I met him on an international dating site during the pandemic. He
wasn’t my type--too handsome (Norwegian with hazel eyes, porcelain skin, and a
buff body), tall (over 6 feet), young (by 12 years), and vain (he posted
pictures driving an Astin Martin and sitting in a private jet). He spoke four
languages-French, English, Chinese, and Norwegian-and claimed to be the CEO of
a foreign trading company in Singapore. His bio could have been all lies, but
it didn’t matter; I preferred my men shorter, ugly/sexy, and time-worn by
experiences, yet he messaged me daily with bad poetry and cliched love letters
about how I was his sun, moon, and stars, even though I never responded.
Before Oliver came rushing into my message stream, I had had a
series of exchanges with other online members from the same site who refused
moving our conversations to a cheaper medium of communication like email or
instant messages (while the site provided emails, video conversations, texting,
and messaging, it charged steep prices for all its services at $1/minute for
instant messages, and $15 for reading and sending letters). Even though I had chatted with Dan from
Paris, Dean from Berlin, Ruslan from Czechoslovakia… for a month, I refused to
communicate with them any longer for their refusal to communicate elsewhere;
still, they sent me love letters and messages daily.
Oliver also messaged me every day, but at first, I
deleted his communications. “Please respond,” he begged after several weeks of
no replies. “I’ve always thought silence the most effective rejection,” I wrote
back. His constant pursuit
annoyed me, but also caught my attention. Eventually, I read his messages; and
because he figured I wasn’t reading them, he wrote messages more personal
letters, telling me about the flooding in his apartment caused by the partying
couple upstairs who forgot to turn off their jacuzzi, and the meet/greet
working trip on a yacht that left all attendees stranded at sea after a
mechanical malfunction on the ship. When
I inquired more about his personal life, he reverted to the same random, vague,
irritating brand of cliched communication:
Dear, I am writing to you again, my destiny. I believe that
you are the very ray of light for me, the very unattainable one that I strive
for. Please read to the end and feel my emotions. Your support is very
important to me now. I have been sitting on this site for a long time, and
there were many girls, but none of them was my only one…
I am an instinctual person. Like a wolf, I act only on instincts,
including eloping to Biloxi at 19; adopting to Russia twice with my former
husband, falling madly in love in Amsterdam with a Dane I met online some years
ago, and chucking my belongings and leaving Florida to move to Maine to play
celibate monk for seven years after a bad breakup with the same Dane I met
online. My heart pulled me
to Oliver because he had a pure heart, the only real feeling I sensed from his
pictures; still, I resented his not answering my specific questions, so I
messaged him that he was emotionally unavailable and full of shit.
Sometimes, because he felt pressured by my demand to be more open,
he confessed personal things, like that in his wallet he carried a picture of
his mother, that he always prayed before he got on a plane, that he was
allergic to sushi, that he loved to barbecue, that he wished to one day swim
with whales in Alaska… but such openness was few and far between. I doubted our
connection was going anywhere, but then came my soul lessons, triggered by
messages from a man I did not fully trust even though my heart demanded I stay
and communicate with him some more.
After constantly rejecting Oliver, I realized I expected him to
return to beg for my affections, a cruel streak inherited from my mother who
took the same pleasure in rejecting others with the expectations they return
and beg for her love, a cruel streak I thought I had healed while raising my
now young adult children and questioning the real reasons for my arguments and
fights with them; a cruel streak that reflected a question of my feeling worthy
of love for myself and from others, which I tested by becoming incensed at the
slightest hint of rejection followed by a demand for a return of affections.
The epiphany shook me. I left Oliver for several weeks to process
the implication of what I’d learned: In my closest relationships with men, I
kept my distance and preferred longing to real connections, like Joey Nagy, a
high school crush I spied from my locker for two years, like my ex-husband who
I was never in love with, and like Finn, the Dane I fell madly in love with
online and held onto the heartbreak of breaking up for seven years, even though
we’d only met once. I was done with unrequited love, so I eventually messaged
Oliver that I was ready to talk on the phone and that we should plan to meet.
He said the company he worked for didn’t allow communications with those
outside the office; he said his phone was checked daily for such communications. Strange thing to say, but I didn’t
question him any further. Really,
I wanted to leave him and the site, but deep down I knew there were many
lessons to learn, triggered by exchanging messages online with a stranger that
I had a soulful connection with. Lesson
after lesson followed. Even buried and forgotten memories of my father and
brothers’ player ways came up for review and understanding that these memories
also contributed to my fear of being intimate with a man.
