i keep catching myself wanting to call it a scam, mostly because that would make it easier. scams have villains. scams have rules. scams end with a lesson you can point to and say next time, i’ll know better.
this didn’t feel like that.
there were no fake profiles. no burner numbers. no wire transfers to nowhere. no moment where i realized i’d been tricked by something obviously false. everything that happened was technically clean. aboveboard. even polite.
that’s what messes with me.
it started quietly, the way most things do when they don’t want to be noticed. we were already seeing each other. arrangement, routine, the usual rhythm. not rigid, but understood. money wasn’t the center of every conversation, which i took as a good sign. i told myself that meant trust was forming. or maybe comfort. i don’t know. those two get mixed up easily in this world.
then someone else entered the picture. not dramatically. not announced. just… present. adjacent. a friend-of-a-friend situation that i hadn’t thought through. i didn’t see it as competition because i didn’t think in those terms. i still don’t, instinctively. i thought we were operating in parallel lanes.
i didn’t realize lanes merge.
the escalation didn’t look like escalation at first. gifts got better. not extravagant, just smarter. things that showed attention. things that landed emotionally before they landed materially. promises got clearer. not vague “sometime” energy, but timelines. weekends. trips. this is where it’s going. that kind of certainty is intoxicating, especially when you didn’t know you were missing it.
and the timelines got shorter. that was the part i felt most viscerally, even before i understood what was happening. suddenly there was urgency. decisions that needed to be made sooner. availability that closed faster than it used to. i felt like i was always a step behind without knowing what race i’d entered.
she didn’t lie. i need to say that, if only to myself. she never told me something that wasn’t true. she never denied seeing anyone else. she never promised exclusivity. if anything, she stayed impressively consistent in her language. neutral. careful. open enough to be honest, vague enough to stay mobile.
she didn’t deceive. she optimized.
that’s the word that keeps coming back to me, even though it sounds cold. optimization implies intelligence. responsiveness. choosing the better option when presented with new information. from a certain angle, it’s hard not to respect. from another, it feels like being slowly edged out of your own life.
i didn’t notice when my position weakened. there was no alert. no warning light. just small shifts. tone. pacing. enthusiasm. i was still there, still involved, but no longer central. like a tab that stays open but stops loading.
what made it feel scam-adjacent was the lack of protection. not financial — i could afford the loss, whatever that even means here — but structural. there’s no recourse when trust is informal. no contract to point to. no terms violated. just an understanding that turned out to be provisional.
i tried to articulate that feeling to myself and failed. how do you explain being hurt when no one did anything wrong? how do you claim loss when what you lost was never explicitly promised?
when she finally told me she was moving on, it was done kindly. that almost made it worse. she explained her reasoning in a way that made sense. alignment. trajectory. stability. words that sound responsible when you say them out loud. she thanked me. genuinely. i believed her.
after, i sat with the discomfort of realizing that if the roles were reversed, i might have done the same thing. maybe not consciously. maybe not with the same grace. but i understand the logic. that doesn’t make it sting less. it just complicates where the sting points.
i’ve replayed the sequence trying to find the moment i could have changed something. raised my offer. drawn a line. asked for clarity sooner. maybe there wasn’t one. maybe the moment i entered a space where value is constantly recalculated, the outcome was always going to be conditional.
that’s the part people don’t talk about much. not the scammers, not the horror stories, but the slow erosion that happens when everything is flexible. when affection, time, and money exist in the same negotiation, even if no one says it out loud.
i don’t blame her. i don’t blame him either, whoever he is. i don’t even blame myself, most days. but there’s still this residual feeling that something was taken without being stolen. that i was outmaneuvered in a game i didn’t realize we were playing.
maybe that’s just how it works. maybe calling it anything else is just me trying to impose morality on market behavior. i don’t know.
i still hesitate to label it. scam feels wrong. relationship feels wrong too. arrangement doesn’t quite cover it. all i know is that when trust is informal, protection is imaginary. and when the upgrade comes along, it doesn’t announce itself.
it just happens. and you notice after the fact, sitting with a version of the story that makes sense but still doesn’t feel finished.
