A Friend of a Friend

It had been several weeks since the incident with the crazy drug thief. I was honestly not making any attempts to look for a date and I was just enjoying my life. One afternoon I received a Facebook message from a colleague of mine asking me whether or not I was seeing anyone at the moment. I hadn't heard from him in years and I wasn't sure where this was going.

Considering that he was single and I was not interested in him at all, I skated around the question and told him I was KIND OF seeing someone. This was a total lie, but if he was asking for himself it gave me an easy out rather than having to shoot him down with no excuse. I did ask him why he wanted to know. He responded telling me that he had a friend in mind who he thought would be a great match for me. I asked him for high level details just to see whether or not I might be interested. 

His friend had just gotten divorced a few months ago, he lived in the same city as I did and he was looking to start dating again. He told me his name and told me to look him up on Facebook and see if I was interested. I did a little obligatory Facebook stalking and thought he was cute so I messaged my friend back and told him it was fine to share my information with him. 

From what I was able to find with my stalking, his name was Andy, he was an engineer and he played soccer in his spare time. He seemed attractive and like a guy that I would be interested in meeting. Other than that I was pretty blind to the situation. All I could do was wait to see whether or not we would actually meet.

I felt like this one might actually be a little more reliable though since it was a "friend of a friend" situation rather than a complete stranger. Time for the waiting game again!! If he called I would go out with him, if not I had nothing to lose anyway because I really didn't care about dating at this particular moment anyway.

If At First You Don't Succeed...

I thought that after all of that Tommy would just tuck his tail in humiliation and bow out gracefully. I had made it very clear to him that we would not be working things out and he needed to move on to someone else. He definitely did not give up.

He would send me text messages apologizing for what he had done. He asked me repeatedly to just hear him out and give him a chance to explain. I felt that there was nothing to explain AT ALL. He had stolen drugs from me! No explanation could change the fact that he was a thief and a pill head. There were red flags all over this guy and I knew that I needed to let him go!

A few weeks after we stopped dating I came home from work and had 2 dozen long stem red roses on my front porch with a card from Tommy. It was yet another apology and plea for me to give him a chance. I stuck to my guns and continued to ignore him. I just honestly knew that at the end of the day there was not going to be a future with us.

After the flowers I honestly thought that he had gotten the point. I did not hear from him for several months. I felt like he was gone. Then one day out of the blue, I got a text message from him with one of those generic "E-Cards" about a dog that he said made him think of me. It was a cute picture so I responded. That was the mistake I made. I should have never responded to him. I should have left the gates closed. What followed was the most horrifying, entertaining and downright embarrassing thing I have ever seen. He sent me another message that said "I was thinking about you the other night and I made something that hopefully will make you smile".

The next thing that came through was a video. I honestly was so annoyed that I didn't even play it at first. I had dealt with enough crazy out of this guy that I didn't want to know. Finally curiosity got the best of me and I had to watch it. He had LITERALLY set up his computer to record himself dancing to  Robin Thicke's "Give It 2 U" and sent it to me. And he was NOT being goofy or funny. He was SO DEAD SERIOUS while he was dancing!! The best part was that he was sweaty in the video so you could tell that he had probably been practicing several times before he got just the right one that he wanted to send. If I ever had any doubts about this guy being on drugs, they were all confirmed!!

Needless to say, after having a small breakdown about what my life had become, I shared the video with all of my friends and colleagues. They all thought it was HYSTERICAL and a bit pathetic and got a big kick out of it. I never responded to his video. After that he did go away. I think he finally got the point that I was not interested.

My Take-Aways from Tommy:

* If you think a person has quirks in the beginning, they are probably going to turn into something a little larger than a quirk. He showed me his "crazy" early on but I chose to ignore it. I thought that he was a good guy. I was completely wrong.
* There is a difference between being intoxicated on alcohol alone and being intoxicated on alcohol plus prescription pills. I always thought that he was over the top when he went out and partied…it just took me a little bit to put all of the pieces together. That is definitely not something that I am looking for in a life partner.
* Always stick to your guns when you break things off with someone if the situation is like it was with Tommy. There is no telling where this roller coaster would have taken me if I would have taken him back and given him another chance, but I was not willing to stay on for the ride. I had had enough of him and his nonsense. I had too much to lose in my life to get caught up in childish behavior like that.

