A Tempting Cliché

Dearest Rachel –

Ever since I let my subscription to that dating app expire, I’ve been waiting for the shoes to drop for each of the last two ladies that I’ve been speaking with. For a while there, it seemed the closest I was going to come to that was when Aileen informed me that she had been placed on assignment by her hospital, and would be moving from exurban Milwaukee to San Diego for the next three months to work as a nurse on the naval base there. Considering that I’m in no particular hurry to create some kind of match with her (or Pauline, for that matter), I didn’t let that phase me. Besides, it’s not as if she was asking for funds in order to relocate. Although, I should point out that, while I’m willing to chat with her and Pauline, I’m not emotionally invested in either of them, as I still assume that something is about to happen to force me to walk away from them, each in their own time.

It just so happened that today was Pauline’s turn.

Now, bear in mind that she already had a few red flags right from the beginning. To the best of my limited knowledge, there aren’t that many servicepeople stationed in Syria at the moment; the odds of me finding one on a site like this are, to put it mildly, remote. On the other hand, up until now, it’s not as if she was making any requests of me, any more than Aileen was. That all changed today, and it’s not as if I didn’t see it coming.

You see, back when we first started chatting, she mentioned about her current posting in Damascus, but that she would be back in the states within five or six weeks. This roughly corresponded with the end of August, which is where we are now. So in the middle of our chat this afternoon, I brought this fact up to her, to which she responded, “yeah, about that…”

And here’s where the story goes off the rails.

At first, it sounded like the typical “help me out; I need $x amount in order to get out of where I am” type request. It even came with a line about “since we are one, I thought I should talk with you about this” as the cherry on top. Now, I really don’t appreciate that sort of approach; if we were truly ‘one,’ wouldn’t she have asked my advice before making such a move, so I could attempt to dissuade her?

Additionally, the amount was bigger than most previous requests I’ve gotten, but there was a reason for it. It seems that she needed the money in order to get some things out of storage; some twenty kilograms of gold bars that she’d purchased from some woman for a total of four hundred thousand dollars. This comes to about $567 per ounce, at a time when gold is selling on the open market for between $1,700 and $1,800 an ounce.

But Pauline didn’t buy this on the open market; she admitted outright that she bought it on the black market, and the seller – for whatever reason – was supposedly desperate for the cash. Pauline herself claimed to have talked her down from forty thousand dollars per kilo to twenty thousand, and sold a house and pooled her savings in order to get her hands on this deal. To be fair, her efforts don’t seem all that far removed from that of Jesus’ parable about the merchant and the ‘pearl of great price,’ but the fact that she was readily admitting to such shady dealings doesn’t speak very well to her character. Perhaps she thought that, by confessing to a supposedly lesser crime of dealing with someone on the black market (which, for all I know, might be a common occurrence for military personnel – I recall it being a plot point on numerous occasions in M*A*S*H, for instance), she would portray herself as honest in my sight for making a clean breast of the nature of her transaction.

In any event, she claimed that the people she stored the bars with were asking for a few thousand in order to release them her. Theoretically, she would easily be able to pay them if they would let her have even just one of the bars to sell, but by not letting her have any of them unless they were so paid, neither she nor they were going to get any money out of this little scheme. Imagine that; she thought she could find an honest businessman on the black market; turns out, they’re nothing but crooks.

Of course, my assumption is that she’s every bit as much one as they are (assuming they even exist, and it’s not just some story she’s making up). The whole scheme is nothing more than an appeal to my own greed, with the assumption that the idea of being part of a scheme to make a million or so dollars out of a mere four hundred grand for the relatively minor investment of a few thousand dollars would appeal to me. And maybe it would have, were I in more desperate straits, or a little less honest. But while I am loathe to claim to be the honest man one can’t cheat, I am happy to say that I have enough so that this isn’t even remotely tempting. Besides, a suspicious nature trumps greed nearly every time – or at least, it ought to.

I did my best to sound sympathetic to her plight (after all, were I to believe her story, she was the one being conned, either by the original seller or the storage company), but reminded her of the stories I had already told her about being catfished in the past, and that this scheme sounded a lot like those others, so she ought to know that I was not about to help her. I also let her know that I wanted no part of the scheme, even if it was real (given the source, I hesitate to refer to it as ‘legitimate’) and if she managed to extricate herself from this dilemma, she was welcome to all the profits she could collect on her a little investment.

I then proceeded to go back to work, as I was updating a spreadsheet to be used for the church’s financial statements, only to get one more text from her:

“You’re not mad at me, are you?”

I hadn’t been silent for even an hour before she arrived at that conclusion. And to be honest, it’s probably the first confirmation that I’m actually dealing with a woman, rather than strictly being catfished by some guy (not that a woman can’t attempt to run a con job, by any means). Guys simply don’t use the silent treatment as a means of punishment – they don’t even understand it when it’s being used on them, as a general rule. So to come to that conclusion so quickly seems to prove who I’m dealing with, at least.

But is it a woman that I would want to date, let alone spend the rest of my life with? Hardly. It was tempting to offer up that cliché that dads worldwide utter from time to time to their misbehaving children: “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.” After all, it worked on you, the one time you let fly with an expletive in your father’s presence, and I’m sure it was used on me at some point to similar effect. But usually, one is disappointed in another when that other fails to meet one’s expectations. That’s not the case here; in fact, this was the sort of thing I had been expecting for some time. So how can I even be disappointed in her, when she actually meets my expectations? Of course, that disappointment is generally due to the other falling short of expectations; in this case, I expected worse of her than I was experiencing up until that point. The fact that she finally lived down to my expectations could still be considered disappointing.

In either event, I may or may not have heard the last of her, but she’s obviously not suitable for me, even if she does manage to get herself out of this situation (which she’ll have to do on her own); I’m not sure how I’ll shake her if she does and still wants a connection between the two of us. I could probably use some wisdom with this.

So wish me luck, honey. I’m going to need it.