I met a fantastic guy and I thought we had a real future together. He was everything I’d ever wanted in a partner and I was starting to fall for him. Then I discovered he’d lied about his age and things were over before they ever really began.
- I shouldn’t have snooped. Okay, so maybe I was to blame for checking his identity card one day when we were chilling at his place, but I just thought it would be fun to see his pic. I nearly collapsed when I saw that he’d been lying to me about his age. He’d told me he was 28 (which had felt perfect because I was 26) but I soon learned that he was only 23.
- Age isn’t usually a big deal. I’m usually not that hung up on age. If a guy’s younger or older than me, it’s no big deal. As long as we connect and we have the same maturity level, it’s all good. The problem here was that he hadn’t been honest with me.
- I came clean about what I’d learned. He was pretty unfazed by being caught out but he looked at me like I was some kind of psycho for being upset about it. He told me to “chill,” which obviously sent my blood pressure through the roof! He then said that age was nothing but a number, blah blah blah. He clearly wasn’t getting it.
- It’s not just one little lie. Although he called lying about his age “a tiny little lie” and said that it didn’t change anything between us, he was sadly mistaken. I felt like him lying to me about his age was actually pulling lots of other lies into our relationship and everything I thought I knew about him unraveled.
- I clearly didn’t know him at all. When he told me that he’d graduated from college five years previously, it had been a lie because he’d only graduated a few months previously. By pretending to be older to impress me, he’d had to fabricate tons of things, like where he’d worked and for how long he’d been in his job.
- He’d also lied about his relationships. During a conversation about exes, he’d told me that he hadn’t had a relationship in seven years when the truth was that he’d been single for two. It might not seem like a big issue, but at the time I asked him what he’d done for all those years and he didn’t have much to say. I thought it was a red flag when in truth, he had never even been single for that long. It’s clear to see that lying can cause stress and complicate things, even in unintended ways.
- He faked being more mature than he was. One of the biggest problems with lying about his age was that he tried to be a bit more mature than he really was. He had to put on an act the whole time to be this 28-year-old guy and realizing that freaked me out.
- I had to end things. I knew I sounded crazy to him, but I had to end our relationship. He’d been fake and lied to me about so many little things that actually added up into big things. I just couldn’t be with someone who did that. It was a bad start to a relationship because I didn’t know how I’d be able to trust him.
- What did it say about what he thought of me? For him to feel that he had to lie to me about his age for me to date him really hurt me. Did he think I’d judge him based on the fact that he was younger? He clearly never even gave me a chance to show him what I was like, and that was quite upsetting.
- It showed me who he really was. I’m not gonna lie, it wasn’t just the fact that he lied about his age that put me off him – it was also how he reacted when I found out about it. Telling me that I was overreacting and that I had to “chill”? For real? That’s so dodgy. He should’ve been man enough to try to see things from my perspective. I shuddered at the thought that he’d behave in this way when we hit real problems in our relationship.
