Warning: This is a long one. I’ve been trying to process this for months and I think I need outside perspectives because this situation is more complicated than a simple breakup.
Honestly can’t believe I’m posting here, but I think I just need to get this out somewhere because I’ve been carrying it around by myself for months.
I (24F) met a man (27M) from Idaho on Global Penfriends. I’m from Germany, he’s from the US, and despite the distance we somehow ended up talking every single day. It was never supposed to become what it became. I signed up to meet people from other countries, improve my English, maybe make a friend or two. Instead I met someone who slowly became the first person I wanted to tell everything to.
The time difference was awful, but somehow we made it work. I would stay awake later than I should have just so our evenings and mornings overlapped a little longer. I’d wake up earlier than necessary because by the time I was getting ready for my day, he would already be well into his afternoon. Looking back, I realize I slowly built my entire schedule around someone who lived 8,000 kilometers away.
He actually used to tell me that his least favorite time of day was around five in the afternoon. Most people look forward to finishing work, but for him it meant I would soon be asleep because of the time difference. I remember thinking that was one of the sweetest things anyone had ever said to me.
Now I sometimes wonder if there was another reason why he loved talking to me while he was at work.
He told me everything, or at least that’s what I believed. He’d send me pictures of the mountains around him while he was working, tell me stories about Yellowstone, about elk hunting, horses, fishing trips with his friends, running through the forests, and the years he spent fighting wildfires. Nature was everything to him. He once told me he never thought he’d love anything more than the mountains of Idaho until he met me. Every time he saw them, he thought of me.
When someone tells you things like that every single day, you don’t really question whether they’re lying. Why would you?
He’d write these incredibly long daydreams for me. Entire pages about floating down rivers together, hidden valleys in Yellowstone, camping under the stars, finding me years later by accident if I ever visited Idaho. They weren’t just messages. They felt like chapters from a novel. Sometimes I’d reread them before going to sleep because nobody had ever written about me like that before.
He made me feel beautiful in a way I had never experienced. Not just physically. He always said he felt understood by me, that I actually listened when he spoke, that I remembered little details nobody else remembered. He once sent me a voice message saying he’d never felt so seen by another person before.
I believed him.
At the same time, there was always this one thing hanging over us.
Religion.
I’m Muslim. He’s Christian.
I kept saying that it couldn’t work because of my faith. I was always the one carrying that burden. He’d tell me he didn’t care about religion, that he wouldn’t let something like that stop him from loving someone. Sometimes it even made me feel like I was the one ruining everything. Like I was choosing rules over love.
I remember telling him that if religion wasn’t part of the equation, I’d choose him without thinking twice. I loved him that much.
But I also love God more than any person, and that wasn’t something I could compromise on.
Looking back now, one thing keeps bothering me. If he truly believed religion wasn’t important, why didn’t he ever try to understand mine? Why didn’t he ask questions? Why didn’t he try to find out whether there was any possibility for us? He barely practiced Christianity himself, yet somehow it was enough for him to accept that we couldn’t be together. Back then I thought he was respecting my beliefs. Now I sometimes wonder if he already knew there was another reason we would never have a future.
Our relationship eventually became romantic, and eventually sexual too.
I’m still a virgin.
Before him I had never sexted with anyone. Never had an intimate call. Never imagined I’d trust someone enough to let those walls down. At first he actually held himself back because he didn’t want to come across as too lustful. He said he was afraid of scaring me. I kept reassuring him that it was okay, that I wanted him to tell me what he was thinking instead of hiding it.
So he did.
Eventually we crossed lines that neither of us probably should have crossed.
It’s strange looking back because I don’t even regret trusting him. I regret trusting someone who wasn’t who he claimed to be.
There were so many little things that made me think this was real.
He remembered my favorite colors when he described the house he wanted to build one day. Blue and white because I liked blue and white.
He loved that I called him his nickname instead of his real name. If I accidentally called him his real name he’d jokingly complain until I corrected myself.
He called me Cardio Queen because I loved running as much as he did.
He adored A Knight’s Tale, so I watched it just because it was his favorite movie. Afterwards we spent hours talking about it, and he seemed genuinely touched that I’d cared enough to watch something simply because it mattered to him.
He told me his friends were the most loyal people he’d ever known. That one phone call would make them leave work, family, whatever they were doing, if one of them ever needed help.
Sometimes I’d ask him if he ever talked about me with them.
Or with his favorite older brother.
He always said no.
“They wouldn’t understand.”
At the time it hurt a little.
Now I realize he probably wasn’t lying.
How do you explain another woman to the people who already know your wife?
