Hahaha, another one of my tawdry stories. Yes, I have a few, but I love the idea that I might prevent somebody else from making the same mistakes I made. Who knows if something in my experience might serve to pull another soul away from the dumpster fire they’re careening towards. That’s why past pain and mistakes can be worth sharing. So here we go…
I was about 22 when I met Ryan (not his real name). He was actually the first partner I shared a house with. Retrospectively I can acknowledge that he love-bombed me at the start (although nobody used that term then), talking up big future plans, way too young, much too early. I was besotted, so I threw caution to the wind and we moved our few possessions in together after only a short while.
It was the 90s. You couldn’t jump online and look people up, check facts or educate yourself enough to be dangerous like you can now. I was naïve, and I wanted him to be true. He was warm and attractive with a lot of love to give. Or so I believed. I took a chance.
Ryan had exciting stories of growing up, some of them a little on the fantastical side, but nothing too unbelievable. I did notice details sometimes changed from one telling to another, but he was always able to explain. For example, he said he was part of a pro skateboard team when he was a teenager, but when I asked him more about it, he said he only skated with them and was not officially in the team. There were similar small but significant corrections to things he had said from one day to the next, but nothing serious. I don’t remember it worrying me because it was about stuff that didn’t matter.
A few times his friends looked at me blankly when I referenced something he’d told me that involved them, like they didn’t know what I was talking about. But never did anyone outright deny anything that he’d said.
When I met his mum, I thought she was unfriendly because she didn’t want to engage with me much. She said very little, drank her tea and looked mildly uneasy when she came to see our rental. I was left feeling like she didn’t like me. She also seemed to quietly disapprove of Ryan, giving him piercing looks that seemed to hold secrets.
Ryan talked frequently about his little brother being adopted and traumatised by a difficult past, getting into trouble, hanging with the wrong people, but I suspect that Ryan himself was the one with the trauma history. By the time I met his mum I’m guessing she’d been to hell and back navigating his lies and their consequences as she raised him, but she still didn’t want to throw him under a bus.
Looking back, I’m guessing she was worried, for me as well as for him. She was likely caught between wishing she could warn me about her son, while not wanting to blow up our relationship, just in case he was doing it right. Maybe what I felt as unfriendliness, was her anxiously sussing out the situation, listening for how much Ryan had lied so far.
Anyway, I found a wedding ring in a box of clothes and Ryan said that he had been married and divorced and it was his old ring. This was big news since he was all of 22, but he explained the marriage had been a kind of weird teen rebellion. Very 1950s kind of rebellion, but Oh-Kayyy. He was attractive, charismatic, said all the right things - I didn’t want to call a stop to all the fun we were having.
A few weeks later, a very pretty girl turned up asking for Ryan because they were once engaged and his car, which she still drove, needed repairs. I assumed she was the teen bride, but he said she wasn’t. She was only a recent ex-fiancée, he said. MmmHmm. He seemed very into all things marriage for such a young guy.
Anyway, the rabbit-hole of whose car it was, why she still had it and when this engagement had even ended, kept getting deeper, the ground shifting every time I tried to find anything out.
Then, I took myself to a local clinic because I was experiencing some weird itches! I was advised that my partner should also see a doctor. Furious and embarrassed, I called Ryan at work. He denied having any symptoms, but assured me he would go to his family doctor immediately to get checked.
He arrived home with a small note in scratchy handwriting, allegedly from his doctor, saying he was completely clear. I was young, but I knew that doctors used letterhead with their name, address and a provider number when they wrote certificates and the like. It was obvious that Ryan had written a fake doctor’s note, like a 12 year old trying to skip school.
Everything started to fall apart from there like a landslide gathering speed as more and more dirt fell. A young woman and two guys started to show up every couple of days to hang out with Ryan - old mates he ran into at the shops, he said.
The old mates turning up triggered a sudden shift in Ryan, including the end of any consideration for me. His behaviour became unpredictable, all his kindness and sweetness replaced overnight by coolness and secrecy.
