I will try to keep this as succint as possible.
I had been friends with this guy – we will call him Kal – since about February. He made it clear to me from the beginning that he was interested in me romantically, but as I was in a relationship and Kal had only just gotten divorced, I wasn’t receptive. Fast-forward a couple months, I break up with my boyfriend and Kal leaves NYC to start college at Cornell in Ithaca, NY.
Kal called me regularly, telling me how miserable he was in Ithaca and how much he wanted to come back to NYC and be with me. I told him it wasn’t a good idea to abandon college for a relationship with me. After all, who could tell if it would last six months, six weeks, six days? I was open to the possibility that one day, after he finished school, that we might be together. I told him so clearly, verbally and by letter.
Last month I had a few days off work and Kal wanted me to come visit him in Ithaca. He had told me he had a female roommate, and that she was fine with it. I thought it sounded like fun so I bussed up from NYC for a weekend of hiking. I’m waiting at the bus stop for him to pick me up when I get a text message from Amy [pseudonym], his roommate. Hi this is Kal’s girlfriend! I’m on my way to get you!
I was shocked. I knew he had a female roommate but Kal hadn’t told me she was his girlfriend! I texted him and asked if Amy was his girlfriend. His reply: Yes. Tell her we met in February 2010 [this was a full year before he actually met me]. She has cancer, please don’t mention it. At this point I’m totally flabbergasted, not only about the girlfriend but the lying he’s asking me to do. So Amy picks me up and I try to play it cool with her. We get to her apartment and I got Kal alone and cornered him.
“Why were you calling me and talking all romantic on the phone when you have a girlfriend? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s complicated,” he says. “You wouldn’t have come if I had told you.”
“First of all, you’re wrong,” I said. “I would have come if you’d been honest and this was truly supposed to be a weekend with a friend. And lies of omission are still lies.”
I considered fessing up to the whole thing to Amy, but decided against it. She’s a really nasty form of cancer, and I didn’t want to dump yet another thing on the woman. Besides, I figured Kal would sooner or later show his true colors to her without me having to get involved. The pieces fell into place quickly – he wanted me to lie about when we met, because they were in a LDR in February 2011 (when we actually met) and Kal didn’t want her to know he was talking to new girls in NYC. So he tries to play me off as an “old buddy” he’s just never mentioned before. And she bought it, hook line and sinker.
In my mind, I kept wondering, what the hell is going on with this guy? This is not the Kal I thought I knew. I mean, is he with her so that all his friends will think he’s such a great guy for sticking by the girl with cancer, and all the while he’s setting me up so when Amy dies he can move onto me?! And he’s not really a roommate, not in the sense that he pays rent. The apartment is Amy’s, the food is Amy’s, he’s freeloading off her! Is Kal planning to jump from one girl to the next once he finds a better deal?
A question a couple of my friends asked when I told them about this trip: Did she really have cancer? My answer: Yes. I overheard Amy talking to her doctors on the phone, and it convinced me.
If he had been honest and said, I am living with my girlfriend, I wouldn’t have had a problem. I was honest when I said I would still have visited. But the fact that he lied about it, asked me to lie to cover his tracks, and was talking all romantic on the phone to me all the while his girlfriend (and meal ticket) is wasting away with cancer is just too skeezy for me to take. I let him know as much and returned to NYC.
I deleted him from my phone but a couple of days ago Kal sent me a passive-aggressive text message, wanting to know why I had DARED to do a background check on him. No one could’ve been more confused than I, because I have neither the time, money, or inclination to perform a background check on him. I’m locking him out of my life anyway, why bother? I texted him that I never ran any background checks on him and that he’s an idiot. Knowing what I now know, it doesn’t surprise me that *someone’s *suspicious enough of him to run one, though.