This is an adapted version of a story I presented at SEANCHOÍCHE in London on 25 May 2023. Thanks to Ciaran, Yasmine, Alex and the Ridley Road gang for making it such a special evening.
This tale is about a particularly surreal incident in my life, from which I have learned absolutely nothing from.
To my friends who helped put me back together, love you forever.
While the theme of this evening rests on the notion of Mistakes, the tale I’m about to relay to this room full of strangers, all bound together by an appreciation of the spoken word and a handful of mutuals on Instagram, sort of touches on the very opposite. My story is about an absence of mistakes, as a “mistake” often denotes a form of wrongdoing, opportunities for growth or lessons for a future self on what can be avoided.
In this story, there is no such moment of self-enlightenment or reckoning. Nothing to be reflected on, or digested in order to avoid a recurrence. There is only a string of totally insane, nonsensical developments that culminated in six months of my life, a week long trip across the Atlantic, irrevocable trust issues and many, many tears.
I suppose a good place to start would be in acknowledging that one of the many tricky things about psychopaths, is that they tend to be quite charming.
Iflowpsychology.com - no doubt a reputable medical outlet, confirms this by stating that “Psychopaths are often highly engaging, witty and fun to be around.”
The saga started off fairly harmlessly, the way it does for most who engage in online flirtations. My first interaction with - let’s call him, Matthew - took place in April of 2021 through a work-adjacent event.
He spoke with a low American voice that was sometimes musical in tone, and had large round blue eyes. Conventionally relatively good looking, though infinitely more attractive by virtue of his sense of humour and his skill in deploying it.
Extremely bright and knowledgeable in his field, though he didn’t seem to have many friends, or much of a social life - which at the time, I had chalked up to him being a bit of a nerd, in the same way I was. Upon reflection however, perhaps not.
Over the course of the next six months or so, we found ourselves in endless Zoom meetings, rarely alone but always fixated on one another. Anytime I’d speak, his eyes would widen and he’d let out a poorly concealed smirk. He would immediately start messaging me things he knew I would find funny, in order to disrupt my aura of professionalism and train of thought, and it nearly always worked. I soon grew to look forward to every pointless meeting we’d be in together, just to go through the same ritual.
In the background to our Zoom flirtations, there was continuous communication via every online platform that you can think of. Matthew was extremely gifted at balancing the very fine line between uninterrupted flattery, and cutting insults laden with sarcasm and a clever sense of humour. He understood that I show affection through teasing, and so did the same.
He also found the correct way of saying “you’re amazing/right about everything/so brilliant” without coming across as too fawning or overbearing. He would often tell me explicitly that he was “obsessed with me”, which for someone who has a tendency to lean towards the narcissistic, was music to my ears.
Our rhythm of communication soon became obsessive, and any vaguely sensible person would have realised it had no chance of being sustained. I decided to ignore this very obvious fact, largely because I was enjoying the attention, but also because I had started to believe that I may have found someone rather special.
Matthew gave me every ounce of attention I felt like I needed at the time, and so I allowed for all his attempts at learning the inner workings of my personality. He was intent on knowing everything about me. What I loved, what I despised, the art I had collected and the music I listened to.
I would often wake up to find he had sent me detailed analysis on what he liked in my favourite films and TV shows that he’d never seen before. Really thoughtful and attentive focus was being poured into the things I cherished with such intensity, that it was hard to avoid forming an attachment to him.
We soon moved to a place where I’d send him a voicenote every evening before I went to bed about on what I had done that day, and he would do the same for me in time for when I woke up.
Things somehow managed to develop to the point where it felt like I had an online boyfriend, and the effort we were putting in was overwhelming. I suppose one of the central lessons that I can take from the whole experience is “never trust a man willing to leave you 12 minute long voicenotes.”
I reached a point in early 2022 where I thought to myself “you can either continue living on your phone like a teenager, or you can just get on a plane.” So naturally, as any other person plagued with a relatively persistent case of hopeless romanticism, I booked my flights.
