Remember Mr. Deceptive, the nice guy who turned out not to be so nice after all? Part 1 talked about what a supercilious jerk he was to other people, but this time we’re going to see how his better-than-thou attitude affected our relationship, too.

An old friend of ours (but a relatively new friend of mine), set the two of us up when I said I wanted to date a guy who was genuinely nice. On our first date, our conversation covered a lot of ground, and I made sure to mention that I am agnostic — a fact that I’ve found is often a deal-breaker in new relationships. I wanted to get it out into the open as soon as possible.

To my delight, Mr. Deceptive told me that he also was nonreligious, having become quite disillusioned with religion. I later learned that he had an obsessively religious mother and a family environment where, even at 24, he wasn’t allowed freedoms such as staying out past midnight or having a bank account without his parents’ names on it.

Sounds kind of creepy, doesn’t it? Maybe the fact that he blamed his mom for his break from religion, yet didn’t have the guts to refuse to get up at 5:30 every morning (!) and pray with the family, should have clued me in. Read More »