The making of a stalker and a mid-life crisis

Perhaps its because I am an investigator of sorts, but once I set my sights on finding out a piece of information, I don't give up.

So the other day I got to thinking about Berlin again, and I was sort of curious about this woman he is so gah-gah over. I wonted to know more about her - and let's just say I began using my investigatory skills.

I only really know what he has told me, which isn't a whole lot. I know she is a scientist and had come to the University where he worked as part of her research in Germany. He told me they met in an elevator.

He was living with his girlfriend, Stephanie, of eight years - a woman from Spain (I think he has a thing for foreigners), and he said the relationship was disintegrating. He didn't actually use the word "smothered", but he described her as "very controlling", and said she "told him how to feel."

This conversation came about one night as we were having dinner together at his house and I asked him how he met Marion. I don't know the details of what happened in that elevator, or how it managed to spark a full-blown affair, but I do know that it was his way of sabotaging a relationship he didn't have the guts to end properly.

"So what happened?" I asked him. "How did she find out about Marion?"
"I told her."
"And what did she say?" I asked.
"She was really upset, but she said it was OK. She said 'let's just move on and forget about it.' But I told her I couldn't forget about it. I didn't want to forget about it."
"Do you think you did it on purpose? To have an excuse to walk away?"
He shrugged.
"It's been suggested to me by other people that that was my real motivation. That I just wanted to blow things up."
"Sounds like a pretty fair assessment of the situation. What do you think?"
"I think they're probably right." He paused. "But sometimes cheating is justified."
"Like when?"
"When the marriage contract is broken. In you're case, you didn't really cheat on him."
"Of course I did. I was married. I'm still married. I slept with other men. How is that not cheating?"
"He broke the marriage contract. He stopped having sex with you. You can't go on in a marriage like that - it's not a marriage. The contract was broken - and he broke it first. You didn't really do anything wrong."

I thought about this logic for a minute. It was true. He had severed our physical relationship, and as a result, our emotional ties began to wither in the dry, parched, sexless desert. I felt shut out, abandoned and alone, and I sought out an oasis in someone else's touch. But my actions weren't entirely excusable -- Even my logic wasn't that warped.

"No. I did do something wrong. I didn't tell him. I tried to talk to him about it, about our problems. But I didn't tell him it had gone that far. I didn't tell him that I was so desperate that I wanted to be with another man. I could have gone to him and told hem enough was enough. I could have said that I couldn't take it any more and that I was leaving him. I could have asked for a divorce before I ever cheated. That's what I should have done. That would have been the honorable thing. That would have been the right thing. I could have given him a chance to make it right, by impressing on him the gravity of the situation. But I didn't do that. He did a lot of things wrong too - but that doesn't make what I did right."

He was quiet. I continued.

"I mean, you obviously weren't happy in your relationship with Stephanie. You felt smothered and controlled. But why didn't you just end it? Why didn't you just go to her and say,'this isn't working.' Why did you chose to cheat on her with someone else - and then - even worse - tell her about it -- so that she would leave you? That was cruel. The fact that you were unhappy enough to cheat should have been enough reason to walk away, and the right thing to do would have been to break it off before you got involved with someone else."

Berlin didn't say anything, but there was a pained expression on his face that made me think he knew I was right, and that, this was the first time he had ever really thought of that. I sensed I had pushed a little too far, and so let the subject drop.

But later I was replaying the conversation in my mind and I began to wonder if I wasn't just his next affair. He was unhappy with the way Marion treated him, but instead of just walking away, instead of confronting her about it and making a clean break, he was cheating on her with me. This would turn out to be more true than I realized, because back then I still was under the impression that their relationship was less serious than it actually was - I didn't really see them as a committed couple - -and so I didn't really fee like he was "cheating" as much as he was just taking the easy way out, or possibly using me as revenge.

You see, when we first met and he said he was chasing a woman in Germany, he left a few things out. For starters, he neglected to mention that they would be sharing an apartment in Berlin. I discovered that over some pillow talk one night when I asked him if he had found an apartment yet. First he described the place and told me the neighborhood where it was located. Which naurally led me to ask how he found it.