Then Oliver got Covid, and his messages became real--or not? At
first, I questioned his intentions and whether he really had the virus. For the several months we had been
communicating, I was doing most of the sharing of personal stuff, expecting he
would eventually follow my cue, yet his messages were still mostly vague and
inane testaments of undying love. Three
months in, I convinced myself I was in love with the possibility of a
connection (I had not had a relationship for the last seven years even though I
was now okay with being alone or waiting for the right man). Still, when I got caught up in the
reality of his pressing emergency, now happening to many people in the world, I
asked myself “why can’t Oliver have Covid?” As further confirmation of the
truth of his new, horrifying reality, I was gripped by intense emotions of
terror and sadness at the most random of moments, like when shopping at the
Farmer’s Market or driving around town, feelings so sudden and overwhelming, I
could not breathe them out or distract myself with other thoughts. My fears and melancholy felt dull and
even, not stabbing like the man’s I was communicating with online.
Oliver had Covid. First, he said the doctor came to his apartment.
Then he said he was moved to a hospital. Then he was made to do lung exercises,
but his condition did not improve he wrote in his messages:
Hi, although it is believed that the lungs cannot hurt, the
back, the area of the lungs, hurts a lot. Sometimes, I can hardly lie on my
back. The temperature is kept around 38, only paracetamol, a faithful friend,
comes to the rescue. The psychological side also joined the physical pain.
Every day I learn about friends who have had coronavirus or died from its
consequences. During the night, I woke up several times: it is difficult to
breathe, my back hurts, bad thoughts come to my head. I don't have the strength
to get out of bed and comb my hair. For several days, I am without appetite. I can hardly cram two spoons into myself.
Temperature in the morning is 37.3. But now it's hard to breathe, to get a full
chest of air, I need to make the effort. From time to time, I try to catch my
breath. I'm with the doctors all the time. Everything is okay. I am under supervision. I just ask you to know that I am with you,
and I really miss you!
When Oliver stopped writing, I prayed for his recovery in the redwood
forest behind my apartment, along the beaches in Trinidad, California, where I
had recently moved to from Maine, and to the glorious California sun that shone
through my living room window every day. My communications became desperate,
fiery, passionate:
Dearest Oliver, you are ordered to come back to me, to tell me
that your lungs are fine and that you are leaving the hospital. You are ordered to wish me sweet dreams
every night. If something had
happened to you, I would know it. I would feel it, like Lara in “Dr. Zhivago,”
who walked into the place where he was at after years of separation. I HATE
this computer, this dating site, because I can’t reach you, because you are
stuck in a place where I can’t hold your hand, sit by your side, or ask for minute-by-minute
accounts of your condition…
I kept writing until I heard from him seven days
later:
Dear, do you know that thinking about you saved me? Hello!!! I just picked up the phone
for the first time in 7 days, and today I can say with confidence that when I
thought it couldn't be worse, when the pain was terrible, and when I was
delirious for days, I returned to my thoughts that I haven’t seen you yet, I
haven’t hugged you yet, I haven’t kissed you yet, I haven’t confessed my love
to you in real life, and I realized that I rather need to run away from this
disease… Do you understand that you are my guardian angel who saved me???
Ten
months later, our communications were still stale and exchanged on the site.
Needing a sign from the universe of whether to stay or go, I received from
another member the exact same letter I had received from Oliver at the
beginning of our communications, a letter with his words and testament of love.
Shocked by my find, I looked online for reviews of the dating site, with its
one-star rating. Some reviewers referred to the Russian mafia running a
sophisticated site with slick professional pictures and fake profiles of
international CEO’s, world travelers, and millionaires who were really
operators working in tandem to steal members’ money and credits with their
requests to chat and to send them letters. Jami,
a young America doctor from Washington, had prepared an in-depth review of her
own scam, costing $6000, after falling in love with a Swiss CEO who was really
Yuri from Moscow, a bodybuilder who was happily married and not looking for
love. She had prepared an
in-depth report she was submitting to the FBI. Most
reviewers said that members never wanted to meet or talk on the telephone,
preferring instead to communicate on the site where they earned wages from
communicating with legitimate members. Another
reviewer said that most profiles stated members were “curated by partners and
used the site for free,” meaning they worked for the site.
It all made sense: Oliver only wanted to communicate on site
the even though I repeatedly begged him to find another medium of
communication. I ran his letters through online plagiarism
programs, but they were 100% authentic; I ran his pictures through Google’s
reverse imaging, but his photos were one-of-a-kind. His profile said that “this
member was curated by our partner, and use[d] the website for free,” so I racked
my brain for what was real and concluded that the pictures he sent of his
weight-loss after Covid, confessions of learning billiards from a Master
instructor, love of poetry, dreams of owning his own company, and not
addressing me by name until a month ago for fear of getting too close were not
fake actions. Because I fall in love with a man’s words first, I knew he spoke
some truths.
For days, his scam haunted and depressed me. Eventually, I realized the mystery was not
worth solving even though it would forever echo in my soul like the Native
American flute music I listened to with breathy notes resonating off canyon
walls. I had been scammed out of
$3500, but I had also been healed. Before I cancelled my membership to the
site, I sent one last message: “Fuck you, ‘Oliver.’”
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