From the moment she entered the fast-food restaurant, it was clear she had some mental issues. She was blurting out factoids about ingredients that are bad for you. She sat on the table next to me and told everyone about her horrible health.
There's quite some human misery in big cities like New York, and some people are out on the streets who belong in an institution, as they cannot take care of themselves. She seemed to be one of them, until I overheard her claim that she was suffering from PTSD, and that she was a veteran.
I walked over to her. There are organizations that help veterans with PTSD and other problems, like Pets for Vets, and I'd happily connect a veteran with competent and dedicated volunteers. That would be real help, not just handing someone a dollar for a coffee, or retweeting a patriotic slogan.
I asked her, Where did you serve?
She didn't answer to my question, but kept whining about how everyone was mean to her.
A real soldier will rattle down a lot of verifiable information about where and when they served. For the years they serve, that's their only identity. They can cite it in their sleep. They will bark it out under torture. They will never forget. And once they come home, they will have problems finding out who they are now that they no longer are where they served.
So it was clear she was lying. That's quite a disgrace, and so pathetic I hesitate to call it anything but a disgrace. She was nothing but an alcoholic desperate for attention, and only aware of her own pain. She needed treatment, and I could not help her.
I owe it to the people I can help to not get distracted by those I can't.
So let me help you with your love life, dear friend.
Because your fake lying so-called boyfriend is a whole different category: Stolen valor.
He claimed to be a veteran, and kept adding to this story, day after day. He embellished and invented new details.
I know a bunch of real veterans who would spit on the ground infront of him, turn their backs to him, and never acknowledge his existence again after that.
Would you kiss a man who earned such disrespect from men who put their lives on the line for him?
I'm not talking just about you, dear friend. I'm not telling you this because the prospect of seeing you getting hurt is not appealing to me. You are my friend, you are very young, I know you will get hurt, and I will always be there to help you pick up the pieces.
Young people play games all the time, they lie and cheat and complain. I was old before my time, so I never took part in this to begin with, and I had better things to do than watching others engage in the same silly games.
But the way young people act in the Western World is very uncivilized, and the result of three generations growing up with the mind virus of progressivism. In lots of ways, what Cultural Marxist teachers did to young Americans is so horrible you have no idea what you are dealing with.
American men and women have been indoctrinated by generation after generation of ever more rabid, unloving women, and self-hating men, to hate Western Civilization, and those who created it, especially White Christian men. Our entire educational system is based on this; one name for this ideology is Cultural Marxism.
If you are a young man, that leaves you with the option of either hating yourself, and submitting to those who preach self-hatred (basically, the Stockholm Syndrome), or you become a really cynical bastard who will pretend to respect women while treating them as prey, and generally regarding human beings as objects.
(The alternative, growing up, and making an effort to unbrainwash yourself, is very hard; few people I are go that road. That's the people the Paul Rosenfels community is trying to help.)
This is a serious problem, and one that someone from a loving family like yours cannot even comprehend easily.
Your parents, your siblings, aunts, uncles, friends all seem to be decent people. But not the entire world is like that. The Western World is in crisis, and many things here are wrong and dangerous.
Yes, young people lie a lot in love matters. Women using make up pretend they are something they are not to impress men. Men brag and lie to impress girls.
And it might be smart to not dump the truth, the entire truth, and nothing but the truth on a person you just met and might fall in love with. If you keep something to yourself until you trust the other one enough to tell the whole truth, that's sensible, but he lied to you every day, and kept adding to it. He made up something to abuse your naivete instead of helping you overcome being so gullible. If he exploits your weaknesses like this, for so long, what reasonable expectation do you have that he'll suddenly switch to helping you grow instead?
Let me explain something about my attitude towards America.
This whole immigration process took Dean and I three years. Acquaintances were wondering if I really wanted to come here. I was told, "If you really love him, you'd just come here" &mdash meaning illegally. "Others do it" &mdash and they do it by the millions — about 30 million, to put a number on it.
Well, in that case I have higher moral standards than those 30 million people.
I respect America. If I come here to shit on American laws, I'll be turning my own life into something dishonorable. You take your standards with you wherever you go. The smile you send out into the world as you go your way, that smile does real work, so does a frown that you send out to other people. If you litter, you are killing sea creatures in the ocean, since that's where your garbage will end up. One unnecessarily nasty word at the wrong moment might make someone crack.
Use your smiles and frowns responsibly, because what you support will grow stronger.
If you reward a liar who stole valor day after day, then that's the world you will end up living in. It's the future you will have chosen for yourself.
If you forgive him, you will only damage yourself. By the age of 40, you will be toothless and cynical and have no idea what real power is. I'm serious about this; both Dean and I know way too many people who ended up like this even though they were really nice and loving when they were young. They became cynical because they made bad decisions in their relationships. Not in their professional life, not in any other field, just in their relationships.
I know this is not what you want to hear from me, but he doesn't deserve another chance. By trying to impress you with something so dishonorable, he showed no respect for people who give their life for their country. He showed you that his family did not teach him that some things are so despicable you'd never do them.
You are a wonderful, sweet, brave, funny and smart young woman, and you want a relationship with someone who is either from a decent family, or left their horrible past behind and went on to find or create a better environment in which they can be human.
Do the right thing. Not just for yourself, but also for your family, your country, and for Dean and me, who actually sacrificed quite a bit in order to show our respect for America.
I advise you to engage in what I call exorcism of bad spirits. Get all the pain out of your system. Do eat a whole pizza, cry a lot, watch a movie, listen to your favorite love songs over and over again, until your neighbors roll their eyes.
No, there is no way you can forgive such behavior. Any real American soldier will high-five you for dumping this piece of shit and never looking back.
Now go have that pizza, and a real good cry, and I will be there to help you pick up the pieces when next we meet.