One thing I wasn’t prepared for in dating was a man’s marital status. I felt good about my ability to spot fuckbois and their vices. I didn’t think I’d have to be on the lookout for their wives.
Married Guy and I matched on Bumble. He said he was 33, looking for something serious, and a vegetarian who had never tried meat. That should have been my first red flag, but he seemed worldly and didn’t mind my own geopolitical red flags. He was a nine out of ten (subtracting for the vegetarianism). Keep in mind, I didn’t know he was married yet.
He loved to pick my brain about politics. He liked making plans and knowing when I’d be free during the day. He even insinuated we’d have a beautiful Jewish-Indian wedding at the house my great-grandfather built in Colombia.
Whenever I meet a man online, I make sure I have his phone number and full name before a date. I don’t care how uncomfortable it makes you. If you plucked, lasered, waxed, and spent days thinking about your outfit, you should know the legal name of the guy you’re investing in. A quick Google search never broke a relationship before it started. Equipped with my usual tools, however, I couldn’t find this guy with a high-powered career in mergers & acquisitions anywhere.
Alarms started going off for me right around the time they started going off in the Middle East (again). I couldn’t really pinpoint what it was. Funny how that happens, how, faced with zero information, our bodies can recognize danger. Funnier still, that it doesn’t happen when our leaders try to hide things from us.
I wondered why I couldn’t find any trace of Married Guy online. I didn’t expect him to have the digital footprint of a world leader, but still. I felt insane. Here I was, doubting the man who was reminding me to eat dinner. Why would anyone care that much about someone they were lying to? I spiraled as good morning texts and news headlines flooded my phone.
A lot of us are used to being lied to. I don’t know if it’s that we don’t recognize the signs, or that we choose to ignore them and live in a comfortable, or unchallenging, lie. We do this in relationships all the time. How many people do you know who have stayed together despite infidelity or moral shortcomings? In politics, the tactics are pretty similar: charm, overwhelm, and if all else fails, blame the leader of another country.
The past few weeks have leaned into the “overwhelm” part of this. When there’s too much to keep up with, it’s easy for things to go unnoticed. The Strait of Hormuz is open or closed, gas prices are up or down, stocks are up, the Islamic Regime is down, but the same people are in charge.
Married Guy was great at distractions, and he knew the best way to distract me was to ask me for my opinion. The Trump administration is also good at this. As the ten news apps on my phone pop off—they’re considering releasing $20 billion to Iran, more than Biden and Obama ever did. The administration also extended a “temporary” waiver on Russian oil through May 16th. These two very important things were done under the guise of cease-fire talks as the Department of Justice ups its efforts to denaturalize foreign-born US citizens, cuts thousands of law-enforcement jobs, and an internal watchdog reviews the DoJ’s compliance with the law mandating the release of the Epstein files. Talk about distractions.
Married Guy would usually FaceTime me in his car, or at the gym, or at the grocery store. He’d ask me about my day, complain about his high-level clients, and go into detail about all the vegetarian meals his private chef makes. He was connecting, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling that something was wrong. I asked him why I couldn’t find him online, and he had a decent excuse, you know, he was an adult who didn’t like social media. He worked high up at Big Consulting Firm and kept his LinkedIn “private”. FYI, you can’t keep your LinkedIn private. It also defeats the purpose of LinkedIn.
We kept talking, but weekends were getting tough. He was getting harder to reach after the workday, too— contrary to most humans. Like a good pseudo-journalist, I followed my instincts.
Uncovering the truth about Married Guy took a week of hyper-focus. I barely responded to work emails or left my apartment, and I had way more coffee than my body is used to consuming. Which is already a lot.
You can’t hyper-focus on world leaders unless you’re a journalist covering them full-time. Still, they do possess a much larger digital footprint than any man you’ll date, and there’s always a trail. Everyone says you need to check your sources—but no one actually does. It’s easier to sit down and have dinner, doom scroll through an algorithm catered to you, and wrap up international affairs in a neat bow.
Since I couldn’t find Married Guy anywhere using his name, I decided to search for his face. There still wasn’t much, but after hours of deep investigative work, I found a picture of him with a very pregnant woman.
