Let’s face it, relationships suck. Oh, don’t give me your sappy, tears-in-your-eye story about how in love you are with your spouse. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t care if you carried your wife in your arms through mud to reach your bridal suite while wild dogs chewed at your ankles, I am still betting there are plenty of times you lay there in bed and think, “what the hell did I do?”

The fact is relationships are complicated. I have found this out the hard way several times, including one quite recently. Of course, the mistake I made, first of all, was finding this person online instead of some more, oh, I don’t know, conventional and sane way. Had I done that, maybe I wouldn’t have wasted two months of my life trying to date, long distance, a complete psycho.

There are a lot of psychos online. I confess that I am probably one of them. Being online allows me to continue to communicate to the world via a keyboard and without the pesky annoyance of having to look someone in the eye, come up with something to say, and worrying about food caught in my teeth. This is probably a deep-seated psychologically problem. I am at least willing to admit that much.

So, it was on one of those goofy online games where you have an “avatar.” An avatar, for those of you who do not know, is an online version of you if you had perfect hair, a perfect body, dressed perfectly and never had to actually speak a word. They are used by people on these virtual worlds where they can have entire lives lived out without having to actually leave their couch or office.

Well, I met this girl while swimming in a lagoon, near an octopus, while I was dressed as a vampire. See, you just try doing something like that in the real world and see what it gets you. I bet drowned or attacked by an irritated octopus while wearing a vampire costume.

The relationship soon ventured into talking on the phone. These then became two and three hour long marathon phone calls. She asked a lot of questions. I answered a lot of questions. She accused me of not asking enough questions. I started asking questions. She accused me of asking questions only because she had told me I had not asked enough questions. You begin to see the warning signs, right? Yeah, well, I sure didn’t.

The tales she told were certainly whoppers. The fact that I bought them and swallowed them like a bass swallowing a lure should show you how desperately I wanted to feel “loved” and have a relationship again.

She was 22, according to her online profile. She then told me she was 20 in our conversations. Then, just before the whole thing ended, she was 18. She is, or was, the Benjamin Button of the female gender. Eventually she was probably doing to tell me she had just been born the week before and start speaking half-sentences.

Her father was wealthy and maybe a gangster. He worried about her so much he had a bodyguard follow her around. She lived on an allowance. Her father had tried to arrange a marriage for her with a man who turned out to be gay. Yes, the over-protective father was trying to marry off his 17-year-old daughter. You see the holes? Yeah, well, I didn’t.

She claimed to have had an addiction to painkillers. However, her over-protective father was encouraging her to go into the world of pharmacy. Yes, so she could be SURROUNDED by the painkillers she was addicted to. Yes, she told some doozies.

Somewhere along the way she met some other guy who may or may not exist and that she claimed was named Anton. He supposedly lives in Vienna, even though we both know most guys online are named “Buddy” and live in Boise in their mom’s trailer. I digress, however. Anton is supposedly married. Suddenly, they are supposedly in love, more in love than she ever felt for me, she is moving to Vienna and breaking up his marriage and she doesn’t care about me, his wife, her family, her own family or anything else. Of course, all of you supposed 18-year-old girls out there, I know how you all aspire to be home-wrecking mistresses before you are old enough to drink a beer, right?

It took that much for me to see what she was. I don’t like to throw around technically psychological terms. It tends to make me look snobbish. However, I have to use the technical term for what she is right now: nuts.

At some point the lies became so big, even I had the goggles ripped off my head. Even if any of what she told me was true, then she is a dangerous sociopath with anti-social personality disorder traits. I mean, really, does anyone who wants to break up a marriage and then say they don’t care who it hurts not have a mental problem? I rest my case, your honor.

She then accused me of being weird because I was still hurting three days after our break up. Sure, a sociopath with no remorse or feelings can get over breaking someone’s heart in a matter of hours. Those of us who actually care about the people around us take weeks, maybe months, to slowly extract the person we let into our lives and become part of us. Apparently she would also expect an amputee to start pitching on the hospital softball team a day after surgery.

It is scary to suddenly see someone you thought you loved as what they truly are. When the masks fall away and you see the churning, swirling, evil monster lurking beneath, you realize how much time you wasted. To me, that is what is really irritating. The two months of my life I will never get back.

From now on, it’s mail-order brides for this lonely dude.