memoir: Glenn

Seven years ago, when I was about 19 years old, I started dating someone who was not only 33, but also my boss. He was also my boss at a retail establishment. I pursued him because I thought he was really cool and interesting, but things seemed off from the start. He, at first, would say that we weren’t really able to date but then he “gave into me” or something equally as awkward.

One of the first weird things happened when we were at the store waiting for a meeting to start. I was telling him about the one tattoo I had at the time, and he showed me the one on his arm. He talked about it a little and then started to tell me he had a tattoo on his ass. He described it in great detail, about how it was from a dare, etc, and I kept asking him if he was being serious. He continued to respond that he was, that he definitely had a tattoo on his ass but obviously couldn’t show it to me because we were at work.

But weeks later, when we were both naked together for the first time, I found he had no tattoo. He didn’t even bring it up, kind of pretended I was crazy when I said we had that conversation.

He spent most of our relationship telling me he did all these cool things like parties and late night poker games with his friends, but I know he was just playing Morrowind to the point where he could jump over buildings — we never actually went out anywhere and he would have had to have 36 hours in a day to accomplish everything he said he did. When we finally broke up, it happened in a fucked up way too: we were at his apartment and he asked me one morning if I still loved him. I said no, so he packed up everything I had at his place into a garbage bag, with no expression on his face. We got back to my place and he pulled my stuff out of the trunk and started crying like a petulant child.

“I hate you! No, please don’t leave me,” he said on the sidewalk, but I was so glad to be rid of him that I just went inside with my stuff. I changed his name in my address book to “DON’T PICK THIS UP” and tried to move on.

The next few months after that were pretty bad: he called me at all hours of the night; he showed up to my job (he was transferred to another store when they found out about him dating me) in a suit and tie at 9am and proceeded to tell me about how he was at an all night poker game with celebrities and that he was going fishing with his dad now; he sent my mom roses when he found out she was sick just to get contact with me again. There’s a lot more, but this is already so long. It was just a fuck ton of pathological lying and he would get mad when I called him out on it. But we did stop talking in October of that year.

On New Years Eve, he called and I didn’t pick up, but the message he left said pretty much that he wanted to apologize for everything he did to me. I never responded because that would have just started it all up again.

tl:dr: Seven years ago, I dated my boss who was 13 years older than me and a pathological liar.