When I was on my second College Program in 2015, I ended up meeting a guy about my age who worked in a different department, but was helping out in Innoventions (where I worked) during one of the festivals. He seemed nice, so we started talking, and I told him that I really wanted to work in his department someday. He offered to tell me more about it and give me some advice on getting into it, which I thought was really nice, so we exchanged numbers after lunch one day and started to make plans to hang out some night.
Of course, this was a big “no-no” as far as Christian was concerned. He was “talking to” another girl that had caused him to extend his target demographic by another year, so I figured that meant I could do whatever I wanted, too. I told him excitedly that I’d met this guy who was going to give me advice, and seemed really cool, et cetera, and he asked what his name was. I told him his name was Chad and he simply said, “Nope.” I asked him why, and allegedly, Chad had a somewhat shady history with a girl who worked at Innoventions a year or two before me, and so everyone who worked there had a weird vendetta against him because of it. Christian even had one of my friends/coworkers who was off that day text me telling me all the reasons why I couldn’t go out with Chad, and said that everyone at Innoventions would hate me if I did (ironically, most of them already did hate me and secretly wanted to ruin my life, just behind my back and not to my face. If only I’d have found that out months earlier).
But, unfortunately, I was still in my phase of listening to everything Christian said. So, I ghosted Chad. Just stopped answering his texts, blocked his number, and avoided him if he walked through Innoventions. I felt bad, but as far as I knew, he was bad news, and Lord knows I didn’t need any more of that in my life.
A couple of years later, in 2017, my dream came true. I got a Professional Internship position working in Guest Relations at Disney World. And, of course, because I’m a one-park-pony, it was back at Epcot. I was extremely excited to be back at Disney after cheating with Universal for a bit, happy to be back in my home and favorite park, and looking forward to meeting new people and learning new things.
I never thought about if I would know anyone that was still in Guest Relations, but of course, I did. My first day of training I met the girl I’d be training with, Lucia, who’s still one of my best friends (and my soulmate), then my trainer, and then Lucia’s trainer walked in. And who was it? Chad, of course.
I couldn’t tell if he recognized me, but to be fair, my hair had gone through about three or four different color changes since I last saw him. We trained in our little pairs for the remainder of the week, and everything went well. Over the course of that internship, I learned that really, Chad wasn’t so bad. He was very sarcastic and had a similar sense of humor to me, helpful when I had questions, and overall just seemed like a decent guy. I tried to tell Christian this and that he was wrong about him, but of course he just told me more lies and made up more stuff. But at least this time, I didn’t listen, and I continued to have some sort of friendly working relationship with Chad. I ran into him a few times after my internship when I was in my last position at Disney, and it was always nice, so I thought that it was cool that after all that time, we could at least be friendly.
For a long time, that was the extent of our friendship. We occasionally liked each other’s photos on Instagram, maybe a message or two here and there, but nothing crazy. Then one day, I was bored and decided to ask him if he had remembered me from Innoventions when I walked in to Guest Relations. He claims he doesn’t remember, which is fair, but I guess that just sort of opened up some sort of door with us because after that, we started talking a bit more.
Eventually, he started to get flirtier, and I often did, too, but I didn’t always bite until after The Cheater left me in a moment of need. Then, my grandma – who was one of my best friends – passed away just a couple of days later. I stayed in Florida for a few more days and then flew back to Boston to get back to my life. The day I got back to work, my managers pulled me in for a meeting and said that they had to let me go because my position was being eliminated due to budget issues. Way to kick a girl when she’s down, right?
So after all that, I was really sad. I felt lonely, lost, and I was desperate for a distraction. So, I started to entertain the idea of Chad a bit more. To his credit, when I told him what was going on and that I was sad about losing my grandma, and then also having to deal with losing a job on top of that, he was extremely nice and talked to me about it more than a lot of my close friends. Some might say it wasn’t genuine, that he had ulterior motives, but honestly, I really didn’t feel like he had an agenda for being nice to me when I was clearly going through a difficult time and just needed someone to talk to. It was such a huge juxtaposition between how he was being versus how the guy I had been dating for eight months had acted, and it was a very welcome feeling.
