A Modern Dating Horror Story

Ellie showed up yesterday with a 7-Eleven bag and eyes like empty swimming pools. We laid out a blanket under my magnolia trees. 76 degrees. Perfect weather for dissecting a psychological thriller disguised as a dating life.

She emptied her stash: Flamin' Hot Cheetos, Diet Cokes, a coffee big enough to drown in. Sugar and caffeine—the traditional offerings to the gods of bad romance.

Josh is breadcrumbing Ellie into insanity. Breadcrumbing: the art of dropping tiny morsels of attention and affection—just enough to keep someone following the trail but never enough to provide actual nourishment. It's dating's cruelest magic trick. The magician shows you the whole deck, lets you pick a card, then never reveals if you guessed right. Josh's breadcrumb trail is elaborate—seven-hour phone calls where he reads her to sleep, texts that arrive at precisely 1:11, 3:33, or 5:55, profound questions about her childhood—all while maintaining a physical and emotional distance so vast you could park a space shuttle in it. One hug since December. A man made entirely of contradictions and red flags.

During one of their early phone marathons—a six-hour call that stretched from dinner to sunrise—Josh deployed what Ellie later realized was textbook manipulation. "Do you think we would have been friends as children?" he asked, voice soft with manufactured nostalgia for a shared past that never existed. When she played along, imagining them as playground companions, he delivered the line that felt sweet but later made her skin crawl: "I would have protected you." It seemed sweet until she intuitively felt he was using a playbook, checked "The Art of Seduction" and found the chapter on creating false intimacy. There it was almost verbatim the strategy of inventing childhood scenarios to manufacture a sense of destiny and establish yourself as a protector. Josh wasn't improvising; he was following a script. Ellie's stomach dropped as she recognized other techniques: the strategic distance, the carefully timed affection, the cryptic personal history. She wasn't special—she was TARGET, underlined in a playbook. Each "spontaneous" emotional connection had been plotted like points on a graph, designed to maximize dependency while minimizing commitment.

Then came the Seattle incident.

He materialized at Seattle airport where she landed last month. Didn't call first. Didn't warn her. Just materialized. He lives in Chicago and claims also Los Angeles, but somehow haunts airports in Washington state. Walked her to her dad's car, then evaporated. That’s it. He was standing at arrivals, walked her to her dad in his car like a reverse wedding, and vanished like an apparition.

"One night I called him crying," Ellie said, crushing a Cheeto between her fingers. "Turns out he was two exits away from my house. In his car. Just sitting there. Didn't mention he was even in California. He showed up ten minutes later, he didn’t even kiss me that night."

When a man shows up unannounced in places he shouldn't be, he's not being romantic. He's auditioning for a restraining order.

Josh is an emotional escape artist with a too-clean car. The kind of clean that suggests: a rental, extreme wealth or recent crime. He exists in quantum uncertainty—simultaneously oversharing and revealing nothing. No middle name. No birthday. No Instagram. Just texts that arrive exclusively at angel numbers and questions stolen from personality assessments.

We ate chips like they might contain answers. If Josh were a novel, he'd be written in invisible ink. If Ellie were a casino game, she'd be rigged against herself.

"He asked if we would've been friends in elementary school," Ellie said. "Told me he would've been 'protective' of me."

"That's directly from The Art of Seduction," I said. "Chapter three. Right before they teach you to isolate your target from friends."

Ellie stared at her phone like it might bite. She knows something's wrong. Knows dinner ALONE with her parents (!!!) while barely touching her isn't normal. Knows men who won't reveal their birthdays are hiding something bigger than age.

Did she want real answers? Yes, but not the obvious ones. She wanted math that made 2+2=romance, not manipulation. Wanted me to explain away the fact that Josh asked what she thought was "a lot of money" but wouldn't tell her his middle name.

The sun cut shadows across the grass. My neighbor's wind chimes rattled a warning.

"So what do you think?" Ellie finally asked, hugging her knees like a child waiting for bad news.

"I think he's either married, a spy, or constructing an elaborate persona because his real life is unbearably mundane," I said. "Normal men don't materialize at airports unannounced. They don't lurk two exits from your house without mentioning they're in town."

This morning, Ellie texted that Josh had asked about her first memory but wouldn't share his own. I was eating a 0.60 cent banana over my sink, wondering when friendship became accomplice-adjacent.

"You're either dating a spy, a married man, or someone practicing for a role as a mysterious stranger," I replied. "There's no fourth option."

"But what if there is?" she wrote back.

That's modern dating—people conducting entire relationships through whispered phone calls and cryptic texts. A man with "1950s values" (Who the fuck says that? A misogynistic racist, I do believe.) who somehow never takes her to dinner. A ghost who reads her to sleep but won't tell her where he lives. A mystery with no solution, just increasingly disturbing clues.

What do you think Josh's deal is? Have you encountered a breadcrumber? Is he married, a spy, a pathological liar, or something else entirely?

Share your theories below.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ellie needs them. She wants vengeance.

I will update Ellie and Josh when more information is given to me.