This got a lot of upvotes on ASKFDS but no replies so I wanted to see if anyone here had insight. I had a really weird encounter not so long ago and I'm feeling confused about it. Background info: I've been friends with a guy for around 2 years, we were never extremely close but we'd hang out occasionally, and since we have a lot of similar skills in the cyber security space that aren't super easy to come by we'd also share new things we learned. I made it clear to him I had no interest in a relationship by openly saying that I have no interest in a relationship an absurd amount of times. He asked me out once and I shut it down quick, I never felt pressured nor did he do anything weird like stand too close or try too hard to randomly touch me (the normal creep factors of trying to move things from friends to more), so I didn't think anything of it.

In December he told me that a friend of his had a client who he couldn't take on because his small business was super busy. I had mentioned before that I wanted to do a project before the end of the year, so it was kind of perfect. I said I'd help if we went 50/50 since he would be bringing the client and doing half of the work and I'd be doing the other half. He was really adamant on waiting 3 weeks to do the initial proposal which I said was a really long time and that with projects for bigger clients you want to move as quickly as possible. But since he was extremely insistent on waiting the full 21 days to finish our proposal I said okay. We spent 3 weeks hanging out and working and meeting up (daily), and then 2 days before we were about to show the proposal suddenly he tells me his friend actually decided to take the client because he was taking too long to reach out. Already this seemed like a red flag but I already knew there was a chance things would fall apart because of how long he wanted to wait, so I didn't think too much about it and just cut my losses. Like I said, we'd been friends for 2 years, so I brushed it off. We stopped meeting up to work since there was no reason to anymore.

But then he said he had another person who would potentially be interested in something similar and so I agreed we could just repurpose what we'd worked on. I agreed to just go ahead and try our proposal on someone else, which led to hanging out more again and all that. But when it came closer to the time to do it, something came up. This became a pattern for the next 2 weeks of things out of his control happening that made it impossible to do what we were trying to do.

I also noticed a few random lies he had told me. For example, he told me one of his roommates was making $10k a month as a d**ler, I thought that was absurd but he kept assuring me that he was making that much and selling to the entireity of our area. I don't do anything like that so I just brushed it off as his roommate trying to look cooler than he is. Then when we were hanging out, he mentions his roommates GF may be pregnant to which I said that's great, but he said his roommate doesn't have the money for a kid. I brought up the $10k lie he had told me and he said he didn't remember saying that or he was probably overexaggerating when he said that because his roommate makes closer to $3k a month. Lying is a huge turn off for me, but this confirmed that he was the one lying to me, not his roommate lying to him.

He also did over exaggerate when talking about other stuff but I chalked it up to personality (think “BEST pizza” or “MOST EXPENSIVE Italian restaurant”), now I’m not sure if that was a red flag I missed.

I ghosted him, blocked all his social media, etc.. today his friend reached out to me in my DM requests just saying "Hi Iceyboo", I ignored it. He also has been texting me a ton asking me why I'm being distant and ghosting him etc.. but honestly I don't feel like responding nor do I care to reply.

All in all, I understand I just wasted 5 weeks and this guy is defo a liar. But I wanted to know if anyone has experienced something similar?

I just feel confused by what happened.

Is there a word or term for what happened here? Any advice or personal anecdotes that are similar would really help assuage the confusion I’m feeling.