"We found it on the internet."
"We?"
"Maria and I"
"Wait, are you going to live there with her?"
"Of course. I don't have a job. I can't afford a place on my own. At least in the beginning I have to live with her."

He acted like that was the most obvious and natural thing in the world. Of course he was going to live with her! Did I somehow think that he was going to move to Germany for a woman who he didn't even know wanted to be with him? A woman who was living on her own and not necessarily inviting him into her life and her home?

Um. yeah. I sorta did.

Maybe it was the "at least in the beginning" part that kept me from collecting my clothes and my naked self and going home. But the concept was unsettling, and it was my first clue that he had misrepresented their relationship to me.

Other clues came later.

Like when I was helping him pack up his house to move and I discovered books that belonged to her, a woman's scarf, a piece of art she brought him back from Africa, and I started to wonder if she had been living there with him.

And when he told me that he bought a car so that she would have something safe to drive, I KNEW she had been living with him. This was not a relationship he was trying to pursue - this was a relationship he was IN. She was his girlfriend - and he just wasn't certain whether or not he should blow the whole thing up. He wasn't sure if he wanted to stay with her, so he was testing out the waters with me. MOTHERFUCKER.

Since he's been gone, I have wondered a lot about him and what was really going through his head - and in retrospect it seems an awful lot like man having a middle-aged crisis. He was 41. When he met, he told me he was 38. I discovered the lie when we became facebook friends and I noticed he had his birthday listed. May 10, 1967. I brought it up one day when we were walking his dog Maddie around the neighborhood.

"So I was checking out your facebook page and I discovered something interesting."
"Oh yeah?"
"Your birthday."
He sort of smiled. He knew he'd been busted.
"1968 ... let me see ... my calculus may be a bit rusty, but my arithmetic is pretty solid. I think that makes you 41 not 38."
"Your math skills are solid."
"So why did you lie? Who cares?"
"I don't know, but there was something sort of thrilling about it."

His face lit up when he said it and I could tell that the whole secret identity thing gave him a total rush. This was a guy who yearned to be somebody else. Someone who thought the idea of sowing his wild oats with a stranger he met on the internet, and shaving a few years off his age was thrilling.

Mid life crisis... CHECK!

This was a man who spinelessly ended a long-term relationship over an ill-thought out affair with a woman who wouldn't commit to him.

CHECK!

This was a man who had failed to thrive in his career - who had floundered in a lab as a post-doc for years without ever finding a faculty position, and felt he missed his calling as a doctor. Consequently he was quitting his job and moving to a foreign country - at age 41 - to start over and go to medical school

BIG, BIG, check.

And then I wondered how OLD Marion was. I googled her name. There was almost nothing. If you google Berlin's name, there are tons of links to his work, to papers he has written - to seminars and talks he has given. This is normal. By the time a scientist reaches the post doctoral level, as most do by the time they are in their late twenties or early thirties, you have already written a number of papers. you can be found on the internet, but outside of a seminar she gave at a conference in Austria just a few months ago, she was MIA. Curious.

But maybe it was because she was foreign, and google wasn't catching the German websites. So I went to PubMed - a comprehensive database of all papers in the biological sciences, including plenty of foreign journals. If she had published anything,ever, it would be there.

NOTHING.

It appeared that this woman - or perhaps a girl - did not even have her Ph.D. She might be 25. OMG. This is a 41 year old man who is having a mid-life crisis. He is giving up his career and chasing a flitty young foreign student, probably 15 years his junior, to a foreign country where he is going to go back to school and live like he did WHEN HE WAS 25. Maybe I should be glad this did not work out.

So what about the stalking? Well I really, really wanted to know how old she is, and the easiest way to find out is to look on HER facebook page. But I can't because we're not friends. But here's the thing. ANYONE can join facebook. Even, say, a fake person, who doesn't really exist. And people will add you as a friend, even if they don't really know you very well - or as I have discovered - even if they don't know you at all.

So I created a fake persona, with an email address, a photo, and a facebook page. then I asked a lot of random people to be my friends. Most of them said yes. Then I asked Marion and Berlin to be my friends. Berlin said yes. I'm waiting on Marion. so now I can spy on his facebook page whenever I want ... and maybe soon I'll know for sure if he is dating a child instead of a woman his own age.

I'll keep you posted.