Ranting about a man (santa cruz)

Here we go again… you don’t like my rant again. So I’m gonna rant about people who flag and get removed posts they just dont like. Or tell me how it doesnt pass the CL guidelines. But I’m gonna rant about what happened to me until I’m done ranting. Consider it as part of my healing process…. Buckle up, Buttercup. This guy lied to me for 10 months about EVERYTHING… including what he had for dinner and who cooked it. My internal alarms did not go off… or I ignored them? So here’s my problem now… any time I meet anyone - of either sex - I wonder if they are lying and what would they gain by lying? Are my alarm bells going off? Why aren't they? Or am I ignoring them? It’s exhausting. This very nice man asked me out for coffee. I told him what happened to me, he handed me his phone and said “the passcode is the year I was born”. So sweet. It made me cry that he was so understanding and made me cry that he felt it was necessary when we first met to overcome how broken I am right now. I got a therapist, a male therapist cuz I figured that would be a challenge for me. My journey… My friends are all tired of me ranting about this at them, so here we go… this is my public service announcement… I don’t have casual sex. My last relationship was 20 years, neither cheated. He was a wonderful, sweet, kind, compassionate, loving man…. He could talk until my ears bled … but it was always interesting. Two years ago, we transitioned to being friends because he had major health issues. I wasn’t really in the market for a boyfriend, but… enter (let’s call him Steve) Steve from Montana. The master manipulator. I am still realizing the subtle ways he manipulated me. When I questioned something he said cuz it wasn’t logical to me, he said “you can’t really love me if you don’t trust me.” From October until July 30, I was involved with Steve. I could not have loved him more, I loved how different we were from each other and got a lot of joy from that. He said “avocados taste like green lard.” I think that’s so funny… and means more avocados for me. He told me he would never tell another woman he loved her cuz his wife slept with his best friend and he divorced her. Imagine how I felt when he told me he loved me. In reality, she divorced him cuz he cheated with 6 or 7 women. Valentines Day, he gave me a red box that said “I love you forever” and the heart-shaped necklace said “I love you” in a hundred languages. Turns out, he gave his other girlfriend one in purple. His job ended in April and he rented a place here for us to live…. But he went to work with a buddy an hour and a half away and I rarely saw him. Anyway, he got really sketchy after May. He still texted me a many MANY times a day… from 7:30am to 10pm. All kinds of love memes. But things kept happening that stopped him from getting back to me and move into our place. July 3 we were gonna take a weeklong trip. He made hotel reservations… but things happened and he couldn’t show up… but I know the reservation was real cuz I talked to the hotel to arrange a ground floor room. All the “reasons” sounded plausible and I couldn’t prove they were true or prove they weren’t. Ya know… he got COVID, fell off a ladder, car accident, car broke, couldn’t cash his check until Monday, job ran longer than expected, etc. In the month after I ended it, i found out he was living with a girlfriend 200 miles away… and he is still married to another woman. His first wife divorced him for cheating on her. Besides these women, there were other random women… and Theresa at the hardware chain in Billings. His wife was a widow with a business and a home… not anymore. When the money ran out, so did Steve. His girlfriend is another widow. Yeah, he targets older women. And thinking I was in a monogamous relationship, as he told me, we did not use a condom so he put all our health at risk. It turns out, every single thing he said to me was a lie… even the story about how gutted he was when he had to put down his dog… he abandoned the dog when he abandoned the wife and SHE had to put the dog down. He never rented a place for us…. I spent about $1,000 for stuff for our new place. He even lied about what he had for dinner! All those love memes… hundreds of them… were bullshit. Why did he keep it up when him and the girlfriend moved 200 miles north? I am shattered. I really thought this was the guy I would love for the rest of my life and vice versa. Now I have major trust issues with everybody. I was talking about this with a guy yesterday and he told me “the passwords to my phone and iPad are my birthday” and I cried because that was so sweet and so sad that anyone even feels they have to say that to me. Anyway, him and the gf have broken up, at least for now. This is where this women (we’ll call Theresa), from a hardware store comes in… Steve has evidently been involved with her this whole time! He used to work at a local hardware chain and try to see how many women he could sleep with at once. His girlfriend put in a nanny cam and caught him masturbating with Theresa via FaceTime. If you know a woman who is involved with a charming guy, please warn her. Everything he’s told women for over 20 years is a lie. Every woman he’s been involved with for the last 25 years got burned and hates him. Contact me and I’ll be happy to tell you his real name.