About five months ago, one of my exes started liking every post I made on Instagram. Every single one. This is the same ex that I am pretty sure went and bought a house with another woman (and probably married her, though I haven’t found the marriage records – yet) while we were still together. We hadn’t had any contact for 8 years.

He didn’t know that I had already done research – and not in the easy way, just by looking on Instagram and Facebook. No, I did research. I actually do this with some of my exes just because I need to know where they are to be able to avoid them. Unfortunately, Facebook is pretty tricky with the algorithms and I’m pretty sure that’s how I popped up somehow for him.

In the middle of winter, when he started making his presence known to me on Instagram, I looked at his photos and also tracked down his partner/spouse’s page. That filled in some blanks for me too. Plus she was displaying some recent photos from Christmas 2020 showing her and my ex posing for a holiday photo. There were a couple of comments saying how cute they were. They were still a “they.” She also posted photos of a very elderly dog he had when he and I dated. They had a new a/c unit crane-lifted and installed in December 2020, all pictured under her Instagram. If she was just living there and wasn’t invested in the house, she wouldn’t have cared one iota about the a/c.

After watching him like everything, I finally told myself that I was going to say hello and be snarky, but instead I just said hello. We chatted for a bit, caught up, and he told me that I was always really nice. I told him I was surprised that he had any good memories of me. Every time something went wrong in his life, no matter what it was, I was immediately the enemy. Usually it had nothing to do with me. Stress at work? Chelsea is a piece of shit, let’s ghost her. Problems with the ex-wife? Chelsea is the worst person on the planet, time to pretend she doesn’t exist.

And I was never, ever, ever allowed to meet his kids, not even after they were adults. I was a secret. He never told them he was dating me. We were dating between 2008 and 2014, with breaks for when I got tired of that shit. His kids never knew I existed.

Over the course of reconnecting, I asked him in clear terms if he was currently with someone. He told me that he had been single since October 2019. I have screen shots.

Around mid-May, we made arrangements to meet up. However, I waited….and waited…and waited for him to come clean about his wife. Crickets. So a few hours before we were supposed to get together, I sent a few screen shots of his wife’s Instagram and told him I didn’t think it would be a good idea to get together. His response was that it was complicated, and he wouldn’t tell me anything past that.

He got hit by a baseball during his league game and chipped off an ankle bone, and so can’t play for weeks, which is difficult for him. He’s used to playing baseball or bowling every day.

Then his elderly dog died at 18 years of age (human years). He talked to me nearly every day about that. He said he would cry for his dog every day, but not his mother, who was dying. (He also said that he cried every time someone had their first at bat in baseball.)

Then his daughter was given orders to go overseas to Eastern Europe (Army).

When his daughter got the orders, he decided to ghost me. I didn’t hear from him for a few days, so I just sent him a quick message. He responded by saying he was swamped with work. This is someone who would say good morning and good night to me every day, but then he dropped off the face of the earth. Big, fat lie. Busy, my ass. We’re back to this. I did absolutely nothing wrong. The last time something even remotely similar to this happened, he sent me some stupid text that went something like, “My heart is guarded by high castle walls…,” etc. Let me tell you, he loves to pretend that he is injured – by me, because I exist. I have never cheated on him. I have never lied to him. I have always been up front with him and told him exactly what was going on.

So I gave him what he wanted. I finished blocking him.

I used to think he was a good guy who was just struggling with mental health issues. When I blocked him, I expected to feel sad, because I felt a little crushed when I found out he remarried and bought a house with someone else. He had told me all along that he would never trust anyone else again after his first wife. What he really meant was that he didn’t trust me – although I never gave him any reason to mistrust me. Now he’s lying, cheating, and whatever else would fall under the scumbag category. Talk about dodging a bullet.