What's Mine is NOT Yours

I looked around my kitchen and realized that Tommy had indeed cleaned up the disaster from the night before. All of the food was gone, nothing was on the floor and overall everything seemed back to normal. There was just one thing that was slightly off. One of my chairs from my breakfast table was pulled away from the table and pulled against my cabinet and the cabinet was standing wide open.

Had this been a food cabinet or the cabinet that I kept my dishes in, I would have never even thought twice about it...but this was a different cabinet. This was my medicine cabinet. Why in the world would a chair be pulled up to my medicine cabinet and the door be standing wide open?? Had Tommy needed an Advil for a hangover there would have been no need for a stool for him to peer in the medicine cabinet. That was right in the front. As soon as I walked over and looked in, I could tell that everything had been shuffled through.

I immediately went into search and recovery mode!! I just had a gut feeling that this was not going to end well.

I am quite the medicine hoarder. Anytime I get a prescription, I keep the leftovers just incase I ever need them. I have my own pharmacy going in my medicine cabinet and now it had been violated. I began looking at everything…mostly looking for the more "desirable" drugs that someone might want to take.

It did not take me more than a minute to find what was missing!! I was missing a FULL bottle (30 pills) of Loratab - which I keep on hand because I have kidney stones - and a bottle of Xanax - which were my saving grace when I went through my divorce!! I could NOT believe it!! Tommy had taken drugs out of my house!! I had NEVER had ANYONE steal from me!! I honestly did not know what to do. One part of me felt like I should report him to the police just incase he were to overdose and my name was attached to the bottles, but then I didn't want to be so dramatic.

After I sorted everything out in my head I chose to send him a simple text. It read "Hope you made it home safely, I don't think you and I have a future together." It did not take him long at all to pick up the phone and call me. Of course he was completely SHOCKED that I felt that way. He wanted an explanation. I asked him if he had left my house with anything that wasn't his. Of course he denied it. I told him how my kitchen looked when I came home and what was missing from my drug cabinet. He continued to deny it. I stuck to my guns and ended it.

Within 20 minutes he called me back and admitted to everything and offered to bring the pills back to me. He told me how he likes to take pills when he drinks (which completely explained the crazy drunken state he got into) and that he was sorry. I told him that I wanted nothing to do with him and he could shove the pills up his ass for all that I cared. I felt completely violated that someone had been in my house and gone through my things and just taken whatever they wanted. After all of this he even had the nerve to ask me to please give him another chance. He thought that if he returned the pills, we could pretend like none of this had ever happened and just move on. FAT CHANCE!!

The Hangover Tommy Edition

I was out with my girlfriends on a Friday night. I did not have plans to see Tommy. We had plans for the next night, but I had already declared that Friday night was going to be girls night. We were downtown having a great time and I happened to run in to Tommy and one of his friends. We chatted and all had a drink together and then parted ways. I could tell that he was quite intoxicated but I honestly felt like it was not my issue because I was with my friends, he had his friends and I was not responsible for him or his whereabouts that evening.

As soon as I left him the texting and phone calls began. He wanted to meet up with me again. He wanted to hang out. He wanted to see me. Blah blah blah! I tried to blow him off but I was torn because I WAS interested in this guy so I did kind of want to meet up with him too. I let another hour or so pass and then I gave in and met up with him and his friend.

The Tommy that I met up with was not the Tommy that I had seen earlier in the evening. He was completely inebriated. He literally could not form a sentence. He was hanging all over me and his friend was done with the situation. I was stuck with him. I had to make a game time decision. I loaded his drunk ass into my car and drove him back to my place. With any luck he would pass out in my car and I could just deal with him once I got home. I was hoping for an easy rest of the evening. What I got was anything other than easy.

As soon as I got him in the door he came to life. I told him he needed to go to bed. I had to be up at 6:00AM the next morning to be at an event. I was in no mood for shenanigans. He told me that I could go to bed and he was going to stay up and watch TV for a bit and then he would come to bed. The mistake I made was believing that. Around 2AM I woke up because I heard a loud bang in my kitchen. I jumped out of bed and I found him laying in the floor with a container of ice cream all over him. I don't even know what had happened but all I could tell was that he had fallen and the ice cream had followed. There was food everywhere in my kitchen! There were crackers on the counter, chips out of the cabinet, the milk was out of the fridge. He had even opened a box of Stove Top Stuffing Mix!! This joker was hungry!! He had been binge eating and my kitchen looked like a scene from The Hangover. I was sure that there was a chicken or a tiger somewhere in my house.