He disappeared a bunch of cash, denying it at first, then admitting he took it but not giving it back. A grotty coke bottle bong took up residence on our coffee table and I started getting home to find him and his mates stoned, barely acknowledging my existence. I cried a lot and he didn’t care. Our last interaction involved him demanding money for cigarettes like a schoolyard bully.
I contacted R’s mum to tell her I’d moved out, and although she still didn’t want to talk much, she did say,
“I’m sorry. He’s a compulsive liar. I wish you well.”
I felt like I’d been hit. All I could think was,
Of course he is, why didn’t I realise?
I tried to get more information from her, to understand how this had happened, but she stood by her son and said nothing further. My heart was broken. There had been so many loving words and future plans that were all just him pretending to be a grown-up.
Everyone told me move on but of course questions played on me for a while. I’m not sure if I was angrier with Ryan or myself, for not seeing what was in front of me.
Months later I was contacted by a guy who had moved in with Ryan after I moved out. He was looking for Ryan, who’d done a runner, leaving him with a stack of unpaid bills, two months overdue rent that he’d said he’d paid but hadn’t, and a large window broken in the property. Ryan had left a trail of destruction in his wake and apparently, none of his friends or family knew where he’d gone. He’d also left his workplace and they were chasing him for hundreds of dollars worth of cab rides he’d charged to the company.
I moved on. I never heard another thing about him. I put it all down to a learning experience.
Decades later, for this article, I lazily type Ryan’s name into Google, not expecting to find anything. I strongly suspect the name he was using back then was false, because it was the same name as a more established person in his field at the time.
Nope. How about that? Maybe it was real, because a photo appears with the name at the top of the Google search. Somebody that I used to know, barely recognisable, middle aged, all his hair gone.
Wow. Ryan is apparently still out there with the same name. It’s a public, professional site and I click to read he has changed industries and spent decades ‘working internationally’.
Irked by my stalkiness, I shut the browser. I want to wash my hands, so I do. I’m irrationally scared, like I might have disturbed a zombie by peering into a long-forgotten tomb. Do. Not. Recommend.
We all lie sometimes, but some people lie as a lifestyle. Some souls are sick with lies, and it’s a complex condition to recover from, because compulsive or pathological lying usually sits within a trauma history, or other diagnoses, not on its own.
Often, it’s a defence against low self-esteem, against feeling like your reality is not enough, so you make things up. I did a bit of embellishing the truth myself as a teenager, to get more attention, to seem more exciting. Maybe Ryan was karma, but he took it to a level outside the normal range. If garden-variety lies sit around a 3 out of 10, on the (fictional) lying continuum, Ryan peaked with some solid 9s.
How do you avoid falling for someone who lies compulsively?
I think the only real answer is to take your time when starting a new relationship, even if it’s exciting and you’re both super keen. Slow down. If it’s going to be good enough to last, there’s no hurry, is there?
Do your homework.
You don’t have to be suspicious, but you do have to be smart and mindful, doing your best to see through your fog of excitement to the facts. Listen if a little voice is telling you some things are not adding up as they should. Force yourself to be honest with yourself and save yourself the heartache of delusion.
That being said, if you get lied to and you believe it, know that the wrong is ultimately with the liar, not you. We’re all just human and fallible, doing the best we can with the cards we’ve been dealt.
Send in your questions please.
Love to you,
P.S. As I mentioned at the start, the topic of compulsive lying is trending online due to a Tiktokker with a lot of followers talking about it. As a result, I contributed last week to an article on Huff Post if you want to read more.
I wanted to just pop back on and mention how much writing this piece affected me, because it has actually taken me by surprise. I thought I'd just write it easily and post it without much worry like usual. Perhaps the kicker was that I actually looked up the person concerned online after decades of not having a thought about him, prompted by this topic. I don't like thinking about him being out there, probably lying and conning his way through all the years since I knew him. I started wondering for the first time, about how many other people he'd hurt and asking myself what, if anything, I could have done to prevent that. All I knew to do back then in the 90s was to remove myself from the situation and write it all off to poor choices on my part. Ryan stole money from me but only hundreds, not thousands, so it was barely worth pursuing legally. The rest of what he directed towards me was emotionally cruel, but not illegal. Pity.