Too good?

Well, you know, it's the little, obvious-as-the Sun details that trip me up.

He suggested visiting me.

I had not considered that at all.

So he suggested coming here, and my first reaction was to yell out: "I'm not ready!" But even to me that sounded like an excuse. I think I'm beginning to understand the idea that one regrets the things one didn't do, not the things one did do. So here's this perfect man I want to know better and he wants me (of all people), and my first reflex reaction is to blow it.

Instead I did some fast thinking and some web searching (hotels and flights) and looked at the calendar. Then I introspected hard.

There are many complications concerning how I live my life, but nothing that cannot be overcome. It will be a bit(*) hectic, but I'll be meeting him here on June 19th.

I'm scared and nervous and I can't wait.


(*) The expression "a bit" as used here means 3 times ten to infinity squared.

"Too good?"

I should listen to myself more often.

Quote: Nareed

"Too good?"

I should listen to myself more often.

And? Was he a serial killer? A terminal
fatty? What..

Long, looking-back-it's-so-embarrassing story short: it was a rather elaborate scam.

I have it all on email. I may look at it weeks from now and write an article about it.

But I'm not angry or even upset. I'm very disappointed, mostly in myself. I learned two things which will be very useful in the future. One is to be a great deal more careful, skeptical, critical and smarter in dating sites. The other is that, while I thought this was real, I faced many of my fears concerning relationships and got past some of them.

Everyone does stupid things from time to time. I know I do. This time I have a concrete answer to the question "Just how stupid can you be?" I merely need point to the email thread Gmail so thoughtfully arranges and say "I can be THIS stupid."

Eharmony brags that 500 people a day get
married a result of meeting on their site.
They never tell us how many a day get
screwed over.

Sorry to hear you had a bad experience. I tried some various online dating sites myself a year and a bit ago, after I had ended a 5 year relationship with my ex fiancé. Not bad results, but I did end up seeing someone who ultimately turned out to be a hell of a psycho. I'm not going to attempt that again. Staying cautious I think is the best route with online or mobile dating.

Best of luck in the future.

Nareed so sorry it didn't turn out well!

Thanks for the sympathies.

I'll try again before long. This time knowing better what I'm doing and dialing my expectations way back.

I do want to make clear I didn't lose any money. The minute he asked for money, I should have dropped him like a hot potato. But I still took the time to check. So:

1) if you're sending a package, allegedly, from LA to Mexico, it makes zero sense to route it through Malaysia.

2) Even if by some quirk of the courier you trust it has to be routed halfway around the world first, no way any payments due cannot be paid by the sender.

3) Even if 1 and 2 were not so, the email requesting the money, allegedly by the shipping company, ought not look like a phishing letter out of a Nigerian scam. That is to say. no typos on the email address (like "deliivery"), no use of a generic domain, no starting with "I, Person in Malaysia," no specific instructions to send money via Western Union to a specific person rather than a company (in this day and age, no international courier company lacks any means of making and receiving payments globally), among other things.

So I got off easy. and I learned daydreams are just pleasant fantasies. If reality begins to approach one, something's off.

Anyway, back to online dating, the first thing to do when I get a message I want to reply to, is to do a Google image search of the profile photos. If they're not of the person contacting me, then at the very least he's lying and at worst he's targeting me for a scam.

Still, did I not live in a country rife with all sorts of telephone and email scams, I might have fallen.

As soon as someone asks for a dime, the deal
is off. Red flag time.

There's a neat way around an image search: put a photo of "yourself" in front of a landmark. Image search will identify it rather than the person. So my rule now is if I can't ID the person by their pictures, I don't reply to their messages.