I was furious! I forced him to get in bed. I left the mess and told him that he would clean it up in the morning. I got very little sleep for the rest of the night because I was so angry…and maybe a little worried that he might die. I just could not understand how someone could get so drunk and act so ridiculous! He was an adult…not a ridiculous irresponsible teenager! It made no sense.

The next morning I left the house SUPER early. He was, of course, still asleep. I just reminded him that there was a disaster in my kitchen and I expected it to be completely cleaned up when I got back.

I was gone ALL DAY. I didn't return home until almost 6:00 that evening. When I got home he was gone and the mess was cleaned up…however there was something that was just not quite right about my kitchen.

Everyone Has Quirks

Tommy immediately asked me out on a date for the following weekend. I agreed to go out with him. What did I have to lose? Little did I know those would later be famous last words in our relationship.

He picked me up at my house on Saturday night and we went out to a nice dinner. We had sushi and a few cocktails. We spent a lot of time talking over dinner and drinks and really getting to know each other. He was an engineer. He had a great job and he also was working in his spare time developing an app for smart phones. This guy was really smart. I was fairly impressed. We talked about his soccer days in college. It sounded like he was a pretty good athlete, which was always a plus in my book.

After dinner we came back to my house. I invited him in to hang out for a bit with the pups. After the Todd debacle, I learned that it was best just to let someone go ahead and meet the dogs before anything got too serious so I would know whether or not the relationship had potential. He was really sweet to my dogs. He played with them and gave them attention. He officially had passed the dog test.

We hung out and chatted for a little longer and then it was time for him to go. I kissed him goodnight and we made plans to see each other again. I was interested in him. He was cute, smart and he seemed to have his life together.

Over the next couple of months, Tommy and I went out a lot. Things seemed to be really developing between us. I felt we had a real chemistry together. He was a little quirky but overall, a nice guy who I felt I could POSSIBLY potentially maybe :) see a future with. I say that very lightly because I had already learned up to this point in my dating "career" to always proceed with caution. I could never be too sure about the way I felt about things.

There were a few things that I learned during the time that I had spent with Tommy that I felt were just quirks and not red flags or deal breakers. Everyone has quirks, right??

Tommy had two tattoos…that I knew of. One was a wolf howling at the moon and one was a tiger. I always thought that these were very odd tattoos and when I asked him about them the answer that I got was even more odd. The tiger was for power and strength…OK. Got that one. The wolf was because he likes to go outside and howl at the moon just like a wolf! WTF??!!?? Why didn't I run away when I got this response? I think that I honestly thought he was joking. No normal person would ever say something like that. No normal person would do that and he seemed overall pretty normal.

Another thing that made him quirky was during a conversation about going to the beach. We were talking about our favorite things about the beach and what we liked to do at the beach. My response was that I like to relax, swim a little, read a book, drink a good drink and just enjoy the time off work. His response was totally bizarre. He said that he likes to go into the ocean and stand there all day and punch the waves and "fight Poseidon". He said he would even yell at Poseidon and hope that he would get bigger waves. I immediately knew at that point that we would NEVER be taking a beach trip together.

The final thing was he liked to party and he liked to party hard. I had never quite seen anything like it. When he would drink it was like a different level of drunkenness than I had ever seen before. I couldn't even really explain it. He was quite a mystery to me.

Armed with these "quirks", for some reason I still decided that I was going to date him for a little longer. I don't know if I was bored, lonely or I just wanted to see where this ride was going to take me.

Function Over Fashion

After Todd, I decided that I was not going to worry with dating. I was just ready to go out and have fun with my friends. I had some GREAT single friends and we had built a pretty good schedule of going either to happy hour for a casual glass of wine or going out until the wee hours of the morning and partying like a bunch of rockstars. I was having the time of my life. I did not need anyone and I DEFINITELY was not looking for anyone. My one friend and I always joked about how oblivious we were to anyone else in bars other than ourselves. We just went to drink, dance and have fun. We never paid attention to our surroundings…especially the men. We did not go out to meet people. We went out to have fun.