I already had plans to see some friends in Orlando while I was home with my family, which I mentioned to Chad, so he kindly offered to let me stay with him. I was excited, because I really needed to see my friends after everything that had happened recently, and I really thought that seeing them plus staying with him was exactly the kind of distraction I needed to feel better. He said he had a guest room, so I could totally stay with him, no problem, and he’d buy me a drink when I got there to make up for everything that had been going on lately. I remembered that one of my other friends from my internship who was friends with him had recently stayed with him when she went down and she didn’t have anything bad to say afterwards, so I figured if I could save some money and stay with someone I knew, and have some fun with it, why not?
Photo by Benjamin Suter on Pexels.com
Except one thing. He didn’t have a guest room. I got to Orlando, saw a friend that day, had my drink with Chad, where we talked and caught up on everything that had been going on in our lives, talked about work, all that fun stuff, and then went back to his place. He had kissed me in the parking lot, so on the way, I was wondering how exactly this was going to work out if he’d planned for me to stay in a guest room. But, apparently, this was not something I had to worry about as I arrived at his place to find out that the “guest room” was really his couch. So, it was the couch or his bed. I could have stayed on the couch, where it turns out my friend had slept when she stayed with him, but considering the way we’d been talking recently, I’ll let you guess which one I chose.
Overall, we had a fun time. It definitely wasn’t anything serious, but I was still a little pissed when less than 48 hours later one of my friends from Orlando, Lizzie, texted me asking if I knew a guy from Disney named Chad and I said yes, why? They had just matched on Bumble and he’d asked her if she wanted to get a drink that night, and she saw we followed each other on Instagram so she wanted my advice. I told her about staying with him just that weekend and asked that she not go at least this time because it was not exactly going to lift my confidence for him to go on a date so soon after me being there. And, considering the hit she knew my ego had recently suffered because of The Cheater, and because girl code is REAL, she quickly obliged.
We still talked here and there and kept things friendly, and then the next time I was planning on going to Disney for a 10K, he invited me to stay with him. I wasn’t very tempted because I’d be going with my family and did not want to deal with the questions of where I was going from my brother, but I did think about it. I had already booked my tickets, but he kept trying to convince me to change my flights, but I am not about that change-fee life so I never did. Good thing, because he ended up having something going on the night I would have changed to arrive on, and he would have had to bail on me last minute. So that would have been $200 down the drain.
Then, when I got back to Boston, I saw on Instagram that there were some ~fishy~ things with him and another girl. Which is totally fine – he could do what he wants, I was doing my thing, too – but, I don’t think you should be trying to convince a girl to spend $200 to change her flight with whatever was going on with them happening. So, given that I was, frankly, VERY tired of dealing with bullshit from men, I told him off. I told him I didn’t appreciate being jerked around like that, and that it wasn’t cool to do whatever he’d been doing and that he needed to be honest from now on. He apologized, and things went back to being friendly. We ended up having a mini falling out a few months later over something that wasn’t really that serious, but I had a no-tolerance policy by that point so I was done. I blocked him everywhere.
However, after seeing his multiple attempts to contact me on my computer (side note, why won’t my computer block the same numbers that are blocked on my phone? Does anyone know how to fix this?) I finally decided to answer. We talked it out, he apologized again, and I told him that fuckboy is NOT a good look on him so to cut it out, and he agreed.
So, Chad, The Host, is one of the few guys on here that I still have contact with in some capacity, which also means that I allowed him to read this before it was posted and veto anything in here that he didn’t want disclosed and give me feedback on things he’d appreciate being changed. Honestly, this should be a lesson to men that if you own up to your mistakes and don’t turn into a major jerk, you’ll end up getting at least a slightly better edit on here than the rest of them. And my parting lesson to women? When a guy offers to let you stay with him for the weekend, make sure that he ACTUALLY has a guest room.