Dating guy whose "wife was shot dead"

[Beautifulbouquet]

For a month I've been casually seeing someone.

He is quite hard work in general.

This weekend he told me that his wife was shot and killed in Afghanistan where she was a marine.

Having looked this up...this seems impossible. A tiny number of British female soldiers were killed in Afghanistan and all deaths are documented on the government website and seem widely reported in the media.

It seems this is a very bizarre lie.

Or I'm losing my sanity.

There is so, so much wrong with the views you express here and the assumptions that power those views and your confidence in expressing them.

Did you really just make yourself the victim here?

Thank you so much.

This has been very unsettling and I stand by the tone I adopted in my messages.

This. I think you need help and not just with this.

You have no way of knowing how these text messages have landed with him OP. Why come on here, ask for advice and then do the opposite?

A PP stated that she told a dangerous man that she was getting back with her ex and giving him a 'final chance' and that was the stand out advice on here as he would have assumed a bloke was around and whilst he may have been pissed off, he would have dropped the whole thing from minute one.

The way you have done this is about as weird as it gets but good luck to you. Hopefully he is not a full on 'nutter' and just takes this on the chin.

On the basis of his responses in this exchange ie very 🤷 don’t really care either way, I don’t think you need to worry about any backlash!

tone or no tone

He seems utterly unbothered by you finishing it so i would not spend another minute thinking about him op, because doesn’t look like he’s thinking of you.

Onwards and upwards

I suspect because the Op completely over egged the potential risk in this thread

Read the exchange

OP seems completely comfortable calling him a nutter and finishing it

and he seems utterly unbothered at prospect of not being in a relationship with the OP

basically…. OP massively over egged it all and that screenshot confirmed it!

Good morning @Beautifulbouquet 💐😊 I hope you have a great day! Very glad to see you were home and fine 🙏

Very odd thread. I'm not convinced it isn't OP who is the fantasist.

I do know/ knew someone like this. He claimed to have had all sorts of amazing experiences all over the world in his past. He claimed to know better than everyone about everything.

In reality he likely was unemployed (never much evidence he worked), living in relative poverty with his wife (who did work and all the daily running around) and 4 children, two of whom were then late teens and it seemed impossible for him to have had either the time or money to do any of the things he claimed to have done.

He was well known in the community and universally derided.

I wonder if you’re a bit vulnerable OP. The way you text him was totally at odds with your apparent fear of him, and really quite foolish. I think maybe you should continue on in therapy.

I suspect a lot of alcohol has been involved in this whole story.

I see what approach you were going for OP, calling out what's happened but with lightness. For a lot of dates going wrong that would be great.

I think you've missed the mark though here.

Laughing at someone like that and calling him 'mad' and a 'nutter' as well as being specific about his lies and saying you were checking up on him was an unnecessary risk.

He's taken it well which is lucky and a good ending but a man who keeps a knife in bed and makes up lies to that extent was absolutely not guaranteed to.

You're clearly very naive. What made you take that approach when faced with a potentially dangerous local man?

You’re really stretching with the man attack this morning 🤣 is the guy not allowed to speak?

I'm my own worst enemy.

My response is that you consider having more therapy, as other posters have said. This is all about boundaries and self-worth.

When I read your age (40s) I was very surprised. I thought you were early-mid 20s.

The reasons - well, you needed to ask the question in the first place! There were so many red flags. There shouldn't have been a single doubt in your mind.
Most of us would run a mile, without asking for opinions.

What I pick up from your behaviour here is that you have problems with boundaries. You aren't sure where to draw the line. You seem more worried about causing offence to the other person.
Examples- the crack cocaine habit, the knife under the bed, the obvious lies.

Why do you doubt your own judgement? What's happened along the way with your life to get to your 40s and have this 'worst enemy' behaviour?

IMO you need to work on your own self-worth . Raise the bar, create solid boundaries and value yourself more.

Leave OP alone, any one of us could meet a bad one, he’s slowly revealed his true colours and she’s ended it. She’s clearly a nice person and wanted to extract herself as drama free as possible. She doesn’t need “help”, she just needed to be away from this guy. Her messages to him weren’t great but she’s dealing with it best she can.

Why do you have him saved in your phone as "How Old Are You"?

He's not really upholding his tough guy, knife-wielding-marine image by having what looks like a cat as a profile picture 😂

Oh dear. You're missing the fact that she very much needed help when she posted this . That's the whole point. She asked for help, when it was very obvious what she needed to do. She's in her 40s. Not a teen or in her 20s.

Reckon both this chap and the Op are known as…. interesting characters locally

Wow why is it getting nasty in here?

My view on that is that so many posters genuinely tried to offer advice yesterday. They even wrote 'the text' for the OP so she could extract herself without risking her safety.

But she went ahead and did something that could have angered this man (and broke an unwritten rule of never posting someone else's private messages on the web.)

She started to lose sympathy at that point because she seemed to ignore all the genuinely kind and helpful advice.

And then she said she was drinking and posted again in the early hours of today.

I don't think anyone should be nasty to her. IMO she needs to go back to the therapy she had an unravel why she has poor boundaries and low self worth.

Right, so it’s ok to be nasty and controlling if someone doesn’t take your advice and do things exactly how you told them to do it? People are free to scroll on by aren’t they? So what if she went out and had a drink? Even if she got totally off her face it would be understandable in this situation. Sometimes someone just needs people to listen, not to be micro managed

Therapy isn’t the answer to everything either! She met a dud and she was processing it, she’s a nice person, who are you to talk about her boundaries? She put the pieces together and she ended the relationship, end of

This. I couldn't believe some of the messages when I came back this morning to see any updates.

If you think she's a fantasist then so what? Move on and go to a different thread.

You don't know if she is or she isn't and if she isn't and she is as vulnerable as it seems then you are just being nasty and piling onto a person who is a bad place in the first place. If she is then move on, it doesn't affect you at all.