Enter Tommy.

It was an unseasonably cold night and my dear friend and I were out on the town. Neither of us were dressed appropriately for the weather and we did not have a jacket. The only solution that we could find was a pink and black fleece paw printed dog blanket in the back seat of my car. SCORE!! We were going to be warm. Function over fashion, right?!? Now…if we actually cared what people thought about us or we were trying to pick up men, we would have never used a dog blanket to keep warm, but neither of these were the case so the dog blanket worked out just fine.

We used the blanket to wrap up in to walk to the bar and then once inside we draped it over our legs while sitting at the bar having drinks. It was a weeknight so it was not terribly crowded but there were still enough people sitting at the bar that we had "friends" surrounding us. We decided that we needed to get a picture to document our evening with the dog blanket in the bar so I asked the gentleman next to me if he would mind taking a quick picture…and that's where it all started.

He took a picture of us and then wasted no time introducing himself to my friend and I. His name was Tommy. He had just moved to our city about a year ago. He was an engineer. He told me that he played soccer in college for a very reputable university. He seemed like an OK guy. Had I been interested in dating I might have thought that he would have been a good guy to consider. Since I was not interested in dating, I was ready to get back to my friend and ignore him.

That is not what happened. My friend and I ended up talking to him the rest of the evening. He had a really cute smile, a sweet personality and from what I could tell he seemed like a pretty good guy. Before I left he asked me for my number. Hesitantly, I gave it to him. I really felt like he was nice, I just wasn't sure if I was up for trying to date again. I was beginning to feel like everything was failing and I was starting to burn out. After I gave him my number I decided that if he called I would give him a chance. I felt the chances of him calling were about 25%. After all, we met in a bar, we had both had a few drinks and I had a damn dog blanket on as a shawl!! You play those odds!

He called the next day!

Friends??

Todd and I continued to date for a few more weeks. Needless to say he was not invited over to my house anymore. We had so much fun together but the one issue that we could not get past was the subject of my dogs. This was something that he was not going to cave on and I absolutely would not EVER compromise on my dogs.

It was very difficult for me to comprehend how everything could seem so spot on with a person and something as trivial as whether a dog lives in your house or outside of your house could be the breaking point. However, it was a definite deal breaker with me because these dogs were NEVER going to live outside and that was that. I could never even imagine anything different for them.

Todd and I eventually decided that we were not going to have a future together romantically. It was a mutual decision and was probably the most mature, adult break-up conversation I had had with someone up to this point. We basically just sat down and agreed that due to this huge point of contention we would never be able to see a future together so we needed to stop things before they got too much more involved. We laughed about how trivial it sounded, I gave him a nickname "Dog Hater Todd" and then we agreed that we would remain friends because we truly enjoyed each other's company so much.

I believe that it is rare to actually remain friends with someone who you have dated and had an intimate relationship with. Usually it is very hard to go back to a platonic relationship…especially if you never had that in the first place. Todd and I have been the exception to that!! We have turned in to really good friends! We talk about once a week. We still see each other occasionally. We have just as much fun together as friends as we did when we dated. There is definitely still an attraction there but we just have to draw the line and know that we have decided to be friends. Occasionally if we're both single we will sneak a kiss in but that is where we draw the line :) I am so thankful to have him in my life as a friend because he is a fantastic person. I would much rather our situation have ended up as it has then ended up in any other way.

My Take-Aways from Todd:

* There are good guys out there. Todd was the first really good, quality, successful guy that I dated. It was encouraging to me to finally find someone that was on the same page as me and shared the same goals!! Even though it didn't work out with him, it made me set my bar a little higher and made me realize that I can find a quality guy if I am just willing to wait for the right one.
* When you feel like you see little red flags, don't dismiss them…pay attention. More than likely they turn into big issues. The entire dog situation could have been avoided had I just listened and taken him seriously when he told me that he hated indoor dogs.
* When you know that a relationship is not going anywhere it is best to go ahead a scrap it. Don't drag it out even if you feel like everything else feels good about it. If there is one huge issue that you will never get past, end the relationship. Fortunately Todd and I ended it early enough that emotions were not so involved and we could not salvage a friendship.