He looked like another ugly man baby, in his “perpetual teenager” attire, but that’s what she always went for. And he didn’t care if she were a demonstrable liar. In fact, it was her very lies that he sought to use to manipulate her, playing the understanding, protective ‘man,” though he had no idea what she had done and didn’t care. The irony was that he made little more than one she had rejected, and, if he said otherwise, he was a liar … but that was par for course. And she, reveling in the attention, spurred his belief in her innocence, her poor, little act of the downtrodden … who stomped on people for ego. He had had decades to profess interest, but did so only now, when it was convenient for him, and he saw her as the perfect mark. 

There was a subtle tell in his otherwise anodyne photos that spoke to his true nature, being that a non-military man who fancied high-power weapons was invariably a control freak with a streak of a well-hidden desire for violence. This was bolstered by gym rathood and, though it may have appeared as the leanings of a kind heart, his journeys professed a belief in his own superiority over the “less fortunate.” In actuality, as was the custom of missionaries, he sought to take advantage of people’s poverty, poverty that he, with his middle class American lifestyle, had, in effect, inflicted. The low always signaled their virtue, but, like those who needed to profess their piety, there was none there. All signs were there, however, as usual, and they screamed malignant narcissism.

It was not so much a courtship—a distant, futile, stupid courtship based in bullshit and feigned desire for commitment—as it was a dance of masks, neither being a truthful … or good … person, a game of subterfuge by two needing to feel wanted by one they were conning. Both only wanted control.