This morning I found out that a guy I met a month ago is married. I call him my ‘Text Guy.’ Initially, I blew him off because I didn’t like his first text. Hence, why I call him my ‘Text Guy.’
My friend helped me bust him.
If you want to find out how I discovered the truth, I wrote about it here, “I Just Found Out My ‘Text Guy’ Is Married.”
Let me explain…
This is how it all played out.
I had a few gut instincts from the beginning. I never completely let my guard down. At the same time, he seemed to overcome many of my doubts. And a few weeks ago, he began to win me over.
I shouldn’t have let him.
I’m not stupid.
I was collecting all of those red flags.
I was lining them up.
I was also giving him a chance to prove me wrong. I wasn’t completely sure if my trust issues have become so intense, that I’ve become jaded. I wanted to get to know him.
I wanted to know for sure.
I should’ve known a man was lying about being divorced.
Here are 7 red flags that he was married before I knew for sure.
His phone number
His phone number made me suspicious.
I didn’t pay attention to his number when he first texted me.
I think it’s because I initially shut him down, and blew him off pretty quickly. When he began texting me again two weeks later, I thought it was odd.
It ended in two zeros.
“Is that your work cell?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said.
I still didn’t believe it.
Business phones end in zeros because they pass the calls to other trunk lines. An individual cell given to an employee wouldn’t have a number like that.
I wondered if it could be a burner phone.
It was one of my first red flags.
His initial text
His initial text turned me off.
My ‘Text Guy’ and I had a great time the day we met. We spent hours together. I liked him. He was sweet, nice, and fun. I didn’t get any bad vibes from him.
The following day his text shocked me.
It wasn’t sexual, it was raunchy.
I almost didn’t respond.
That was my initial reaction. Instead, I decided to see if I could redirect him with some humor. I texted him back, “I think you’re going to need to take me to dinner to get an answer to that text.”
It didn’t redirect him.
He said something else I didn’t dig. I told him thanks, no thanks. I said I was looking for an authentic respectful connection. I didn’t hear from him for two weeks.
He texted again, and said he realized I didn’t like what he texted me.
He redeemed himself.
He seemed sweet, nice and fun again.
I never liked that text, it was my first red flag.
He paid cash
He paid cash the day that I first met him.
We were at a bar that I liked to call the bad effects of divorce.
It’s a fun place but you need to be leery there. It’s actually called the ‘Lucky Lounge.’ When they named it, I wonder if they knew how true that moniker would become.
Is it a huge deal to pay for a bill in cash?
Not necessarily.
But nearly no one carries cash around anymore. Especially, after the pandemic. Is this a hard, and fast sign of a person trying to leave no trail of where they’ve been? No.
But it can be.
It gave me pause.
I tucked that away in the back of my mind.
It turned out to be my third red flag.
His text behavior
He could never completely reign himself in.
After he redeemed himself, he couldn’t help himself.
His texts kept veering back, not toward sexy but over the top sexual. I told him I wasn’t sure I wanted to go out with him because of it. But in between, we talked about other things.
He would tone it down.
And then turn it up.
I didn’t like it, and he knew it.
In the back of my mind it made me suspicious. It was too much. It made me think of a man who might be trying to get what he could get because it’s all he had.
Meaning, I thought it might mean he was married.
It’s crazy that he was beginning to win me over but he had another side to him.
But I also deposited that in the back of my mind.
It’s another reason I didn’t let my guard down. It’s why I wasn’t disappointed we were having a hard time getting together. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see him in person.
I wanted to vet him more.
I didn’t like his singular obsession.
His inability to reign himself in was another red flag.
His lack of availability
His lack of availability was the most obvious red flag.
Men who text, and are never available are typically married.
I’m not stupid.
I knew this.
But he had a really demanding work schedule. He would text me at 5 a.m. when he got to work. The first night I met him he told me he was tired. He said he had to leave because he got up at 4 a.m.
I do know what he does for a living. I knew he was telling me the truth about that. I also knew he worked on a six weekend rotation, with two weekends off.
His children are younger than mine.
They are ages that have demanding schedules.
We only reconnected about two weeks ago. It didn’t seem outrageous that we weren’t able to get together yet. Plus, we hadn’t agreed to see one another.
I was still deciding what I was willing to get myself into.
Married men don’t have time.
Clearly, his lack of availability was a red flag.
He suddenly goes dark
A man who can’t talk to you for days is a married man’s red flag.
A guy who goes dark.
It’s not the norm.
A man who can talk to you constantly goes randomly missing in action. Please, it makes zero sense. It’s not believable. It’s even more unbelievable when he makes up a sketchy story.
His Dad is in the hospital. He doesn’t know when he will be back. He has no idea what’s going on yet. He has to fly out immediately. Oh, and his father lives in the middle of nowhere with spotty cell reception.
A guy who drops in, and out of your life is probably married.
It was another red flag.
His inconsistencies
There were a few inconsistencies in his story.
The day I met him, he said he was originally from Chicago.
He said he left there early, and joined the military.
I told him a few days ago that I Googled him. He didn’t seem to have a problem with it. I told him I couldn’t find him under that name in that location.
It turns out, I had misunderstood his last name when I met him.
He Googled himself, and sent me the screenshot. It had his name, age, and prior residences listed on it. Chicago was not listed. It should’ve been if he was raised there.
He told me he lived one town over.
It didn’t come up either on the screenshot.
He told me he thought it might be because he was renting. But that shouldn’t matter. A mailing address should come up whether he rented or owned.
And then there was the Chicago parents who left to live in the middle of nowhere Missouri a few years ago, to get away from the snow.
The screenshot he sent me convinced he was telling me the truth.
Why would he send me that if he was married?
Why wouldn’t he worry about me having that additional information?
At the same time, the inconsistencies were a red flag.
…
7 red flags that I was talking to a married man.
I wasn’t stupid.
I was collecting them.
I was allowing myself to get to know him. I was letting him win me over at times. I was bonding with him a little. I liked him. But I knew in my gut that something might be wrong.
It just took a few weeks to connect all of the dots.
I even asked him once, “Are you sure you’re not married Sunshine?”
“Nope,” he said. “I’m pretty sure divorce takes care of that.”
This isn’t the end of the story.
I’ll write about that when he gets back from ‘No cell service Missouri.’
That will be a conversation worth repeating.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Jeongim Kwon on Unsplash
