagine ever being such a manipulative liar. People like this scare me. They’re sociopaths.

Worse than that, though, I scare myself. My terrible loneliness and desperate need for love and affection are making me very vulnerable and putting me in lots of potentially dangerous situations. It’s happening all the fucking time now.  I can’t trust myself anymore. If I’m not romantically interested in a person, I usually have very good instincts, but as soon as I get interested in somebody emotionally and sexually my instincts go completely out of the window. I only see and hear what I want to hear; if I don’t like what I see or hear, I manage to rationalize my doubt away, and if I don’t hear or see anything I want, I just make up some little romantic fantasy to fill in the blanks.

In the shower this morning, I asked my Higher Power to not let me obsess over this guy. Well, I guess my Higher Power answered my prayers – just not quite in the way I had expected.

Oh well. Back to the SLAA drawing board for me. It’s pretty clear that I cannot be trusted to be within a hundred-mile radius of any man.

I am grateful, though. Grateful for the fucking internet which allowed me to get the better of this dude before he got the better of me.

I’m also grateful for my observant friend here who saved me a whole lot of grief – and for my friend back home who pointed out sardonically how much erotic massage money I lost by developing a romantic interest in this guy. They have both helped stopped me from going to a really dark place.