Once upon a time a 34 year old mother of 2 divorced her husband and spent some time getting right. She dated for a couple weeks at a time, but was guarded, and didn't tend to open up completely with any of them.

Nearly 2 years of dating and single life went by, and them she met the Glitch. She thought he was the glitch in the matrix, because over and over, she kept feeling reassured and began to let down her guard.

Cue the foreboding music.

She wanted a relationship with the Glitch. After 3 months or so she explicitly asked him "are we exclusively dating each other?" And he looked her in the eye and said yes." Subsequently, he introduced her to his daughter, to his best friends, and met her friends, too.

The Glitch seemed too good to be true. She was on cloud 9 for another couple of months.

This week the girl went to work where at 10:30 her department was advised that they had been eliminated and were laid off on the spot (10 people.) Two hours later she received an Instagram message from another woman saying she, too, had been sleeping with and dating the Glitch.

She confronted the Glitch, who confirmed it all, was utterly unapologetic, and said he didn't want a relationship with her, but still wanted to see her, so he just told her what she wanted to hear. When asked what he would have done if she hadn't found out, he said he would have just kept lying until it got to be too much of a pain in the ass.

She has been crushed and broken by this. Already grieving her father's death 6 wks ago, our heroine lost her job and what she thought was the first real relationship in 2 years in one sweep.

She is now on her couch, sobbing, googling for jobs and living off wine and coffee and sleeping pills.

The moral of the story is that sometimes, DTR and all the things that make you think they're telling you the truth - meeting family, friends, planning holidays together - don't mean anything at all.

Cheaters gonna cheat. Our heroine now realizes that even if you DTR,even if you read attachment theory, even if you give your best - you can't ever truly trust a person.

I wish this wasn't a story I had to tell. I wish I could tell you i did everything right, and I was open and honest and communicative, and it worked. But it didn't for me, because the person I tried to be wasn't operating on the same level. That isn't my fault - I'm not a conniving and calculated narcissist - but I felt like this was a place who could relate to the pain of knowing that sometimes you're going to meet someone is just well and truly cruel and selfish. And it really, really hurts. And it's going to be a long time before I can ever assume every word a man says isn't a lie.

TL;DR - DTR means fuck all if s/he lies in it. Call it what you like, but unless both of you tell the truth it's a waste of time.