I flew to the east coast in February last year on some half-arsed excuse of “networking” as the rest of our team was also based out there, spending hundreds of pounds to do so.
I had been careful to avoid anything that resembled a filthy message during our months of online dating. I wanted to give myself space for flexibility should we meet and have zero sexual chemistry, or for the thing that made him feel so special to suddenly disappear once he became a real person.
There are too many variables when it comes to deciding if you want to fuck someone or not, and I didn’t want to feel suffocated by not having my own place to stay for the week I was visiting, so I booked an Airbnb not thinking I’d use it.
Upon arrival, however, I quickly learned two things which would irredeemably shatter the fictional world that Matthew and I had created, that meant I’d end up spending a lot more time in the Airbnb than anticipated:
The first - he was absolutely not interested in fucking.
The second - he had replicated the entirety of our months long online tryst with the other woman we both worked with.
Now - it’s important to stress that we weren’t working at some global company with thousands of employees. There were five of us on the team, with me and - let’s call her Kelly - being the only other woman.
My memory has blocked out most of the two day period where Kelly and I came to realise what had been going on. Needless to say, at the time it felt a little bit like my entire concept of reality was being shredded before my eyes.
Everything I relayed to her about my experience with Matthew, she had encountered as well. The voicenotes, the endless talking via phonecalls and texts, the funny messages during meetings, the onslaught of attention that somehow knocked us off our feet entirely. If it wasn’t so disturbing, it would almost be impressive.
While Kelly and I shared some traits, we were fundamentally very different people with divergent interests, desires, even styles of communicating. What made it even worse for poor old Kelly, was that she also happened to be married.
When I use the term “psychopath” to describe Matthew, I don’t do so lightly. The skill and dedication one must possess to go to the lengths that he did, and for the duration of time, takes a level of psychopathy that could surely only be verified by a medical professional.
To add further weight to my hypothesis, it became very apparent once I was there that he had absolutely zero interest in the primal urgency to seal the deal, as it were. His total lack of interest in sex has without a doubt been one of the most disturbing facets of the whole ordeal.
I won’t go into details, largely as I’m running out of time, but I spent two evenings laying next to him in his bed, wearing nothing but his Liverpool FC Tshirt and the confidence of a woman expecting to get laid, and he didn’t lay a single finger on me. I initially thought perhaps he was just nervous, or didn’t have much experience.
However, after the second evening of zero physical contact - which I should highlight, was not on accounts of my lack of trying - I started to realise it wasn’t just nerves.
For Matthew, the thrill was in testing the limits of what he could convince Kelly and I to believe. The physicality of sex was of no interest to him, which only makes the whole thing so much more perverse.
Had this been another case of a man just trying to get a shag, it still would have been fucking awful, but perhaps there’d have been some way of rationalising it?
Our friends over at iflowpsychology.com’s had assessed that while psychopaths can be charming and kind, they are also deceitful, and exploit others with total ease. It’s a shame the website never mentioned “not interested in shagging”, or else I could rest my case.
After a devastating week I flew back to London, confused and emotionally dishevelled, and immediately wept into the arms of my best friends. I did what any self-respecting woman would do, and ran myself a scolding hot bath and proceeded to get very, very drunk.
A few days later, my best friends all came over and I stress-cooked a stir fry fit to feed about 20 people. We sat in the living room as I drank, cried and laughed - all aghast at what had happened, trying to make sense of any of it. It was like a scene from the last supper, only if Jesus had just been sort of catfished.
Throughout my life I’ve often tried to be retrospective about difficult incidents or moments, to formulate some clarity of thought or note of wisdom, to turn the pain into something positive.
The reality is that sometimes people are just fucking mental, and there’s nothing you can do to make sense of it.
Of all of the ridiculous stories I have in the ever growing dumpster fire that is my love life, this is by far the worst and most surreal.
I had joked at the time that one day it’d be a funny story to tell to strangers, and that I’d be able to speak about it without much pain, and so here I am trying to do just that.