Are y’all ready for another crazy story?
This is actually the story that made me realize that, yeah, I REALLY needed to start documenting my insane dating stories because honestly, I think this one takes the cake.
Isaac was one of the other guys that I met on Hinge during the summer of 2019. He’s Israeli, and I kind of have a weird thing for Israeli men (something about those eyes), so he immediately caught my interest. He works for a technology company, was a couple of years or so older than me, and just generally seemed interesting. So we matched, and then began chatting through the app.
I have a Google Voice account so that I could get a secondary number with the Boston area code, mainly to use for work when I was at a start-up and making lots of phone calls and realized I didn’t want all these random people to have my number, but then I realized that this was also a great thing to have when it came to dating apps. I could match with guys, talk to them a bit on the app, and if I wasn’t sure how I felt about them when they asked for my digits, I could give out my fake number first, and then feel them out for a bit longer before deciding if I felt comfortable giving my real number. People always ask me what I do to explain having two different numbers with two different area codes, and honestly, I don’t know because I’ve never actually had someone graduate from a “maybe” to a “yes,” so I have not crossed that bridge just yet.
But, Isaac seemed really cool. I didn’t feel like I had to feel him out first because he seemed alright, so I went straight to giving him my real number. Boy, was that a mistake.
Full disclosure, my more or less being an open book gets me into trouble quite a bit. I’m also a pretty big flirt – have you ever seen that meme where it says, “I flirt when I get bored and now I owe 10 people a relationship”? That’s me. I also (clearly) have no shame, so there are very few off-limit topics for me. However, I have never experienced what I went through with Isaac before, no matter how flirty or open I happened to be in casual conversation. In the middle of texting one day, where frankly I thought things were mostly tame, he just randomly throws out that he’d never be okay with having a threesome with me and another guy, or watching me with another guy. Okay? I never expressed interest in that? I was confused, but just kind of went with it, changed the subject, and kept up with our plans of going on a date a few days later.
Then things got REALLY weird. I was still in training for my job at Encore at this time, and I was waking up at about 4:30am to get there on time each day, so one day, I decided when I got home I’d take a nap. Before my nap, though, he asked me to send him a photo. I figured he wanted to make sure I wasn’t catfishing him or something, so I sent him a selfie on Snapchat and then fell asleep.
When I woke up, I saw he had responded. I opened up his message, thinking he was going to tell me I looked pretty or something. He did, but that wasn’t all. After complimenting my photo, he had then said, “Now send me pictures of your feet.”
I vividly remember staring at the message for a solid two minutes before having even the slightest clue how to respond. I have never experienced someone with a foot fetish – this was a first for me – so I was pretty dumbfounded. I don’t remember what I said, but I probably just thanked him for the compliment, laughed off the foot comment, and changed the subject yet again. I thought that would be it.
But again, it was not. The next morning, as I was walking into training at 6am, I got a text from him asking if I liked his snap photo. I was a bit nervous about what he’d sent, so I took a deep breath, braced myself for a dick pic, and went to open the Snapchat photo he’d sent just a few minutes before. It was not a dick pic. It was worse. He had sent me a photo of a dildo that had to be about nine inches long. Seriously. I cannot make this shit up. Even better, in the photo, he had captioned it, “I can’t wait to use this on you on Friday.”
Now I’m not a prude, and I fully believe that men and women should be able to do whatever they want to do with one another regardless of what date society says is acceptable to engage in certain acts, but I was kind of shocked that he’d just assumed I was going to put out on the first date when we hadn’t even met yet. Also, I seriously have absolutely no clue what part of my Hinge profile where I talked about loving ice cream and Disney was the thing that made him think I’d be interested in having a 9 inch dildo used on me? Plus, I’m only 5’4” – that just does not seem fun.
At this point, I was not into this anymore. I deleted and blocked Isaac on Snapchat, which he somehow realized pretty quickly because within minutes I had another text from him asking if I’d seriously blocked him on Snapchat. I lied and said I’d deleted my account because someone was bothering me (him), and told him that I wasn’t really interested in the photo he’d sent me and it seemed like we weren’t really compatible because he was into things I was not, and I didn’t think I wanted to go out with him that weekend anymore. I tried to be nice and let him down easily, but ultimately I had to say no.
