Tainted Love: The lies he told me left me lying to myself

It was coming up to St Patrick’s Day one year when my ex announced he was going to visit his daughter and grandchildren in London. This was nothing unusual.

On arrival, he sent me a heartwarming video of his grandson dancing. There was only one grey tick on my WhatsApp messages to him after that, but I didn’t suspect a thing. I thought maybe he’d just dropped his phone down the toilet.

It was only when another of his daughters texted me asking about him that things got interesting. The daughter in London had told her he wasn’t there – the video I received was one she had sent him before.

Cue chaos and drama. Nobody could get through to him on the phone or knew where he was. I worried that something bad had happened to him.

On the fifth day, he rocked up carrying duty-free cigarettes and said he’d been to Tenerife. Someone stole his phone. He said I had been “too busy” to go away with him and if he’d told me I would have been upset. “You lied to me!” I shouted eventually, getting increasingly wound up by his cavalier attitude.

But my mother was coming to stay for the bank holiday weekend and he was going to buy all the food and cook. I couldn’t cope with the idea of everything being disrupted. So, instead, I stuck my head firmly in the sand.

He pulled out all the stops. As far as my mother was concerned, he was the model partner and she had the best time. He served up every meal with panache and was super attentive. She was so glad I had finally met someone like him.

This sent me into denial about how bad the lie was. I didn’t even entertain the idea that he could have been with another woman. I told myself that maybe it wasn’t that big a deal. Surely everything he did that weekend showed he wanted to make up for it?

By then, I had invested so much in the relationship that I couldn’t face it ending. Swallowing my uneasy feelings, I decided it was a blip; I just needed get over it, let it go and carry on.

The fact that I’ve never told anyone close to me about this gives me goosebumps. I knew what they would think and, deep down, what I really thought myself – that if he was able to lie so effortlessly about something like that, he must have been lying about a lot of other things.

Sadly, this turned out to be the case.

There was the time he said he wasn’t in work because he had a hospital appointment when really he’d been fired. And once, when he told me he was going to the pub and I went looking for him only to be told he hadn’t been in at all. When I confronted him, he got angry and told me I had “embarrassed myself”.

These days, my stomach churns if I sense someone is lying to me. Lying is a now a deal-breaker and no amount of doing nice things will make up for it.