We met on a London tube train - Part 2

Steve was not his real name.

And the revelation of his real name coincided with the first instance of gaslighting.

I should have known better than to trust someone who so easily lied to me from the moment we first introduced ourselves.

After meeting again at the Finchley Central tube station he asked for my number. I gave it to him. He called my flat. I was out. He left a message for me to call him. The name of the caller was not Steve. I was baffled.

Upon my returning the call and establishing it was Steve by another name, I queried the name change. He denied he’d introduced himself to me by another name and made light of it. Looking back, how could I so easily have let him cause me to doubt myself?

But I was on the other side of the world. It was only supposed to be a bit of fun.

It was never going to amount to anything.

He was a recovering drug addict. He told me soon after we met. That was red flag number 3. If you do the slightest bit of research into recovering from addiction, one of the first things recovering addicts are told is to avoid new relationships in the first year of recovery because they can be a distraction from recovery and may lead to relapse. That is because the addict replaces one addiction with another. The addict can also repeat unhealthy relationship patterns before they are equipped with the tools to create new, healthy ones.

I am a fixer. I naively thought I could fix him. Turns out I could not and in the process of coming to that realisation, I almost lost myself.