I investigate. That’s just what I do. I like to know who and what I’m dealing with. Of course, I’ve heard that you shouldn’t go looking for anything because you will find it. And I believe this to a certain extent; but some things a girl just stumbles upon…and in this case it was something I wanted to know about a potential boo.
No, I didn’t discover that he was married or had a few kids stashed away somewhere. He wasn’t a convicted felon, nor did he have a secret life of being on the down-low. It wasn’t any of these catastrophic details that he failed to mention; it was something so insignificant that I didn’t even know a man would lie about: his age.
Yes, while playing investigator on Google I found out that my guy was two years older than he said he was. Immediately I thought, who does that? I know you’re immediately thinking, what’s the big deal? Sure, it’s only two years, but c’mon, it was only two years, so why lie about it? At that moment, my curiosity turned to anger, and then curiosity again. Seriously, who really does that?
Everything else about him added up for the most part, or at least, my investigation didn’t reveal any other secrets; but this was a bit much for me. I don’t do liars. And lying about something so minor, made it suddenly so major. If he chose to lie about this, what else would he lie about? Who was I really dating?
I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt and even asked him a second time what his age was, claiming that I had forgotten what he’d said; but to my dismay, he looked me dead in my face with a straight face and lied again. Immediately I realized either this guy had a serious issue with our age gap or he was a compulsive liar. I chose to think both and decided his lie was a huge red flag.
If he was, in fact, lying about his age, that would make him eight years older than me. And while this may have seemed like an immediate dismissal or problem to him, it actually wouldn’t have been for me. I had never dated a man more than five years older than me, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t open to it. What I wasn’t open to, however, was dating a liar.
A good man is hard to find; and although it had only been a few months, I thought I had found one. That was until I found out he was lying about something I wouldn’t have cared about and wound up making me question many more things about him and made me wonder what other lies he had told or would tell in the future. Whatever the reasoning behind the fib, it prevented our relationship from ever really flourishing.
I often think about what could have been, if only he hadn’t lied about something so simple; but I know if he lied about his age, nothing would have been off limits in the future. Lying is most definitely a red flag when weeding through the bad guys; but call me crazy, I still think he was a good guy. He just happened to tell a really stupid, bad lie, and for that reason (and a few other things), he was no longer my type.