I gasped and ran away from the computer as if I had just barged in on someone in a public restroom. Because I had, hadn’t I? No, I hadn’t consented to being in this situation, but here I was, staring at my situationship and his unknown Baby-Mama. I still didn’t have a name for anyone, and I couldn’t confirm he was still married.
I got a little smarter about how I spoke to him, and maybe a little colder. I didn’t want to call things off immediately, but I couldn’t let them progress. I needed the truth. We had been speaking for three weeks at this point, and he picked up on a change. Married Guy responded like any good politician would: with charm.
He brought up Valentine’s Day plans. Traveling together. He texted me more often and started calling me “sweetheart”. It took everything in me not to barf.
Then I hit my lucky break. I couldn’t find anything more on him, and I didn’t have Baby-Mama’s name. I had searched for her picture online and had only found a professional headshot, but no name. Nada. Nothing. Zilch. Desperate, I saved the professional headshot to my computer—and there it was. The auto-generated title had her full name in it. I had always been good at internet, but I never thought I was that good.
I know we’re at war with Iran. And I guess Russia. I guess Russia is at war with Ukraine. I guess Israel is at war with Hezbollah, sort of, but has a ceasefire with Lebanon, which doesn’t control Hezbollah but definitely doesn’t want them over their house anymore. We have to give things we don’t want to give during negotiations. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists” is bullshit. Who else are you supposed to negotiate with? Nancy from next door? She’s killed zero people. We always have to give something in exchange for peace.
I know, I know, we sort of had peace before. At the very least, we had a Cold War Era-esque sustained, stable violence. Nothing you could really feel from the States if you aren’t tied to the East.
Baby-Mama wasn’t “private” on LinkedIn. She had a great job. She was driven and prioritized helping other women. I couldn’t find anything that tied her to Married Guy other than their botanical pregnancy photo shoot, and I wasn’t about to blow up someone’s life without definitive proof.
People will eventually show their true colors. The Islamic Regime is authoritarian and genocidal. Russia is the mean girl we were friends with in middle school, who then got kind of hot and stopped inviting us to her parties in high school. You can love peace, and people, and flowers, and rainbows, but you have to understand when the power struggles of those in charge impact you.
Married Guy called me from his car on a Friday night. I was getting ready to head out to one of my favorite events—a Shabbat conversation with a Middle East policy expert. I decided to ask him if he’d ever been married and give him the chance to prove me wrong (and insane). He denied it, but at this point, I had also found pictures of their wedding. He also said he didn’t have children. I felt the barf come up again but smiled and nodded instead. Still, I needed more. I needed help.
I was scared. What if he hurt me? Sued me? Killed me? I had been poking around for too long. I said “thank you” when he told me I looked pretty and hung up, promising to text him when I got home. I did.
No one likes to believe they’re the bad guy. No one likes to believe they can be fooled into being complicit with a bad guy. How could the president of the US, how could we, do something that would hurt us? How could a man who reminded me, a frazzled and overcaffeinated writer, to eat dinner, text me goodnight after tucking in his daughter?
I turned to my friend, a bad-ass divorce lawyer, and her techie husband for help. Equipped with her name, access to public records, and two new team members with too much time on their hands, I was able to confirm Married Guy’s marital status. And his real name. And his real age. And his very real daughter.
I paid for LinkedIn Premium, had a panic attack for half a day, and messaged his wife. I gave her every bit of information she asked for. She said she was sorry this had happened to me.
I texted Married Guy one last time, told him I knew, and told him never to contact me again. Then I blocked his number and drank the better part of a bottle of tequila.
It took me a while to get over it, but I didn’t want to take a break from dating. This experience hadn’t officially happened to me. This was someone else’s marriage. Someone else’s life. I got to walk away, and I needed to take advantage of that.
We can’t walk away in politics. Sure, we can pretend nothing’s happening. We can close our eyes to a good or bad economy and to international relations being rewritten and believe we’re the ones in control, but we’re not the other woman in this situation. In politics, it’s always about our marriage. It’s always about our lives.
I went on three dates that week. My friends got a good laugh out of it. It didn’t work out with any of those men, but at least I knew for certain that none of them were married.