This is where all hell broke loose. He FREAKED out. He was texting me nonstop the rest of the morning. Begging me to please still go out with him. He said that he wasn’t really that into the feet thing, it was just something an ex-girlfriend had liked that he thought I might find fun. Then, to make it even better, he told me that actually, he really wanted to see me with another guy, he thought it would be “so hot” to watch me with other men in front of him, so we could have a threesome with another guy, or he’d just watch me with two other random guys if that’s what I preferred. Again, I NEVER told him that was something I wanted, especially not with him.
At this point, I couldn’t be nice anymore. I tried telling him he seemed nice, but I just wasn’t feeling it, one more time, but when he still kept texting me, I blocked his number. So then he turned to WhatsApp. I couldn’t check my phone much in training, but during lunch I saw I had WhatsApp messages and he had used it to beg me to go out with him, to talk to him, anything, some more. I blocked him there, too. I found his Instagram and blocked that, and then when searching for his Facebook to block that, too, I discovered that he had dated a girl in my sorority who was a senior when I was a freshman (I still wonder if she was the one with the foot fetish). But, he was blocked, that’s what mattered.
I thought that would be it, but of course, because it’s me, it wasn’t. The next day, I got a text from a random number saying, “Hi Maddy, my huge cock is ready and waiting for you.” First off, if you’re going to call me Maddie, spell it correctly. Secondly, I’ve already said NO so many times! So I blocked that number.
A couple of days later, I went onto my computer for the first time in a few days and realized that apparently my computer doesn’t block numbers that I’ve blocked on my phone, so I had a handful of texts from him waiting for me. Again, begging me to talk to him. Saying he missed talking to me (after five days of communication?), talking about his “hard cock” some more (guys need to stop watching so much porn) – I still have most of the texts, a few of them were a lot and not things I feel I should share here. I couldn’t figure out how to block his number there, so I ended up having to call Apple support and the guy who helped me needed me to screen share and even he was like, “Oh damn” when he could see the texts that were making me feel like spending an hour on the phone was completely necessary to get this guy blocked. Finally, we figured it out.
But that didn’t stop Isaac. Oh, no. Over the next few weeks, I would periodically get random texts from new numbers that I knew were him, saying he missed me, all the same things as usual. It was so bad that I had to ask my manager if he could talk to security at work about changing the rules saying we couldn’t carry pepper spray, because he knew where I worked. When my manager didn’t get an answer from anyone, I went to security myself and explained the situation and asked if I’d get in trouble for having pepper spray knowing this guy knew where I worked and clearly would not stop trying to get in touch with me no matter how many times I blocked him. They said no, absolutely not, and if he ever showed up at work to call them and they’d “take care” of it. I even started saving screenshots of all the texts he’d sent me to a photo album on my phone so I had evidence if he ever did something super crazy.
Finally, the texts stopped, but anytime I go through another phase of not having and then having Snapchat again, and making a new account, he always tries to add me. I always decline and immediately block him. He still hasn’t learned.
I also tried reporting him several times to Hinge, but they never answered me until about six months later. It made me really worried because luckily I had found out he was a bit (a lot) psycho before meeting him, but what if a girl didn’t realize that and he did something on their date? How many other girls had he basically stalked? It really bothered me, and it still does, so really, this is just my little PSA to not use Hinge because personally, I don’t feel like they take their clients’ safety very seriously if they can’t even respond to my numerous attempts to report him until months later.
So, that’s The Stalker. I sincerely hope he is my only stalker because honestly, I don’t have the energy to deal with anymore of them. I have learned my lesson that just because a cute Israeli with pretty eyes seems nice, it does not mean he deserves my real number right off the bat, and hopefully, he learned that most girls are not interested in early morning photos of large dildos and talks of threesomes before the first date. But maybe that’s just me?