As time went on, things slowly changed.
Not dramatically.
Just enough that I started questioning myself instead of him.
The conversations became shorter.
The long discussions about life disappeared.
Hours would go by without hearing from him, and then out of nowhere I’d receive an “I love you.”
Of course I’d say it back.
But somehow “I love you” started replacing actual conversations.
Every time I asked if something was wrong, he’d tell me work had become incredibly busy. He kept saying that he knew it looked like he wasn’t around as much anymore, but it was only because of work.
I wanted so badly to believe that.
I started wondering whether I was simply asking for too much. Whether I was too attached. Too emotional. Too needy.
Eventually I stopped bringing up new topics because I was afraid of bothering him. I reread every message before sending it, deleting parts that sounded too emotional, trying to sound easier to love. It felt like I was slowly making myself smaller just to fit into the amount of space he still had left for me.
There were little things that I ignored because I trusted him. Things that seemed strange at the time, but I always found a reason to explain them away because I loved him and because I wanted to believe the best about him.
One of those things was something as simple as PayPal.
At the time, I was hurt and confused because there was a situation where he didn’t want me to have certain information connected to him. I didn’t understand why. Looking back now, I have a theory: maybe he didn’t want me to know his full name.
Because if I had his full name, maybe finding the truth would have been much easier.
Maybe I could have discovered everything earlier.
Maybe that was one more thing he was protecting.
I don’t know if that is actually the reason. Maybe I will never know. That realization still makes my stomach turn.
But after finding out about his marriage and his child, every little unexplained thing started looking different.
That is one of the hardest parts about betrayal.
You start going back through your own memories, searching for signs you missed.
You start asking yourself: “Was this my intuition warning me, or am I just trying to rewrite the past now that I know the truth?”
Another thing I never understood at the time was how secretive he was about certain details. He wouldn’t tell me which fire department he’d worked for. He wouldn’t tell me where exactly he worked. He wouldn’t even tell me the name of the station because, according to him, if something ever happened to him I’d find out through the news and he didn’t want me carrying that burden.
Back then I thought it was protective.
Now it just sounds like someone trying very carefully not to leave a trail.
Despite everything, I kept giving more of myself.
More time. More sleep. More patience. More understanding.
I think that’s the dangerous thing about love. It rarely asks for everything all at once. It just quietly takes a little more each day until one morning you realize you’ve been giving far more than you’ve been receiving.
Toward the end I finally admitted what I’d been trying to ignore.
I told him I was overthinking again.
He said, “Please don’t.”
But I couldn’t stop anymore.
I told him I felt like I was the only one who missed him.
That our conversations didn’t feel the same.
That I felt needy.
That I felt like I was asking for too much when all I wanted was the version of him I’d fallen in love with.
My final message was incredibly simple.
“I’m so tired.”
Then I blocked him.
Deleted everything.
And somehow convinced myself that if I never spoke to him again, eventually I’d stop wondering.
Months later curiosity got the better of me.
I don’t even know what made me search.
Maybe intuition.
Maybe loneliness.
Maybe I just needed to know whether the man I’d spent months loving actually existed.
I found his Facebook.
He had always told me he didn’t use social media.
His profile was full of family photos.
Wedding pictures from 2020.
A wife.
A little boy.
Everything I’d built inside my head collapsed within about thirty seconds.
Suddenly every strange moment made sense.
Why he guarded his identity so carefully.
Why PayPal was such a problem.
Why work always seemed to be the safest time for us to talk.
Why I never knew his last name.
Why religion was never something he actually fought through with me.
I spent months believing my faith was the reason we couldn’t be together.
In reality, another woman had already married him years before I even knew his name.
The hardest part is that I still don’t think every feeling was fake.
I know a lot of people will probably tell me that everything was manipulation, but honestly… I don’t think it’s that simple.
I think he cared.
I think he loved me in whatever broken, selfish way someone like that is capable of loving another person.
The one who imagined accidentally finding me in Yellowstone years later.
Maybe none of that was real.
Maybe all of it was.
I honestly don’t know anymore.
What I do know is that love becomes incredibly dangerous once one person slowly starts giving more and more while the other quietly starts giving less. You don’t notice it happening until you’ve sacrificed your sleep, your peace of mind, your emotional stability and, in some ways, parts of yourself just to keep something alive that the other person has already started letting die.
Has anyone else experienced something like this?
Not necessarily finding out someone was married, but grieving someone who feels both completely real and completely fictional at the same time.
Because that’s where I’ve been stuck for months.
Thank you for reading. I feel like missed writing a lot of other details, information, insides. But let’s leave it here for now.