This is moreso a story of my stupidity. Despite my friends and family trying to tell me that they understand how I made my mistake, and how it was mostly my ex-partner’s fault, I don’t know if I’ll ever fully believe that due to how much I feel I could have avoided. But because I know I’m not the only person who makes stupid mistakes, I thought maybe this could be beneficial to someone struggling in the same way.

Before I get into this, I feel it might be important to mention that I’m 28 now, and I’ve always been an emotional person in search of emotional connection to something or someone outside of myself. Being this way has led to countless problems for me, but this was the biggest one yet.

I moved to Georgia from Illinois back in April to be with family during Covid. Trying to comfort myself and atone for everything I was leaving behind, I got on OkCupid so I could talk to some guys in the area. I’d been on OkCupid on and off for many years but had somehow never actually managed to meet up with anyone from there. So I was surprised when I met someone within just a couple weeks, whom I seemed to have so much in common with — we seemed to have the same speech patterns, to have similar ideologies on life, and to have a lot of the same emotional issues we bonded over. We even had damn near the same birthday. It felt really freaky, and I definitely got the vibe that I was supposed to meet him. He texted me all day every day. We would stay up until 4 AM a lot of nights sharing and learning about one another. It all seemed to happen so naturally and I began to feel like I could have known him forever. I wasn’t fully convinced we were destined to be together or anything, but my actions soon switched from that of a skeptic’s to that of someone becoming willing to risk more and more.

Now, there are important pieces of information that will become relevant soon which I will mention here:

(1) Prior to meeting up with him for the first time, I got an STD and STI screening because I’d been diagnosed as having HPV some years back. To my surprise, all results came back negative. When I asked him if he knew he was also clear, he explicitly said yes.

(2) He had a female roommate, whom he had told me he’d never slept with. I made sure to ask and, even though I felt funny about their arrangement still, I’d also had opposite gender roommates in the past with girlfriends they were faithful to, so I felt wrong making assumptions.

Fast forward through a few months, we’d been booking hotel rooms on some weekends and he made it clear he wanted to be able to get off inside me since the beginning. Of course I’d said no for a while; honestly, I wasn’t on protection for it, and I wasn’t even sure I’d wanted children. In his mind he was very likely unable to have kids due to the fact that apparently he’d been getting off in women for a long time and none of them ever became pregnant to his knowledge. I still felt weird about it but eventually I gave in, in the heat of the moment. It happened 2 or 3 times. As you can probably guess, I discovered soon that my period was late. I was pregnant.

I was immediately nervous and worrying about millions of things. He, on the other hand, was ecstatic. He quickly suggested that I live with him and his roommate so I wouldn’t have to go through the process without him. I agreed but I made it very clear that living there couldn’t be a long term deal for me. He promised me that even if it meant we couldn’t afford to live somewhere great right away, he’d go with me anywhere I went and we’d work our way up, together. So I moved in with him under those pretenses.

And yet, the moment I moved in with him was when everything changed.

He instantly changed from someone who went places with me and seemed to love talking to me, to a guy who did literally nothing but work and then sit on his butt gaming with his roommate. I knew he was a gamer but I also knew that he didn’t seem to have a problem getting away from his games to spend time with me a couple days a week. I also began to notice his roommate getting way too close for comfort with him right in front of me. I saw her sit so close next to him that they were touching, and rub her hand up and down his back. Then she laid directly behind him and played with his hair. They both worked from home but she felt it necessary to bring her laptop over to HIS work area seemingly every other day — they didn’t even have a wall separating them prior to this — and sit next to him while they worked. Hell, she would even invite herself to tag along with him when he went to get food every now before I even knew he was going out, and neither of them felt it necessary to invite me along. Obviously I noticed something was up. This was when all the truths came out, and mind you, by this point I had only lived with them for about 2 weeks. All of that had happened in just 2 weeks.

He told me that they HAD slept together (while confessing he was only telling me then because his roommate demanded it of him,) and the last time was just 2 months before he met me. Some time very close before that, he had also admitted that he had not been tested since his last few sex partners, so he didn’t actually *know* if he was clean. The BIGGEST and most hurtful lies, though, were the ones about his plans for the future with me. Soon after I moved in, he told me he couldn’t live somewhere else with me because he was signed on for a 15 month lease at the apartment. And he didn’t think we could afford a house either towards the end of the lease — another lie he had fed me before — so the roommate had pulled him aside in a private conversation asking about us getting a 3 bedroom, IF they could even afford THAT.

All the while I was constantly talking to friends, family, and random people on forums every day asking for advice on what I should do. Everyone told me to leave him and advised against me having the baby. Somehow I still felt bad just up and doing that, so I talked with him about it a handful of times. He kept saying things like, “I had it worse as a kid,” “I think your expectations for raising the the baby are too high,” and “Are your friends gonna raise the baby? If not, why are you listening to them?” I let all of that get to me for a while. But ultimately I decided I needed to leave and do what felt right. Thus, here we are today. I went to the clinic, was given the pills for the at-home method, and suffered like hell for the 5 hours following.

It was a huge lesson that I’m almost sad to say I’m grateful for. Like anyone, I wish I could have learned without such drastic measures being taken first. But I now understand what happens if you do something you aren’t sure of in order to please your partner, without having spent enough time with them to build REAL trust beforehand. Unfortunately I’m still lonely, and still very emotional. But ultimately what I had to ask myself and what I advise any woman in a similar situation to ask themselves is:

In the end, who would be more important to you: a grown man who should already have the means to fend for and please themselves? Or a baby whose ONLY source of life – let alone happiness – would come from you, its mother?

If you care more about a baby’s livelihood, you have to learn to put your loneliness aside. Because by giving into your loneliness and living recklessely, you are risking potentially putting another person’s life at stake. And when that goes wrong, it will haunt you forever.

Thanks for listening.

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