Story Of A Mimic

In November of 2023, Todd — as we’ll call him for the duration of this blog — found me online roughly three hours after my friend helped me set up a Match.com profile.

That first night, I threw out intense questions immediately, assuming any man talking to me would run for the hills.

But not Todd.

He leaned in like he had been waiting twelve years for that exact conversation.

We covered everything: religion, pornography, failed relationships, emotional wounds, marriage, trust. After five straight hours of talking, I gave him my number. We texted constantly for days until he upgraded our coffee date into dinner and asked if he could pick me up.

He agreed to a background check.
He agreed to an STD test.
He showed up early to meet my friends — the people who had basically become my stand-in parents while I rebuilt my life.

They had watched me crawl out of years of emotional chaos: addiction, gaslighting, secrets, self-doubt, never trusting my own instincts. I was healing slowly, carefully, and I trusted their discernment while I learned how to trust myself again.

I grilled him that night.

I asked him directly what his angle was.

“Are you just looking for sex?”

He actually looked offended.

He told me he was just a nice guy who had finally found someone interesting after years of not connecting with anyone.

It sounded almost too good to be true.

But when you’ve spent years being emotionally starved, surrounded by people trying to rebuild your broken self-esteem, a part of you starts wondering if maybe they’re right.

Maybe you are worth pursuing intentionally.
Maybe you would make a fantastic partner.

So I leaned in.

Before he left that first night, he made it clear he wanted a monogamous relationship with me. I actually laughed and said something like:

“I thought online dating was supposed to be harder than this. Aren’t men supposed to be confusing?”

But he wasn’t confusing.

He was direct. Intentional. Pursuing.

Second date became third. Third became fourth. Soon we stopped planning dates altogether and simply existed together every evening I didn’t have my children.

On nights I had my kids, he would still come over. I wouldn’t let him inside yet, so we would sit outside under blankets, talking for hours beneath the stars.

Somewhere early on, he took too long to text me back one night.

Not long enough to feel alarming. Just long enough for me to tease him.

So I joked:

“What took so long? Were you with your Tuesday girlfriend?”

I wasn’t remotely serious.

Shame on me for assuming this nerdy engineer who claimed to be socially awkward and barely dating anyone was incapable of secretly running through women.

It’s unsettling now — realizing how close I was to the truth without knowing it.

After that, “Tuesday” became a running joke between us.

Eventually he started giving her a personality.

At one point he described her as “an OCD treat too.”

I genuinely believed my boyfriend was teasing me about something absurd that could never actually be true.

After all:

• He was the one who asked for exclusivity.
• He was the one who proudly deleted the apps.
• He was the one who said “I love you” first.
• He was the one who suggested cosigning on a home so I wouldn’t end up in an apartment far away from him.
• He called it “an investment in our future.”
• He was the one who found the house three doors down from his.
• He was the one who contacted the owners.
• He was the one who met me there at 9 PM and walked through it with me.

Every step forward in our relationship came from him.

So every time we joked about Tuesday, it never once crossed my mind that he might actually be confessing.

Months later, after everything exploded, I started combing back through old text messages trying to make sense of reality.

And I found multiple instances where he initiated the Tuesday jokes completely unprompted.

One conversation stopped me cold.

We were discussing dinner plans after work, figuring out what we wanted to eat before meeting up like we always did.

He loved teasing me that I wasn’t “nurturing enough,” and joked that if I simply kept steak nachos available at all times, he’d never leave me.

Most of the time it just felt like insecure banter from a man who needed little ego wins. So I played along.

That night he texted:

“If Tuesday had steak nachos with fresh jalapeños, you might be in trouble. But she is an OCD treat too.”

I wasn’t in the mood for the joke that evening, so I replied:

“Fuck Tuesday.”

And he answered:

“I did.”

At the time, I still had no idea there was any actual truth buried underneath these conversations.

Throughout our relationship he constantly told me I was “too literal,” that jokes went over my head, that I needed to “learn to read the room.”

So I responded:

“Stop. I’ll poke a bitch.”

And again he replied:

“I did.”

At that point I answered:

“This isn’t funny anymore.”

He sent an eggplant emoji.
I sent an eye roll.

When I rediscovered that conversation later, it genuinely startled me.

Because what I no longer saw was a confused man making bad decisions.

I saw someone taking pleasure in taunting his intimate partner with the truth while simultaneously training her not to trust her own instincts.

“You’re too literal.”
“You can’t take a joke.”
“You’re reading too much into things.”

There was a level of cruelty there I had never experienced before.

Not guilt.
Not shame.
Not avoidance.

Pleasure.

Most people who cheat desperately avoid conversations that get close to the truth.

He ran toward them.

Sometimes these jokes came directly after nights he had actually slept with “Tuesday.”

Later I would learn Tuesday was “A.”
Then later “C.”
And likely others I’ll never know about.

There are people who make mistakes.
There are people who self-sabotage.
And then there are people who derive excitement from manipulation itself.

That realization sat in my stomach like poison.

Because simultaneously, I remembered all the moments where he stared directly into my eyes telling me he adored me. Telling me he loved me. Talking about growing old together. Building a future. Moving in next door.

And suddenly every memory became layered with secrecy, dishonesty, manipulation, and betrayal.

The hardest part wasn’t discovering he lied.

It was realizing how much joy he seemed to get from making me participate in the joke without my consent.

He used language strategically:

• to make me doubt myself,
• to tease me,
• to destabilize me,
• to mirror exactly what I wanted to hear,
• and to feed me reassurance precisely when I needed it most.

And on the rare days his mask slipped, I was so committed to believing in the version of him he sold me that I explained those moments away.

That’s what it feels like to encounter a mimic.

And this is my true story of recovering from the harm he intentionally caused.