I spent a couple months emailing a guy who very likely has paranoid personality disorder and was a stealth TRPer. I spent hours reading and replying to his ridiculously long messages, and every now and then would run across something he said that raised an eyebrow. But he was very complimentary, told me I was special, etc, so "a guy is seriously interested in being with me" overrode "there's something off about this guy" for a while. It was getting to the point where I was hoping he'd want to meet (he was several hours away, so it was kind of like a LDR).

And then, after a skype chat where he criticized me for 1. my favorite movie being Jaws, 2. wearing the same zip hoodie that I did during the previous skype chat, and 3. wearing a watch/not having a smartphone, I had a sudden realization that this wasn't going to turn into a good thing. After that, I re-read all our messages and the red flag mountain tumbled down around me. This guy was suuuuuuper paranoid. He "knew" things about people, especially women, even when there was no actual evidence. He claimed to be a devout Christian, but in a weird way that I've never experienced before: he'd come to it later in life and seemed mostly interested in the "how women should behave and be treated" parts of the bible, but disinterested in the "love thy neighbor" bits. He was really interested in a "church" that some guy was trying to start up in rural Idaho: to me it sounded a whole lot like a cult.

I broke it off and at first he seemed to take it well, but after a week or so sent me a message where all the crazy came out. I think it was mostly him being angry because he "knew" that I was a liar and trying to use my sexuality to manipulate him, "just like all the other lying sluts," and I guess the worst thing that I had lied about was being a virgin. Thing is, I didn't lie to him, and am still a virgin. He "knew" I'd lied about this because apparently I was too pretty to have gone through college without having had sex, and "that's what happens when our young women are allowed out unsupervised in such an environment." It made me angry more than sad, mostly at myself for wasting so much time on him. He really did a number on my ability to trust the men I meet online.