Td,lr: Almost fell for a guy with common connections until I found out how much he'd been lying about.

I've been on n off OLD apps since a few years now. One thing I never skip is the mandatory background check on the guy when things start picking up between us. Just this one time, I got too comfortable really quick and that turned out to be a huge mistake!

What happened was that we found many common acquaintances (because of the industry we work for) one of whom is a very close friend of mine. So the comfort level was already few notches higher than usual. I pinged the friend anyway to just tell her that I'm talking to a common friend and she told me that ya he's a nice guy but they haven't spoken in like a decade. So, that knocked down a level but I still wasn't too worried about it since I'd been speaking to the guy since a couple of weeks now and we hadn't met yet thanks to the pandemic.

There weren't any red flags coming up in our interaction. He was calm, not pushy, not creepy, seemed chill and would talk about interesting things. He held a good position in an MNC and seemed to be doing well for himself. He told me right at the start that he was a divorcee and when I asked him some details of the fallout, he wasn't uncomfortable talking about it.

After a few days, I found myself just casually thinking about him, thinking there might me something for us here. That's when my instincts kicked in and I quickly picked up the phone to do my basic search. I remember thinking that this seems just a formality, it's all fine. And whoop! With his full name in bold, there's an ENTIRE BLOG about him on the first search page itself!!! This ONE time I skip the step and it's all been sitting right there. How much he lied to me so casually.

The blog was written by the woman with whom he cheated on his wife for 4/7 years of his marriage! (He told me the reason for divorce was lack of emotional connect) Apparently, he even moved in with this woman before his divorce was finalized. (He told me he lived alone at this temporary place since it was closer to work and had a great time with "friends") According to this lady, he married his wife just because she was from a wealthy family, and wanted to leave her now. He had promised to marry her after his divorce, but didn't follow through. When she pressed on, he took her home to live with his mom and made her take care of them both. She said that his mom was super toxic and didn't approve of their relation but was okay with her staying with them as long as she looked after the house! What?!! She left when she realised he wasn't serious about marrying and she went and wrote a whole blog on him! (THANKS A TON for that lady!)

I was so shook, it felt like I swallowed a rock. I called our common friend and she swore she didn't know any of this. They'd just talked few times on a professional level and he wasn't married at that time. Anyway, whatever happens, I'm never skipping the basic search ever again! Lesson learned.