I posted a thread the other week asking for advice about how to ‘get over’ the embarrassment of making a mistake. The jist of it was that I sent a message to a fairly new date after not hearing from him since the day before which was unusual (more than 24 hours), he sent an angry response saying his parents had been involved in a car accident and he’d been busy with that (sorry, I don’t know how to link the thread). We spoke on the phone the following night, all seemed to be okay, he apologised for snapping in his message reply and I apologised for thinking he had perhaps changed his mind about me. We then messaged normally for the next few days and made an arrangement to meet the following weekend. On the day, I didn’t hear from him with his train time and have heard nothing since (and don’t expect to!).
On our very first date, he told me that his elder daughter had been killed by running out in front of a car at the age of 4. He and his wife went on to have another daughter, who is now coming up for 2, but that their marriage just couldn’t survive their grief and that was the reason for their separation. His first daughter was mentioned very naturally through all of our dates, how different she was in temperament to their other daughter; what the months felt like following her death and so on; how his parents felt etc.
Last weekend, knowing that I wasn’t going to hear from him, I had a social media nosy (I hadn’t done anything like that while we were seeing each other). He has no fb profile which he’d already told me, but his wife does. They are definitely not together... but there is no sign of there ever being an older daughter. None at all. Not that I expected a death announcement or anything like that but there was simply nothing and the dates of all of their photos didn’t give an opportunity for there to have been a child, if that makes sense (holiday pics, family parties, weddings etc). In Scotland, records of all births, marriages, divorces and deaths have to be in the public domain, you can search for them via the national records website. So I looked there. There was no birth or death record of this wee girl.
I cannot fathom why someone would tell such a despicable lie, I’ve made peace with the fact I’m no longer seeing this person but as the days go on, I feel more and more upset about being so conned, in fact I feel really funny about it. What kind of person makes up a story like that and what does it say about me that he ‘needed’ to make something like this up? I know people can tell untruths and exaggerate in dating but this story was bloody awful.